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The beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman on Sunday during the pope's visit to England is a timely reminder of Newman's monumental
importance to the revival of Catholicism in his native England and the United States. His 1845 reception into the Catholic Church heralded a new dawn for Catholicism in the English-speaking world.
Before Newman, England's Catholic presence had withered to such a degree that only remnants of the old recusant families still carried the faith. These adherents to the ``Old Faith'' bore Catholicism in their hearts and in their homes, but they were effectively excluded from bringing it into public life. After Newman's conversion, Catholicism became a major intellectual presence in English cultural life. Thousands of British citizens followed him and converted to Catholicism. This phenomenon crossed the Atlantic, heralding a similar revival in the United States.
If Newman's historical importance is beyond question, so is the great legacy he bequeath-ed to posterity. In theology, philosophy, education and literature his influence on both sides of the Atlantic is remarkable.
Newman's famous February 1843 sermon on Development in Christian Doctrine has become the benchmark for doctrinal-development study.
His discourses on liberal education, delivered to Catholic audiences in Dublin in 1852 as he prepared to become rector of the new Catholic University of Ireland, were published two years later as The Idea of a University, a book that remains one of the finest and most eloquent works advocating the efficacy of an integrated liberal arts education.
To this day, Newman's influence can be seen in the founding of new Catholic centers of higher education such as Florida's Ave Maria University, Virginia's Christendom College and California's Thomas Aquinas College.
Newman's greatest contribution to philosophy is his seminal work, The Grammar of Assent (1870), the product of 20 years' labor, which highlighted the rational foundations for religious belief and the inadequacy of empiricism. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) is arguably the greatest autobiographical spiritual aeneid ever written, with the obvious exception of St. Augustine's incomparable Confessions.
Years earlier, in 1848, only three years after his reception into the church, Newman foreshadowed Apologia with his first novel, Loss and Gain, a fictionalized semiautobiographical account of a young man's quest for faith amid the skepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. Literary critic George Levine called Newman ``perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the 19th century,'' a judgment seemingly echoed by James Joyce, via Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Newman was also one of the finest poets of the Victorian age, writing poems such as The Sign of the Cross, The Golden Prison and The Pilgrim Queen. His most ambitious poem is The Dream of Gerontius, later the inspiration for an oratorio by Sir Benjamin Britten, which presents the vision of a soul at the moment of death and its conveyance by its guardian angel to the cleansing grace of purgatory.
``It reminds us at times of Milton,'' suggested critic A.S.P. Woodhouse, ``and it strikingly anticipates T.S. Eliot in its presentation of Christ as the surgeon who probes the wound in order to heal.''
Newman's beatification signifies the belief of the Catholic Church that he has attained his heavenly reward. Whether one agrees, there is no denying the magnitude of Newman's influence on both the church and the wider secular culture, especially in the English-speaking world. U.S. Catholics can see their faith and world from a revival that stands on Newman's shoulders.
As such, the debt that American Catholics owe to the beatified Cardinal is considerable.
Joseph Pearce, writer in residence and associate professor of literature at Ave Maria University in Florida, is author of Literary Converts and biographies of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and J.R.R. Tolkien.
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