Newman and His Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology

Fr. Stanley Jaki, O.S.B.

Newman emerges more and more as possibly the most prominent convert in all post-Reformation time. Now that the Church has officially recognized the heroic character of his virtues, it is not daring to say that his conversion was truly a heroic act in the moral sense. The heroic measure of his mind's involvement in his conversion could be seen from the moment when, a month or so after his conversion, his Development of Christian Doctrine came off the press. Almost twenty years later, his Apologia pro vita sua made clear to any and all the utter honesty of each of his steps towards what he called the One True Fold.

Those two immortal books made public record Newman's claim that he would not have left the Church of England for any reason other than that he could not see in it the One True Fold, or the God-ordained haven of salvation. He had already made this claim privately in the twenty or so letters he had written on October 8, 1845. It was the eve of his being received into that very Fold. Among the recipients were Faber, Manning, Pusey, Church, Woodgate, Allies, and Dodsworth. Each of these found in the letter written to him the phrase, "One True Fold." Biographers of Newman at times do not even make a generic reference to this facet of those letters.1

At least one of those letters, the one Newman wrote to Church, eventually dean of St. Paul's in London, should have struck any careful biographer of Newman as a document of more than momentary interest. In witness to their deep friendship, Newman addressed Church as charissime. He would never forget that Church as Provost vetoed the proposal that the University of Oxford censure Tract 90. Only in that letter to Church did Newman give details about Father Dominic, "a simple, holy man, and withal gifted with remarkable powers. He does not know of my intention, but I mean to ask of him admission into the one Fold of Christ."2 A month later Newman wrote to Church: "There are several things I want to say to you, if you will give me half an hour some day."3

Nothing would have been easier for Church than to walk a good half hour from Oxford to Littlemore or ask him for a meeting somewhere in Oxford. Church did not communicate again with Newman until after the publication of the Apologia, when their erstwhile friendship came alive again, although their respective ways of conceiving of the One True Fold remained very different. In fact, Church rebutted Newman's reply to Pusey's Eirenicon (1865) on the ground that the union of Churches demands that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican Church should alike admit to falling short of being the One True Fold!4 Such was the basic premise of the branch theory so dear to all Tractarians. The principal function of the theory was to gloss over the crucial point. Church himself was engaged in that doubtful art when he claimed, shortly after Newman's death, that Newman had become a Catholic because only the Church of Rome preserved in full strength the spirit of "devotion and sacrifice" of the Church of the Apostles.5 To say this was simply to evade, by falling back on phenomenology (devotion and sacrifice), the evidence of objective truth (the One True Fold).

Indeed, on reading those letters written on that most momentous day, which decades later prompted Gladstone to write that the Church of England still had not realized the true measure of the loss it suffered by Newman's conversion, it is impossible not to sense the obvious: Newman revealed the innermost recesses of his powerful mind by repeating that he was about to be received "into the One True Fold." On October 9, 1845, when he was received, he assured his own sister Jemima (Mrs. John Mozley) that "if I thought that any other body but that which I recognize to be Catholic were to be recognized by the Saviour of the world, I would not have left that body."6 Five days later he wrote to her that it would have been a betrayal of Truth (writ large), had he kept from others his most considered conviction that the Church of Rome was the Catholic Church. He told her that he could not live with a conscience guilty of dissimulation, with the guilt that he had deprived others of the Truth: "What a doom would have been mine, if I had kept the Truth a secret in my bosom, and when I knew which the One Church was, and which was not part of the One Church, I had suffered friends and strangers to die in an ignorance from which I might have relieved them."7 He knew which was the pain to be dreaded more: the temporal pain he would feel because he had to pain others, or the eternal pain he would eventually suffer by choosing not to pain them and thereby not to inspire others to convert as he did.

