Heart Speaks to Heart

Far beyond his home in nineteenth-century England, John Henry Newman's influence is still felt in educational and religious circles. Rome transformed him. He is perhaps best known as a high-profile convert from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in the mid-1800s, when such conversions were unusual and controversial. After his conversion he founded a university and a school, wrote lasting philosophical works, and gained a continuing reputation as a saintly, enlightened servant of the Church.

Newman was assigned to establish a Catholic university in Ireland, today's University College Dublin. As its founding rector he wrote The Idea of a University (1852), a classic in educational theory. He championed the voice of the layman in the Catholic Church by writing “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859), and famously defended individual freedom of conscience in a pamphlet on papal infallibility (1875). Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) made him a cardinal in 1879. His epistemological theories later influenced the philosophy of Popes John Paul II (r. 1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (r. 2005–13). The latter pope recognized Newman as a candidate for sainthood by a beatification ceremony in Britain in 2010. Newman's reputation for holiness came from his kindness: tending the sick during a cholera epidemic, writing countless letters to the suffering and lost, and, as an aged cardinal, tottering on foot to the Cadbury candy factory in Birmingham, England to ask the owners that Catholic workers might say their own prayers instead of attending mandatory Protestant prayer services at the factory. Impressed by the great man's concern for unskilled workers, the owners agreed. New-man's motto was cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart.

Passionate in his Christianity, Newman always wanted to know on what authority to accept belief. This imperative ultimately determined his conversion from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic faith. In the four centuries since the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547), the state had controlled English religion. In 1833, while he was both a prominent Anglican priest and on the academic staff of Oriel College (Oxford University), Newman helped instigate the “Oxford Movement” to insist that the Anglican Church stand on the authority of the apostles rather than of the king.