PARISH PRACTICE JOHN CORNWELL Towards perfection


Cardinal John Henry Newman, to be beatified tomorrow, offers a persuasive model of priesthood characterised by simplicity and unobtrusive devotion. The Mass, and his pastoral duties, were at the centre of all he did


W


e had a parish priest (now gone to his reward) who routinely preached on Sunday for more than an hour. For the congre-


gation, it was like being in a stacked aeroplane: we would seem to be, at last, coming into land; but up we would go again for another round. Once I congratulated him on his recent homily of one hour 10 minutes, to which he beamingly responded: “I let the Holy Spirit guide me. Do you know, there are priests who write out their sermons, and read them? Cardinal Newman used to do that: it didn’t leave much room for the Holy Spirit, did it!” So I ventured: “Perhaps, Father, the Holy Spirit came to him when he was writing?” After a pause, the good Father replied: “You know, I never thought of that!” Newman was one of the great preachers his age; yet, always in the con- text of a full pastoral life. He became a curate aged 23 in the working-class district of St Clements, east Oxford. His rector was ailing and Newman carried the main burden for their 1,500 parishioners: liturgy, preaching, visiting the sick and the poor, teaching catechism. He raised £2,000 (a prodigious sum in 1825) for a new church. While researching the early Fathers as a fellow of Oriel College, this pattern of tireless parish work would continue for another 20 years after he became vicar of St Mary’s, the university church. He preached to packed congregations every Sunday, and he had responsibility for a village parish at Littlemore, south of the city (where he also built a new church). When he became head of the Birmingham


Oratorian community, he spent many hours in the confessional, and did his share of bap- tisms, preparation for Confirmation and marriage, and caring for the sick. He often preached on special occasions; one of his best-known Catholic sermons, the Second Spring, was delivered at Oscott College to the first Catholic synod after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1852. But his preference was for his own parishioners. A Vatican monsignor once invited him to give


a series of sermons in Rome to visiting English aristocrats. Newman replied: “Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor talent for the sort of work which you cut out for me.” Newman’s sermons followed the Church’s


TO DO


Acquire an edition of Newman’s sermons to read alone or in a group


Join or start up a Newman Society in your parish


Consider marking Newman’s newly chosen feast day – 9 October – with a special event in the parish


year, invoking Scripture, and the early Fathers. They are beautifully crafted in prose that James Joyce described as “cloistral silver veined”. He spoke in a “low clear voice” with pauses, “when for a few moments there was a breathless silence”. His delivery was even, well paced, without rhetorical or dramatic flourishes. Matthew Arnold wrote that Newman’s sermons spoke of “words and thoughts which were a religious music – subtle, sweet, mournful”. He mesmerised his congregation: people wept. All his writing went through many drafts. He said, “I do not think, that I ever … wrote my thoughts, without great pain, pain reaching to the body as well as the mind.” The effort was to reach out to the people’s hearts: his motto was “heart speaks unto heart”, and he once wrote: “the heart is com- monly reached not through reason but imagination”. He would speak in the early days for 50 minutes; but his sermons got shorter as he got older, 30 minutes and less.


Many had the impression that he was addressing them individually. He returned repeatedly to the moral and spiritual impact of his preaching rather than its doctrinal arguments. There was, according to one lis- tener, an “appeal to conscience with such directness and force … a passionate and sus- tained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously realised in conduct”. The historian Richard Church, who later became Dean of St Paul’s, wrote that Newman spoke of the “Holiness necessary for future Blessedness”. Newman hated preachers who worked themselves up into “a pretence, nay, into a paroxysm, of earnestness”. Attending the dedication of new church, he wrote to a friend that the sermon was “half scream- ing and bellowing, half whining”. He was appalled at the praise heaped on it by “ladies


of quality” who were “in raptures with it”. Newman favoured simplicity and unob- trusive devotion in all things. Hence he came into conflict with his fellow Oratorian, Fr Faber, who went in for processions and flam- boyant sanctuary choreography. In the early days at least, Faber liked Pugin’s neo-Gothic: rood screens and other such mock-medieval paraphernalia; Newman preferred the simpler Romanesque “basilica” style. His spirituality, which he carried into every


aspect of his pastoral life, was, he claimed, shaped by St Ignatius Loyola and St Philip Neri: “interior religion, a jealousy of formal ceremonies … obedience rather than sacrifice … mental discipline rather than fasting or hair shirt … mortification of reason … that illumination and freedom of spirit which comes from love”. Much as he set great store by his sermons, he was critical of the evangelical emphasis on preaching. The Mass was always at the centre. In old age, he continued to say Mass until he could no longer stand. Then he recited Mass without consecration from memory. He had two by heart: a Requiem Mass and Votive Mass. On these occasions, said Fr Neville who looked after him, “the brightness of his face, the speaking intelligence of his eyes … were wonderful to see”. His greatest devotional joy on becoming a Catholic was the privilege of paying visits to the Blessed Sacrament. One last glimpse, by a parishioner, of Newman at prayer before he died was in his own church at Edgbaston. He was kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament which on that day, Good Friday 1890, was in “repose” at the altar of St Philip. Newman knelt for a long time “with his face in his hands, or with his hands clasped against the back of his head”. He died that August. On Newman’s orders, before he died, his


coffin was buried in a rich compost to hasten decomposition. Hence nothing was found of his remains when they came to exhume him in October 2008. He perhaps intended it as his final sermon, to the text: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”


■ John Cornwell is author of Newman’s UnquietGrave: the reluctant saint (Continuum).


18 September 2010 | THE TABLET | 25


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