Details of the guidance he gave to prospective converts constitute what may be called Newman's existential ecclesiology. Not that he ever considered theology as something that can be severed from one's very spiritual existence and destiny. But the vital relevance of theology to life, or rather to a decision about eternal life, comes through with a particular force in the concern which Newman felt for the eternal salvation of others. He was naturally most closely connected with those who like himself tried to see through that facade behind which the Church of England appeared as a mere tool of a secularist Establishment. Far more difficult was it both for Newman and other Tractarians to extricate themselves from their belief that, whatever its defects, the Church of England was Catholic and that it was both possible and legitimate to live a genuinely Catholic spiritual life within it.

For Newman it caused agonizing pain to perceive that the belief in question was but a splendid illusion and that therefore one had to recognize in Rome the only true fold, no matter what the price. Such was the gist of the instructions he gave to those Anglo-Catholics who, prompted greatly by his example, felt more and more a pull towards Rome. Here too the gist can hardly give more than an inkling of the details. These, strangely enough, have not yet attracted appropriate study. This is all the more surprising because the letters that contained his guidance to prospective converts, have now been available in print for more than thirty years. I mean volumes XI-XIV of the Letters and Diaries that cover the time from Newman's conversion in October 1845 to the end of 1851, when his attention had to shift to the Achilli trial and to the burdens he incurred with his having been charged, as its first Rector, with the organization of a Catholic University in Dublin.

Those volumes appeared in the early 1960s, a time of ecumenical euphoria. Within that atmosphere it would have been jarring to come forth with a study of the letters which Newman wrote to prospective converts between October 1845 and December 1851. Jarring (and unpopular) it certainly would have been, though very much to the liking of Newman, precisely because, as the author of Development, he held that although the formulation of truth develops, its content does not change by being further unfolded. The Church of Athanasius and Ambrose was that of the Apostles, and both those saints, he claimed, would recognize today only in the Church of Rome the Church of the Apostles. Union with Rome meant therefore compliance with the very will and command of Christ.

Books, including the book called the Bible, Newman was wont to argue, are unsure guides. About letters, including his own, he would have said the same, and even more forcefully. But about letters he emphatically said that an author is far more present in his letters than in his books. Moreover, he considered letters as so many facts. Biographers (and theologians, one may add) may forever varnish their subject, but "contemporary letters are facts" and all the more so because, Newman added, "the true life of man is in his letters." This view, he said, "has ever been a hobby of mine."8 He did not call this a hobby in order to detract from its value. After all, in writing this in 1863 he knew that he had crucial pieces of his correspondence ready to be used as soon as there arose the proper opportunity to defend the sincerity of his entire spiritual development leading to his conversion. The opportunity came within less than a year and led to his writing his most famous book, the Apologia pro vita sua.

Surely, the life of a writer comes through more immediately in letters which are hardly ever written with the concern that they will eventually appear in print, not at least during one's lifetime. Letters reveal spontaneity, directness, informality, and even an added measure of frankness. Newman, for one, would never criticize ecclesiastical authorities in public even when he was sorely pained by some of their policies. We know how deeply offended he was when during Vatican I a letter of his written in great confidence to Bishop Ullathorne in Rome suddenly appeared in The Times, because somebody had abused of Ullathorne's trust.

Most importantly, the letters Newman wrote to prospective converts give, as was noted above, a priceless insight into what may best be called Newman's existential ecclesiology. This is not to suggest that he was ever bogged down in that newfangled theological pastime which is to draft "models" of the Church, so many offerings in an "existential" smorgasbord of ecclesiology. And whatever the temptation of pandering to the fashion of the moment, nothing is more dangerously tempting for a theologian than to discount truths when applying them on the internal forum. In fact this dangerous deviation has become a theological virtue widely practiced in rank disregard to the relentless instructions issued by the Magisterium. There is not a trace of this dissimulation, hidden or open, in Newman's dealing with converts, for whom the question of converting was existential often in the dramatic sense of the word.

