Birmingham will tomorrow witness the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a 19th century theologian and a former Protestant who converted to Catholicism.
Born in London on February 21, 1801, his family were ordinary churchgoers but without any strong religious tendencies. But, from an early age, John Henry took a great delight in reading the Bible. At the age of eight he was sent to Ealing School and it was there that he underwent a profound religious conversion which was to determine the rest of his life as a quest for spiritual perfection. His first work after his ordination was as a curate in a poor Oxford parish and then, in 1828, he became Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin.
It was precisely at the University Church that his spiritual influence on parishioners and members of the university was truly colossal, particularly through his preaching, embodied in the parochial and plain sermons. In 1845, John Henry converted to Catholicism and, at the age of 78, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed this simple priest a cardinal.
On the eve of his beatification, it would be appropriate to reflect on the beauty and profoundness of at least one of Cardinal Newman’s sermons, a sermon on the theme of love. In his letter to the Corinthians (1: Cor 13:-1-2) St Paul does not mince his words on the subject of love. He proclaims: “If I had the gift of being able to speak in other languages without learning them, and could speak in every language there is in all of heaven and earth, but didn’t love others, I would only be making noise.
“If I had the gift of prophecy and knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good what it do? Even I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, I would still be worth nothing at all without love.”
Cardinal Newman echoes St Paul’s proclamation and entrenches it in our daily lives. In his sermon on faith, hope and love he says love is the noblest of all God’s gifts since it never ends. We have been created to love and we love because God has made it our nature to do so. Love, he says, gives life sense and fulfilment; it is the goal of our earthly pilgrimage. This is our real and true bliss, not to know, or to affect, or to pursue, but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere and to adore. Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied.
Cardinal Newman lists faith and hope as the two fundamentals of love. But faith and hope, he says, have to be permeated by a great joy that flows from knowing that we are partakers in redemption, which is to last forever. We have been redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb, who gave His life so that we can have ours for eternity.
The underlying tone in Cardinal Newman’s sermon is that, though our life proves to be hard, challenging and risky, filled with suffering and pain, which are, sometimes, aggravated by our human fragility and mistakes, there is, through our faith and hope in the resurrected Christ, a state of mystical joy that rises above our misery.
The cardinal’s trusting gaze is constantly on the eternal goal, a gaze that synergises and gives purpose to our life here on earth. It is not a gaze that leaves us sentimentally on Mount Tabor, where we all would like to build our spiritual tents. It is a gaze that gives us renewed strength to descend and courageously face our daily trials in the midst of a culture so heavily indoctrinated with illusive pleasures and success, far from the Gospel truths. Cardinal Newman realised that transformation of the heart does not take place from one day to the next; it needs great effort and perseverance. “To obtain the gift of holiness is a work of life,” he says.
Love, he insists, has to go beyond the “noise” implied by St Paul. It has to be translated in concrete action towards our neighbours, flowing naturally, not out of a sense of need or a restless feeling of seeing a better world but out of our benevolent nature rooted in us by God himself, a love that matures and grows out of our oneness with Christ.
Our real love must depend on practice, he says. It begins by exercising itself on our friends around us, otherwise it will have no existence. How? In his own words: “By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness with kindness, by dwelling on their excellencies and trying to copy them, thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity, which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth”.
Cardinal Newman will always be remembered as a man of God who made his pilgrimage on earth in faith, hope and love, which he described with force and clarity in his writings. His sermons, letters, novels, poems, prayers and meditation have changed lives in his time and still today.
To end this little homage to this great man of God, it is fitting to quote from the long obituary which appeared in The Times (London) the day after his death on August 11, 1890: “Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of this pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness will endure, and whether Rome canonises him or not, he will be canonised in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds. The saint in him will survive.