Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (49 page)

Pio’s successor, Leo XIII, was 78 years of age in the year in which he was elected and regarded a stop-gap. He was to reign for a quarter of a century. He has gone down in history as the Pope who expounded a modern approach to Catholic social teaching, writing many key encyclicals on matters such as employment and poverty in belated response to Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
. Trained in diplomacy, Leo believed that the papal diplomatic service had a crucial role to play in both the implementation of internal Church discipline and the conduct of Church-State relations. He was also a keen educationist and intellectual, encouraging the study of Thomas Aquinas in seminaries. He had developed over the years, it appears, a knowledge and appreciation of the works of Newman, although he had unavoidably gained the impression that Newman was somewhat ‘liberal’, a view shared, of course, by Cardinal Manning. The old tensions between Manning and Newman appeared to have been quietly laid to rest, especially as Newman seemed permanently and safely in harbour in Birmingham. Events, however, were to bring them into sharp antagonism once more.

On the election of Leo XIII a rumour did the rounds in England that the new Pope would most likely make Newman a Cardinal. Whether the Duke of Norfolk had prompted the idea or not, England’s leading lay Catholic decided to make it a reality by getting support from other great and good Catholics of the time. According to Manning’s first, and not always accurate biographer, Purcell, when the matter was broached the Cardinal bowed his head and appeared struck dumb for a while, before pulling himself together to acquiesce reluctantly in the idea of sending a petition to Rome.

Manning’s letter to Rome is reserved, stressing that the request came from leading English lay men rather than the hierarchy; his own endorsement is polite rather than enthusiastic. Cardinal Edward Henry Howard, resident in Rome and charged with the care of Anglican converts to Catholicism, was to take the letter personally to Rome. He received it from Manning in August of 1878, but it still had not reached Cardinal Nina who dealt with such matters when the Duke of Norfolk turned up in Rome in December. When Norfolk raised the matter with Leo, it was the first the Pope had heard of it. So Norfolk asked Manning to write once again. He did not. In the meantime the original letter at last reached the Pope in the New Year. So Leo asked Cardinal Nina to write to Manning to‘enquire, with the necessary tact and discretion, of the Rev. Fr Newman, or better still of his Bishop or other trustworthy person, what are his dispositions in regard to accepting the sacred purple, should it be offered him by the Holy Father’.
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Manning now came off looking every bit as devious as Newman ever thought him to be. To Bishop Ullathorne, Newman’s bishop, had been assigned the task of formally telling Newman that the Pope wished to honour him with a Cardinal’s hat. Newman felt greatly honoured, but he was naturally anxious about the prospect of having to move to Rome rather than remaining in Birmingham. Cardinals who were not archbishops of dioceses normally took up residence in Rome. Ullathorne was conscious of this problem, so he suggested that Newman should write a letter of thanks to the Pope, pointing out how difficult it would be for him to leave Birmingham. At the same time, Ullathorne wrote a covering letter, explaining that Newman nevertheless accepted the honour of the Cardinalate, yet pleading with the Pope to allow Newman to stay put in Birmingham.

Manning forwarded Newman’s letter to Cardinal Nina (and hence to Leo XIII), with its fears about living in Rome, and failed to send Ullathorne’s accompanying letter confirming that Newman had accepted the Cardinalate. Furthermore, within a day or two it was published in the British newspapers that Newman had been offered the red hat, but had refused. As
The Times
reported on 18 February 1879: ‘We are informed that Pope Leo XIII has intimated his desire to raise Dr Newman to the rank of Cardinal, and that with expressions of deep respect of the Holy See Dr Newman has excused himself from accepting the Sacred Purple.’
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Newman was devastated. Offers of the hat were conducted with the greatest discretion; nobody was supposed to know except the Duke of Norfolk, Manning, Ullathorne, and Newman himself. And now it looked as if a loose-tongued Newman had insulted the Pope by refusing the honour. By this time both Manning and Cardinal Howard were in Rome and after a bombardment from the lay Catholic great and good they went to see the Pope to explain and resolve matters. Whereas the very first letter had travelled with the tardy courier Howard the summer before, taking six months to arrive in Rome, Manning sent

Ullathorne a telegram saying that the Pope had sanctioned the Cardinalate and that Newman would be allowed to remain in Birmingham.

Newman travelled to Rome by rail with William Neville, who had taken the place of Ambrose St John as his companion and factotum. Father Thomas Pope, a late-vocation Oratorian, already in Rome, and staying at the English College, joined the party which finally met the Pope. Newman wrote to his friend Henry Bittleson from Via Sistina where he had taken rooms on 2 May:

The Holy Father received me most affectionately – keeping my hand in his. He asked me ‘Do you intend to continue head of the Birmingham House?’ I answered, ‘That all depends on the Holy Father’. He then said ‘Well then I wish you to continue head’; and he went on to speak of this at length, saying there [was ] a precedent for it in one of Gregory xvi’s cardinals.