Of course, his own heroic resignation from his living and from his Oriel Fellowship made it in a sense impossible for him to bargain with truth even in strictest privacy. But he kept spelling out the full truth to prospective converts not so much because he did not want to contradict himself. He spelled out the entire truth because only truth deserved to be obeyed in full and the truth was riveted on the Church. This sums up his existential ecclesiology, which he articulated nowhere more concretely than in his letters to prospective converts.

To focus on volumes IX - XIV of his Letters is all the more advisable because the great wave of conversions was ebbing away a year or so after Newman delivered in the late Spring and early Summer of 1850 a series of twelve lectures, known as Difficulties of Anglicans. He addressed them to Anglo-Catholics, so many Tractarians, in the hope that they would act on their principles and join the Catholic Church. With that task accomplished, he himself said to Aubrey de Vere that he felt it to be burden to be occupied with the Church of England.

Newman's attention turned to the project of working out a set of reasonings (it ultimately came out as the Grammar of Assent), to help those who were at best nominal Anglicans, though still with some eagerness to find God, but who were more often than not the victims of an increasingly skeptical mentality. Converts who were to come from these ranks were hardly ever bothered with the branch theory. For them Newman had to show that it was most reasonable to believe that there was a Revelation. Once this had been dealt with, the need for a Church as an authentic and unfailing interpreter of Revelation readily appeared.

Prospective converts from among the Tractarians needed a different set of considerations. Newman had to impress on them the logic that the voice of Jesus Christ could not be echoed by Churches contradicting one another. Newman could be patient and understanding, but he never failed to point out in one way or another that unless one saw the voice of Jesus Christ in the teaching of the Church of Rome, it made no sense to transfer one's allegiance to it. By the same token it was one's God-given duty to complete one's path to Rome.

In those letters Newman refers time and again to his own motives and experiences as a convert. Ten days after his reception he told a correspondent that although the Catholicity of the Church of Rome had broken "suddenly and clearly" on his mind six years earlier, he dreaded to allow it lest it should prove a delusion. This dread stayed with him until the very last month: "I do not mean to say that every one who comes to the same views with myself must be as long about it. Mine was a peculiar case. But I can easily understand that in many minds a conviction will be the work of time."9

A month after his conversion he gave a priceless rŽsumŽ of that slow maturing of his conviction. He spoke of the principal tenets on behalf of the Church of England. One was the view that Antiquity, not the actual Church, was the oracle of truth. According to the second, apostolic succession was a sufficient guarantee of sacramental grace and therefore the latter did not need actual union with the Christian Church throughout the world. About these tenets he said: "From the time I began to suspect their unsoundness, I ceased to put them forward when I was fairly sure of their unsoundness, I have given up my Living. When I was fully confident that the Church of Rome was the only true Church I joined it." Further, since only Bishop Bull's theology,10 a theology distinctly hostile to Rome, provided a firm base for the Anglican position, no one could remain a member of the Church of England without opposing Rome, unless, of course, one was willing to have it both ways. He was to say this many times yet to Anglo-Catholics.

He considered their case a most difficult one because Anglo-Catholicism represented the most accomplished and yet at the same time the most devious mimicry of true Catholicism. For this reason alone he had to be very patient. He knew from his own case how difficult it had been for him to distinguish the imitation from the real. But though patient, he made it clear that conversion was not a matter of personal fulfillment but an obligation to fulfill one's duty to belong to the One True Fold. He never waxed "pastoral" by failing to remind any and all of that duty.

One of those whom he kept reminding, though never in a hurtful way, was none other than the Pusey whom Anglo-Catholics considered to be their supreme oracle. A month after his conversion Newman walked through Prior Park in Oxford and met Pusey, who was already reading the freshly printed Development. Pusey, visibly strained by the encounter, voiced his dismay on finding that two other converts, Faber and Oakeley, had started "proselytizing." Writing to Dalgairns the next day, Newman reported that Pusey expected them to act like vinedressers who had merely "transferred to another part of the vineyard."11 Newman would not hesitate a moment about what to say to those Anglican bishops (and to some Roman Catholics) who nowadays write off the conversion of hundreds of Anglican clergy as a move from one section to another in the same housing development.

