7:20am Thursday 9th September 2010
By Chris Koenig
Here’s a thought: had Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) had his way back in August 1864, Pope Benedict XV1 might later this month be beatifying him here in Oxford instead of in Birmingham.
Leading Catholic layman Anthony Mockler, who lives in Milton Manor, near Abingdon — which contains the lovely 18th-century Strawberry Hill Gothic chapel — kindly alerted me to this thought by pointing out that the saintly man came close that year to realising his dearly held wish: to return to Oxford, the city he loved and in which he had long worked as an Anglican vicar.
Mr Mockler pointed me towards a section of his new book, John Henry Newman: Fighter Convert and Cardinal (Signal Books £9.99) which explains that Newman was that year offered a five-acre site in the centre of Oxford: “a vast stretch of real estate between St Giles and Walton Street” which, with the help of rich supporters, he bought for £8,000. A great procession of Oriel undergraduates was planned to welcome him back and he wrote to a friend: “We want to erect a great centre of Catholicism in Oxford, which may last and grow ever more important as time goes on.”
But it was not to be. His plans were rejected on the grounds that Newman’s return to Oxford would inevitably attract hordes of Catholic young men who would then be faced with the dangers of a “mixed education” ; “mixed” here meaning a mixture of Protestant and Catholic of course; definitely not co-education!
Mr Mockler told me: “Newman wanted to return to Oxford but was foiled by Manning and the Vatican.”
Manning was a fellow convert from the Church of England, and erstwhile friend of Newman, who rose remarkably quickly to become the second Archbishop of Westminster.
In his book Mr Mockler writes: “Oxford had always been Newman’s earthly City of God; more so than Birmingham, Dublin, or even, I would venture, than Rome.”
As an Oxford academic, ordained into the Church of England, he had been vicar at the University Church of St Mary from 1828-1843, and leader of the Oxford Movement - which in the end led him to”go over” to Rome in 1845.
As vicar of St Mary’s he had responsibility also for the parish of Littlemore, where he built the church of St Mary and St Nicholas.
He also leased a barn there which he converted into a quiet, austere home in which to contemplate.
After one of his famous Tracts had caused a particularly strong reaction among dons and Anglican authorities, he agreed to write no more Tracts and resigned from his position as Vicar. He then gathered around him at Littlemore a group of serious-thinking disciples.
In 1843, he preached his famous last sermon as an Anglican at Littlemore church, called the Parting of Friends, and in 1845 he was quietly received into the Catholic church there — by the Italian friar Dominic Barberi (who incidentally has already been beatified, the second step after becoming Venerable, towards becoming a saint).
He left Littlemore to found his Oratory in Birmingham. He wrote in 1864, the year his plans for a new Oxford mission were thwarted: “I have never seen Oxford again, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway”.
As for that tract of land — and no one seems sure exactly where it lay — the university bought it for £9,000, thus more than reimbursing Newman. As for the Oxford Mission, it was awarded to the Jesuits who built the church of St Aloysius on land next to the Radcliffe Infirmary.
In 1990, the centenary of Newman’s death, it was passed to the Birmingham Oratory and is now itself a flourishing independent oratory.
And as for that barn in Littlemore. In 1950 its owner, the Diocese of Oxford, put it on the market for £2,000. The Birmingham Oratory bought it. Now it is the Newman College, run by an order of nuns called The Sisters of the Work.
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