Beatification Report - Cardinal Newman Exhibition

To coincide with the beatification Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is playing host to an exhibition of ”rarely seen items from the life of Cardinal John Henry Newman”. Amongst the exhibits are many not generally on public view. Most items are loaned from Birmingham Oratory’s own collection and were in Newman's rooms at the Oratory. Below are photographs of the exhibits.

Cardinal's robes, hat and shoes @ 1879. Newman reputedly complained that it was very expensive to be fitted out as a cardinal!




Pectoral cross and chain, silver gilt with garnets, 19th Century.


Crozier, 1860. Silver inset with semi precious stones and micro mosaic.



Jewelled mitre, 1879, presented to Newman when he became a cardinal. Silk and gold thread inset with semi precious stones. I can't even begin to tell you how incredible the workmanship is, but the photographs really don't do this justice!






Oil portrait on canvas of Newman by William Thomas Roden, 1879. This portrait was commissioned to celebrate his appointment as a Cardinal although Roden chose to depict him as an ordinary priest.


Shell engraved with the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 19th Century.


Metal pot with used and sharpened quill pens from Newman's study at the Birmingham Oratory. Also a letter from Newman to a printer dated 1840 concerning the production costs.


Statuette bust of St Phillip Neri, founder of the Congregation of the Oratory. Ivory turned on wooden base.



Portrait of 'The Virgin in Glory' @ 1860. Oil paint on ivory in silver mount.


Portrait bust of Newman by Richard Westmacott, 1841. The sculptor was at school with Newman in Ealing.


The number of items included in the exhibition was less than I was expecting but it does offer a unique opportunity to view some beautiful relics one is not normally able to see.

For those that would like to visit, the exhibition runs until 6th January 2011, entry is free of charge and you can find more information about the venue here.

Beatification Report - Newman and Birmingham Lecture

Newman and Birmingham was the title of the first of a series of events taking place in Birmingham leading up the beatification of John Henry Newman. Around 300 people attended the lecture, on Monday 14th September, hosted by Birmingham University's Barber Institute and organised in conjunction with Birmingham Oratory. The speaker was Professor Sheridan Gilley, former lecture in theology at the University of Durham and author of ‘Newman and His Age’ This biography was written whilst the Professor was an Anglican though he has since followed Newman to the Catholic Church.

The lecture touched on many aspects of Newman’s life and that of his contemporaries as well as his links with Birmingham. The Professor’s words painted a vision of the city of Newman’s age, one in which he spent a significant portion of his later life as a Catholic.

He told us that, being close to the centre of the industrial revolution, Birmingham was the heart of the ‘Workshop of the World’. The population of the city grew rapidly during this period with the need for labour being fed both from surrounding areas and further afield. In 1851 just one quarter of its population were regular churchgoers.

Birmingham was at the centre of the Catholic revival thanks at least in part to the charismatic Cardinal Wiseman (founder of the Dublin Review) and to Oscott College which was within easy reach of the city. Indeed St Chads, built between 1839 and 1841, was the first cathedral to be built in England after the Reformation.

The Catholic population of the city was largely made up of Irish immigrants, many of who fled the hardships of Ireland during the potato famine to seek work in England’s increasingly industrialised cities

Newman’s original city location for his Oratory was in Alcester Street. It opened on February 2 1849 in a former gin distillery and here he taught Sunday school and classes in the evening. Funds were scarce with the community living on a frugal diet of salt beef and salt cod; poor Irish immigrants would have made up much of Newman’s early congregations. All of this was a far cry from his life as an Anglican Minister eating at High Table in the colleges of Oxford.

Despite this Newman seems to have developed a love for the city and its people. Indeed he famously declined an invitation to preach in Rome:

'The Oratory, Birmingham: July 25, 1864.
'Dear Monsignore Talbot,—I have received your letter, inviting me to preach next Lent in your Church at Rome to "an audience of Protestants more educated than could ever be the case in England."

However, Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor talent for the sort of work which you cut out for me. And I beg to decline your offer.
'I am, yours truly,
JOHN H. NEWMAN'

What stood out for me from this lecture and my other reading is that Newman was clearly a man who thrived in a diverse range of environments gaining respect and affection from people of all backgrounds and beliefs; from the slums of an industrial city to Oxford’s Colleges, from the more affluent environs of the London Oratory to Dublin society. Surely to be able to do so in his time was a greater achievement than even it would be in our own?

Father Richard Duffield, Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, thanked Professor Gilley for such an interesting opening to the week of events leading up to the beatification. He left the audience with the thought that in these times we should follow Newman’s words and have “clear heads and holy hearts” and St Paul's guidance ”to hold fast to that which is good”.

Beatification Report - Life of John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman was once described as the most dangerous man in England. The words he chose for his memorial read ‘ex umbris et imaginibus in veritate; out of shadows and phantasm into truth’. Perhaps both are equally valid for a man who has caused and continues to cause controversy and yet also to inspire.


John Henry Newman was born in 1801 into an Anglican family and from a young age he felt drawn to religion. After graduating from Oxford University he was ordained as an Anglican minister. In the following years as a minister in Oxford he wrote extensively as he did for much of the rest of his life and was openly critical of Catholicism.

Newman travelled throughout Europe during 1832 visiting Rome which he said was "the most wonderful place on earth". Whilst on these travels he became seriously ill and on his recovery returned to England in the belief that God had work for him to do there. Over succeeding years Newman was a leader of the Oxford Movement which sought to reform Anglican doctrine based on its descent from the early Church and combat the State’s influence over the Anglican Church. Throughout the period Newman became increasingly drawn to the Catholic Faith, beginning to draw parallels between Anglicanism and heresies of the early church.