Pusey could not have been more wrong in his view of what Newman the convert stood for. He kept seeing in Newman a mind similar to his, one who was always finding in theological hairsplitting an excuse for evading the obvious, including the obvious duty of making the move. Newman, however, seized every opportunity to insist on that duty whenever he found someone searching for the One True Fold.

One such person in Newman's estimate was the Marquise de Salvo, a cousin of Manning and the wife of a Sicilian nobleman, to whom he wrote on December 18, 1845: "I earnestly exhort you to join the Catholic Church. It is necessary for your salvation, considering your present state of mind." As to the pain the Marquise felt she would thereby inflict on her relations, Newman quickly removed it from the psychological domain: "God will support you under every trial He puts upon you and you will have the strength of the whole Church of all saints who ever lived."12

The same letter is also precious because it is there that Newman first refers to rumors that were to haunt him for many decades to come, namely, that he and his companions had come to regret having joined the Catholic Church: "This is said of every one in turn and in every case which I am acquainted with most falsely. There is but one feeling of joy and happiness among those persons with whom I am acquainted who have become Catholics."13

And what was the source of that joy? He explained it a month later to Miss Giberne, a recent convert, who found all her friends turning their backs on her. Newman first reminded her that he himself had lost many more friends than anyone else. To be sure he came over with a handful of friends. But they were new friends. They were undergraduates when they first met him in Oxford. None of those who had studied there with him twenty years earlier and had formed deep ties of friendship with him followed him to Littlemore. But whether the friends were old or new, the real issue was that there in Littlemore he was with "Catholic hopes and beliefsÑCatholic objects."14

A month later, already at Oscott, Newman reproached Pusey for resisting the evidence of truth. In defense of the apparent harshness of his words, Newman said this: "Excuse this freedom, and do not let me pain you. I am in a house, in which Christ is always present as He was to His disciples, and where one can go in from time to time through the day to gain strength from Him. Perhaps this thought makes me bold and urgent."15 A month later in a letter to Mrs. Bowden, Newman spoke of precisely this gain in becoming a Catholic. But the real point Newman made was that in becoming a Catholic, neither he nor his friends expected to find that real gain. He explained himself by recalling that in 1833 he had visited various churches in Italy and found it a soothing experience, but nothing deeper. He did not dare then to fancy "the extreme, ineffable comfort of being in the same house with Him who cured the sick and taught his disciples, . . . but now after tasting of the awful delight of worshipping God in His Temple, how unspeakably cold is the idea of a Temple without that Divine Presence!" And he begged pardon if had he sounded as if he were proselytizing. In his defense he could refer only to his closeness to the Bowdens: "While there are few persons to whom I could say what I have said, I cannot keep from saying it where I can say it."16

He said this on March 1. In the first days of July, Newman was present at Mrs. Bowden's reception into the Church in London. The way Newman handled the anxieties of her brother-in-law, not yet a Catholic, is usually a part of Newman biographies. Newmanists still have to exploit that gem of a letter which Newman wrote on the day of Mrs. Bowden's reception into the Church to a first cousin of hers, Mr. Manuel Johnson, who, as an undergraduate, was first introduced to him in Oxford in 1834. The Tractarians often met in Johnson's house, and it was there that Newman spent his last days in Oxford. Newman knew that Johnson would be deeply pained by his cousin's conversion. Newman expressed his firm hope that the joy found by Mrs. Bowden would eventually be shared by all those dear to her. This prospect was to be realized by their eventual coming together in the Catholic Church: "And then the lingering, prolonged, repeated, wearing distress which they undergo in their successive losses, will be recompensed to themselves and to us by their regaining all at once all that has gone from them. And thus, my dear Johnson, the Catholic Church will be the true type of heaven to all of us, for it will bring together all in one all those who die off from the world. . ."17 No, Newman was not to hint, even as a gesture of consolation, that the Catholic Church somehow was not really the One True Fold.

