Today, October 9, is the liturgical commemoration of Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890), one of the patron saints of the Paulist Fathers, canonized just two years ago in 2019.
Newman was an influential member of the English Oxford Movement while still an Anglican, prior to his conversion to Catholicism and his reception into the Church on this date in 1845.
He was the author of a famous autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1866), The Grammar of Assent (1870), the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865, published in the new Paulist magazine The Catholic World), and the popular hymns Lead, Kindly Light and Praise to the Holiest in the Height. A priest of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman was created a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the United Kingdom at an open-air Mass in Birmingham on September 19, 2010. Newman’s significance for the wider English-speaking world was reflected in the presence of the Prince of Wales at his October 2019 canonization ceremony in Rome.
Newman never visited the United States, but Paulist founder Isaac Hecker visited him several times in England. After Hecker's death, Newman wrote:
"I have ever felt that there was this sort of unity in our lives - that we both had begun a work of the same kind, he in America and I in England, and I know how zealous he was in promoting it." (Letter to Paulist Fr. Augustine Hewit, February 28, 1889).
(Photo: Portrait, Newman in Choir Dress, by John Everett Millais, 1881)
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