In 1841 Newman he began living an almost monastic existence with close friends at Littlemore, a period he described in his Apologia as “on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church”. February 1843 saw him publish a retraction in a local paper of all his previous condemnation of Rome and this was followed in September by his resignation of his living as an Anglican minister.

In 1845 Newman was received into the Church by Blessed Dominic Barberi. The conversion of perhaps the best known Anglican minister to Catholicism in a country still rife with prejudice created huge shock. For the remainder of his life Newman experienced misunderstanding and distrust from both Catholics and Protestants.


Of his conversion The Tablet said “…the Anglican Establishment has been deprived of the largest mind and the most penetrating intellect lately to be found, at least among her ecclesiastical children. The least part of what has occurred is that a man informed by profound genius has passed from heresy to the Church; has brought over to the camp of truth the stores of his profound learning, of his active and disciplined intelligence.”

Newman went to Rome to study for the priesthood in 1846 and whilst in Rome he discovered the Oratory founded by Saint Philip Neri in the sixteenth century. On his return to England in 1848 he set up the first English Oratory at Maryvale just outside of Birmingham. Three years later the Birmingham Oratory moved to its present site in Edgbaston on what is now the outskirts of the city centre. Newman along with his fellow Priests, worked with the poor of the city which was rapidly expanding as a result of the industrial revolution.


Newman also went on to establish the London Oratory under Father Faber as well as a school linked to the Birmingham Oratory. A prolific author Newman published a huge array of works, in later life sometimes writing for up to 17 hours a day.


Newman lived out his life at the Birmingham Oratory with the exception of a period in Dublin. In 1851 Newman was invited by the Bishops of Ireland to be rector of a new Catholic University, the formation of what is now part of University College, Dublin. 1855 saw the commencement of the building of the University Church on St Stephen’s Green which Newman felt would “recognise the great principle of the university, the indissoluble union of philosophy and religion”. Whilst the University was not a successful venture the Church remains, a monument to his time in Dublin. I think you can see a certain likeness between the style of University Church in Dublin and the cloister of the Birmingham Oratory

In 1879, when Newman was seventy eight, Pope Leo XIII named him a Cardinal, a rare honour for an ordinary priest. He obtained a dispensation to remain at the Birmingham Oratory. He adopted the motto ‘cor ad cor loquitur’; heart speaks to heart, the theme also chosen for Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the UK.

On 11 August 1890 Newman died at the Birmingham Oratory. On his death the Cork Examiner stated: ‘Cardinal Newman goes to his grave with the singular honour of being by all creeds and classes acknowledged as the just man made perfect.’

It was reported that 15,000 people lined the streets to see Newman’s cortege travel to Rednal where he is buried. This is next to Cofton Park where the beatification is taking place. He is said to have wished to hasten the process of decomposition with the addition of compost to the grave, in obedience to ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. It appears this wish was granted; when the coffin was recently exhumed as part of the beatification process no remains of his body were found.


The Times once wrote of Newman ‘whether Rome canonizes him or not he will be canonised in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England’. Declared venerable in January 1991 by Pope John Paul II, the 19th September sees his beatification. Should Newman go on to be canonized he would be the first English Saint since the Reformation not to have been a martyr.

Venerable Pope Pius XII

Today, the 19th of December, 2009, the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, has received in private audience His Excellency, Archbishop Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. In the course of that audience, the Holy Father has authorised the Congregation to promulgate the decree recognising the heroic virtue of Pope Pius XII and declaring him to be Venerable.

In the modern era, the process of Canonization, of which the decree of heroic virtue is the first step, was firmly established by the Decrees of Pope Urban VIII and Pope Clement XI. By a Bull of 5th July, 1634, Urban VIII definitively reserved to the Holy See the faculty of granting cultus to individuals and prohibited their veneration prior to the judgement of the Holy See.

It had previously been the practice, despite, it must be said, a Decree of Pope Alexander III in 1170, renewed by Pope Innocent III in 1210, for Bishops to render people Blessed at least to be honoured in their own Dioceses, although it was for the Pope to extend such devotion to the Universal Church, which is, to render them Saints in the technical sense. However, the Pope could also make localised Decrees in some cases. For example Blessed (now Saint) Rose of Lima, who Pope Clement declared to be patroness of Peru, and Pope Clement X declared to be patroness of South America, the Philippines and the East Indies, and also Blessed (now Saint) Stanislaus Kostka, who Pope Clement X declared patron of Poland and Lithuania.

Special mention must be made of the monograph of one Prospero Lambertini "the cleverst man in Christendom," once Promoter of the Faith, an official of the S. Congregation of Rites, who would later become Pope Benedict XIV. The monograph was entitled De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione and for more than two centuries remained - and to an extent remains - the basic text on the subject. The two examples of Rose of Lima and Stanislaus Kostka are mentioned at lib. I, cap. xxxix of that monograph. Two early editions (1743 and 1749) are available at Google Books. (See if you can spot the reference to vampires when Lambertini discusses the post mortem state!)

The document relating new procedures introduced by Pope Benedict XVI gives a summary of the history of the procedures involved.

Venerable Pope Pius XII, pray for us!

Blessed John Henry, Cardinal Newman

DECREES OF THE CONGREGATION FOR THE CAUSES OF SAINTS

VATICAN CITY, 3 JUL 2009 (VIS) - Today, during a private audience with Archbishop Angelo Amato S.D.B., prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Pope authorised the congregation to promulgate the following decrees:

- Servant of God John Henry Newman, English cardinal and founder of the Oratories of St. Philip Neri in England (1801-1890).

Blessed John Henry, Cardinal Newman, pray for us!