Venerable John Henry Newman, CO (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890)[1] was a Roman Catholic priest and cardinal, a convert from Anglicanism in October 1845. In his early life, he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots.[1] Eventually his studies in history persuaded him to become a Roman Catholic. Both before and after becoming a Roman Catholic, he wrote influential books, including Via Media, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865-66) and the Grammar of Assent (1870).[1] His body was buried in the small cemetery at Rednal near Birmingham, next to the Oratory country house. The grave was opened on 2 October 2008 with the intention of moving any remains to a tomb inside Birmingham Oratory, during Newman's consideration for sainthood; however, no remains were found because of the coffin having been wooden and the burial having taken place in a damp site. Canonisation would make Cardinal Newman the first English person who has lived since the 17th century to be declared a saint.[2][3] In 1991 Cardinal Newman was proclaimed "Venerable" by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. At the age of seven Newman was sent to Great Ealing School conducted by Dr George Nicholas, at which George Huxley, father of T. H. Huxley, taught mathematics.[4] Newman was distinguished by diligence and good conduct, as also by a certain shyness and aloofness, taking no part in the school games. He spoke of having been "very superstitious" in these early years. He took great delight in reading the Bible, and also the novels of Walter Scott, then in course of publication. Later, he read some skeptical works by Paine, Hume, and perhaps Voltaire, and was for a time influenced by them. At the age of fifteen, during his last year at school, he was converted, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was "more certain than that I have hands or feet." It was in the autumn of 1816 that he thus "fell under the influence of a definite creed," and received into his intellect "impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured".[5] Saved from the ordeals of a public school, he enjoyed school life. Apart from his academic studies (in which he excelled), he acted in Latin plays, played the violin, won prizes for speeches, and edited periodicals, in which he wrote articles in the style of Joseph Addison. His happy childhood came to an abrupt end in March 1816 when the financial collapse after the Napoleonic Wars forced his father's bank to close. While his father tried unsuccessfully to manage a brewery at Alton, Hampshire, Newman stayed on at school through the summer holidays because of the family crisis. The period from the beginning of August to 21 December, 1816, when the next term ended, Newman always regarded as the turning point of his life. Alone at school and shocked by the family disaster, he fell ill in August. Later he came to see it as one of the three great providential illnesses of his life, for it was in the autumn of 1816 that he underwent a religious conversion under the influence of one of the schoolmasters, Rev Walter Mayers, who had himself shortly before been converted to a Calvinistic form of evangelicalism. Newman had had a conventional upbringing in an ordinary Church of England home, where the emphasis was on the Bible rather than dogmas or sacraments, and where any sort of evangelical "enthusiasm" would have been frowned upon. The tone of his mind at this time became evangelical and Calvinist, and he held that the Pope was Antichrist. Matriculating at Trinity College, Oxford on 4 December 1816, he went into residence there in June the following year, and in 1818 he gained a scholarship of £60, tenable for nine years. But for this he would have been unable to remain at the university, as in 1819 his father’s bank suspended payment. In that year his name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. Anxiety to do well in the final schools produced the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, and so graduated with third-class honours in 1821. Desiring to remain in Oxford, he took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel, then "the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism." To his intense relief and delight he was elected on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same society in 1823. He also founded the Oratory prep school and the Oratory school in 1859. Celebrating its 150th anniversary this year 2009. On 13 June 1824, Newman was ordained deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and ten days later he preached his first sermon in the little church Holy Trinity at Over Worton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire when on a visit to his former teacher, the Reverend Walter Mayers. On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825 he was ordained priest in Christ Church. He became, at Pusey’s suggestion, curate of St Clement’s, Oxford. Here, for two years, he was busily engaged in parochial work but also found time to write articles on Apollonius of Tyana, Cicero and Miracles for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In 1825, at Richard Whately's request, he became vice-principal of St Alban Hall, but this post he held for one year only. To his association with Whately at this time he attributed much of his "mental improvement" and a partial conquest of his shyness. He assisted Whately in his popular work on logic, and from him he gained his first definite idea of the Christian Church. He broke with him in 1827 on the occasion of the re-election of Robert Peel as member of parliament for the University, Newman opposing this on personal grounds. In 1826 he became tutor of Oriel, and the same year Richard Hurrell Froude, described by Newman as "one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men" he ever met, was elected fellow. The two formed a high ideal of the tutorial office as clerical and pastoral rather than secular. In 1827 he was a preacher at Whitehall. Newman later wrote that the influences leading him in a religiously liberal direction were abruptly checked by his suffering first, at the end of 1827, a kind of nervous collapse brought on by overwork and family financial troubles, and then, at the beginning of 1828, the sudden death of his beloved youngest sister, Mary. There was also a crucial theological factor: his fascination since 1816 with the Fathers of the Church, whose works he began to read systematically in the long vacation of 1828. This he regarded as his second formative providential illness. The year following, Newman supported and secured the election of Edward Hawkins as provost of Oriel in preference to John Keble, a choice which he later defended or apologized for as having in effect produced the Oxford Movement with all its consequences. In the same year he was appointed vicar of St Mary's, to which the chapel of Littlemore was attached, and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew. At this date, though still nominally associated with the Evangelicals, Newman’s views were gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone and, while local secretary of the Church Missionary Society, he circulated an anonymous letter suggesting a method by which Churchmen might practically oust Nonconformists from all control of the society. This resulted in his being dismissed from the post, 8 March 1830; and three months later he withdrew from the Bible Society, thus completing his severance from the Low Church party. In 1831–1832 he was Select Preacher before the University. In 1832, his difference with Hawkins as to the "substantially religious nature" of a college tutorship became acute and he resigned from that post. In December he went with Hurrell Froude, on account of the latter's health, for a tour in South Europe. On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta and the Ionian Islands, and subsequently Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described Rome as "the most wonderful place on earth," but the Roman Catholic religion as "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous." It was during the course of this tour that he wrote most of the short poems which a year later were printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April, Newman returned to Sicily alone, and fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever (of which many were dying) at Leonforte. He recovered from it with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England; he saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio, and here he wrote the verses, "Lead, kindly Light", which later became popular as a hymn. He was at home again in Oxford on 9 July, and on 14 July Keble preached at St Mary’s an assize sermon on "National Apostasy," which Newman afterwards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organization of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement." It was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergymen was held over 25–26 July (Newman was not present), at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer-Book." A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian." Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline, in case either of disestablishment or of a determination of High Churchmen to quit the establishment, an eventuality that was thought not impossible in view of the state's recent high-handed dealings with the sister established Church of Ireland. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called "Puseyite"; and in 1836 its supporters secured further coherence by their united opposition to the appointment of Hampden as regius professor of divinity. His Bampton Lectures (in the preparation of which Blanco White had assisted him) were suspected of heresy, and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr Hampden's Theological Statements.