John Henry Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. The title has been given to only 38 saints, each recognised for their intellectual and spiritual contribution to the life of the Catholic Church. There is a certain symmetry in that Leo XIII declared Newman a cardinal in 1879.
This acknowledgment by Leo XIII was an immense relief to Newman. Formerly lauded as one of Anglicanism’s most brilliant minds, his reception into the Catholic Church required him to renounce his Oxford academic career. He was shunned by most of his social circle, including his sister Harriet, who never spoke to him again.
Despite this enormous sacrifice, he still faced a lack of acceptance from some prominent Catholics. He wept on being made cardinal, declaring that “the cloud is lifted forever”.
Perhaps one cloud was lifted then, but Ireland remains curiously uninclined to acknowledge Newman’s Irish links. Secular UCD seems more than mildly embarrassed that the founder of the forerunner of the college was not only a Catholic but now also a saint and doctor.
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For example, UCD originally had no plans to send an official representative to Newman’s canonisation in 2019.
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The then lord mayor of Birmingham, Mohammed Azim, a Muslim Labour councillor, was delighted to participate in the canonisation to honour Newman’s long association with the city. Prince Charles and 13 Westminster cross-party MPs and peers were also attending. UCD eventually bowed to pressure from former staff and alumni, including Prof John Kelly.
It was a stark contrast to 55 years earlier. Dr Michael Tierney, sometimes called the second founder of UCD because he oversaw the move to Belfield, celebrated the centenary of the Catholic University in 1854 with “much splendour”, as Jeremiah Hogan later wrote in Studies.
Representatives from 70 universities worldwide attended, honorary degrees were awarded, 900 guests enjoyed a garden party, and a banquet was held at the Gresham.
Newman faces the same modern Irish attitudes toward Catholicism as Daniel O’Connell. People rightly are falling over themselves to applaud the Liberator’s commitment to civil rights, especially his abhorrence of slavery. However, there is a palpable reluctance to confront the fact that Catholics were the prime focus of his activism.
In an Ireland where the Catholic Church is routinely portrayed as the enemy of all progress, what are we to do with the fact that one of our greatest statesmen sought to uplift the battered, broken and demoralised papists and release them from the yoke of the Penal Laws?
Of course, the church brought much of this current disdain upon itself through misuse of power, but there is now little desire to acknowledge any good at all in Catholicism. Yet after a brief flirtation with Deism in his student days, O’Connell’s Catholic faith fuelled his activism.
[ UCD fails founder and itself in handling of Newman canonisationOpens in new window ]
It is progress that we are acknowledging O’Connell at all, even if tiptoeing around his inconvenient Catholicism. His legacy has been subject to attack from the very beginning, and not just by the British satirists who routinely portrayed him as the devil.
For example, although initially in agreement with his decision to call off the monster meeting in Clontarf in 1843 after Robert Peel threatened the participants with troops and gunships, the Young Irelanders then denounced him as a failure and a coward.
During the long years when the physical force tradition held sway, O’Connell’s non-violence led to him being ignored. Éamon de Valera’s 1967 speech at the reopening of Derrynane House, admitting that his generation had never given O’Connell the credit he was due, marked a turning point.
Although they probably never met, there is an intriguing link between Newman and O’Connell, recorded by Patrick Manning in The Furrow. Initially, Newman despised O’Connell, referring to him as a “vile human” for his Catholic emancipation campaign.
Nicholas Wiseman was the first cardinal resident in England after the Reformation and the first Catholic archbishop of Westminster. Along with Michael Quin and O’Connell, he founded a Catholic periodical called the Dublin Review (confusingly published in London).
It aimed to present an intellectually coherent Catholicism. Newman writes in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua that one article in the Dublin Review by Wiseman convinced him that by remaining an Anglican, he would be like the Monophysite schismatics in the church’s early centuries.
Without O’Connell’s financial backing, there would have been no Dublin Review and no moment of clarity for Newman while reading Wiseman’s article. (Incidentally, O’Connell was terrible with money, so he probably backed it with money he did not have.)
Without Catholic emancipation, there would have been no Catholic University, and no establishment of UCD in 1908.
When the medical school Newman founded was absorbed into UCD in 1909, it was the largest Irish medical college in Ireland.
The first name entered on the roll of the Catholic University in 1854 was Daniel O’Connell, grandson of the Liberator.
Ireland is still in a kind of adolescent stage, where everything that smacks of Old Ireland is embarrassing unless it can be presented as something in tune with current ideologies. Thankfully, both Newman and O’Connell are far too complex to be co-opted.