He asked me various questions – was our house a good one? was our Church? how many were we? of what age? when I said, we had lost some, he put his hand on my head and said ‘Don’t cry’. He asked ‘had we any lay brothers?’ ‘how then did we do for a cook?’ I said we had a widow woman, and the kitchen was cut off from the house.
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Newman added this vivid description of Leo: ‘I certainly did not think his mouth large till he smiled, and then the ends turned up, but not unpleasantly – he has a clear white complexion his eyes somewhat bloodshot – but this might have been the accident of the day. He speaks very slowly and clearly and with an Italian manner.’ When it was time to go he took Newman’s arm and led him to the outer door of the papal apartment. Then Cardinal Nina kissed him on both cheeks. As Newman was to say to Bishop Ullathorne, who reported it to Manning: ‘The cloud is lifted from me for ever.’
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A reception took place on 12 May in Cardinal Howard’s apartments, where Newman received the special
biglietto
, the summons to attend the conferring of his red biretta personally by the Pope, set for the following morning. On receiving the letter Newman made the address, known as the
biglietto
speech of acceptance. Father Pope observed that although Newman had a heavy cold ‘he did not cough – and his delivery was very animated, and perfect, as the vehicle of his words … The Italian ladies behind me were unanimous that he was: “che bel vecchio! che figura! … pallido si, ma bellissimo” [What a beautiful old man! How elegant! … Pale, yes, but very handsome].’
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The next day, 13 May, he received the biretta from the Pope, and the day after took possession of the Cardinal robes at the English College along with his cho-sen motto:
Cor ad cor loquitur
: Heart speaks to heart, echoing the note written by Beethoven on the score of his Mass in D: ‘From the heart – may it go to the heart again.’

BIGLIETTO SPEECH

In the
biglietto
speech, delivered on the eve of his investiture as Cardinal, New-man told a select audience of ecclesiastics and English lay persons gathered in Cardinal Howard’s
salone
in Rome that his life’s work, as an Anglican and as a Catholic, had been a struggle against ‘liberalism in religion’. This liberalism, he went on, was a ‘great mischief ’ and ‘an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth’.

There followed an eloquent warning of the danger inherent in liberalism as religious toleration and religious relativism: the idea that one religion may be as good as any other, or indeed as no religion at all. Liberalism

teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them.
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He goes on to claim that in a liberal society, what we might call a pluralist, secular society today, the public promotion of religion becomes intrusive. The idea that religious opinions expressed publicly undermine the rights of others not so minded was prophetic. In these circumstances religion is a ‘private lux-ury’, he said, which one might have ‘if he will; but … which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance’.
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This liberalism, he asserts, began on the continent of Europe, where the great apostasy came about with the widespread abandonment of faith itself, by nation States and individuals. In his own country, however, the collapse of religion stems from the ‘religious sects, which sprang up in England three centuries ago’. He is speaking, of course, of the variety of dissenters and Evangelical groups that have challenged the ‘Union of Church and State, and would advocate the un-Christianising of the monarchy and all that belongs to it’ since such a disestablishment would ‘make Christianity much more pure and much more powerful’.
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8
The stance is interesting, since forty years earlier he seemed to be urging the independence of the Church of England from the Government and Parliament, arguing that no secular political system (composed of dissenters and unbelievers) should have the authority to abolish Anglican dioceses in Ireland. In 1879, however, he is focusing on the Christian monarchy as representative of the unity of Church and State – although the monarchy had of course long been constitutional.

Then comes, nevertheless, a prediction that raises more questions than it answers, or could possibly answer.

Consider what follows from the very fact of these many sects. They constitute the religion, it is supposed, of half the population; and, recollect, our mode of government is popular. Every dozen men taken at random whom you meet in the streets have a share in political power, – when you inquire into their forms of belief, perhaps they represent one or other of as many as seven religions; how can they possibly act together in municipal or in national matters, if each insists on the recognition of his own religious denomination? All action would be at a deadlock unless the subject of religion was ignored.

We cannot help ourselves.
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Thus Newman goes to the heart of the dilemma that faces not only the Catholic faith, but any of the Christian denominations and main non-Christ- ian Faiths active in our complex societies today. He surely did not think that the sects could simply disappear, or be converted to Anglicanism or Catholicism. They were there to stay, and to increase and multiply. Hence he clearly accepts that, in England, the process of expanding secularisation was inevitable. He has no answers for this, other than dependence on God’s providence. What he did not, and perhaps could not, envisage was the positive requirement of a secular government to protect the religious freedoms in a multi-Faith society. Nor could he have envisaged the development of Catholic principles of religious freedom that were only endorsed, and with difficulty, in 1965 at the very end of the Second Vatican Council.

It is arguable, however, that he had already foreseen the theological underpinning of individual religious freedom, by invoking the importance of conscience and ‘private judgment’. He was also prepared, in the speech, to grant the ‘liberalistic theory’ much that is ‘good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence, which, as I have already noted, are among its avowed principles, and the natural laws of society’. Yet he was of his age, and personal history, in seeing that these selfsame benefits of liberalism prove an enticement to deeper and total secularism: ‘the device of the Enemy so cleverly framed and with such promise of success.’
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It would have dawned on many of his listeners that his bold anti-liberalism was paradoxical and ironic. Pope Leo would remark later of Newman’s elevation: ‘My Cardinal! it was not easy, it was not easy. They said he was too liberal.’
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Despite that famous anti-liberal profession in Rome, Newman from his own day to this has been claimed by‘progressives’ as one of them. The outspoken laymen Acton and Döllinger certainly thought of him as on their side and were disappointed when he refused to carp publicly about the shortcomings of the Holy See.