In August 1847 Newman visited with Pusey. What he said to Pusey can easily be guessed. Then on September 1, he left for Rome. The first stage of his ministering to prospective converts was over. It lasted but ten months, too short a period to allow Newman to speak at length about his experience of being a convert to Catholicism. He came back from Rome not as a lay convert but a priest and charged with the task of establishing the Oratory of St. Philip in England. The counsels and precepts he urged on prospective converts remained the same as those he had voiced during that ten-month period, but now he voiced them as that official representative of the One True Fold which every priest is or should be. Furthermore, as the years went by, he could with ever greater credibility refer to his own experience as a convert.

All this is amply shown by the very first letter he addressed, following his return from Rome, to a prospective convert. The recipient of that letter, dated February 10, 1848, was the Rev. Anthony John Hanmer, who first met Newman in 1839 and took orders the following year. Newman already in December 1845 had advised Hanmer on two points. One concerned a difficulty, the wish to clear up all particular problems and make too much of extreme cases in Church history, a concern typical of some Anglican inquirers after truth. The other was more pastoral. Newman told Hanmer that the genuineness of feeling a call to the true Church did not consist so much in its vividness as in its continuance. He asked Hanmer to test whether that feeling would still be on hand six or so months later. Also the elimination of doubts was not ultimately a function of reason, "an uncertain guide," but of grace. As to himself, Newman wrote this: "I am so convinced of the truth of the Catholic Church that I am pained about persons who are external to it in a way in which I was not before."18

Now in February 1848 Newman pointed out to Hanmer that only a Catholic could understand what the Church and the sacraments were for him, because only a child could understand what it meant to have a father and a mother. For Newman this was not a pious dictum but an experience which he hastened to convey in a theologically existential form: "From the time I became a Catholic, the shadow of a misgiving has not crossed my mind that I was not doing God's will in becoming one."

No, Newman was not to talk of his own fulfillment, but of his having done the will of God. He could further reassure Hanmer that all the other converts who had come over to Rome were similarly free of doubts, because, like him, they had joined the Church "in the spirit of a child to a Mother, not to criticize anything, but to accept, and if we have had no trials of faith, it doubtless is, by natural consequence, a reward, (I hope I may say so without boasting,) of our having come to the Church in this spirit." To have this spirit in coming to the Church was the only way of coming to it. Nothing would be more miserable than a mere outward conformity or reservation: "God is not wanting to us, and hard as faith is, and above reason, yet He who made the Church to speak, makes us, if we earnestly pray for the gift, to hear and accept."19

That letter to Hanmer also contains the anticipation of an inscription which Newman eventually wanted to have on his tombstone: ex umbris et imaginibus ad veritatem. Newman did not mean something abstract by those words, and not even the transition from the earthly shadows of eternal verities to their full contemplation in heaven. He meant by that phrase the transition from that shadowy church, the Church of England, to the Church of truth, the Church of Rome: Conversion, he wrote, "is coming out of shadows into truth, into that which is beyond mistake a real religion, not a mere opinion such, that you have no confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too, but an external objective substantive creed and worship. The thought of Anglicanism with nothing fixed or settled, with Bishops contradicting Bishops within, and the whole world [Catholic Church] against it without, is something so dreary and wretched, that I cannot speak of it without the chance of offence to those who still hold it."20

Almost two years later, Hanmer was still struggling with his difficulties. Newman could only feel sorry for him. He referred to many others who had already "seized and are enjoying the high calling offered to them," while he, Hanmer, was still "wasting precious years in vanity. Having myself been called to the Church late in life, when my best days were gone, I feel for those who persevere in losing what cannot be recalled." Newman brushed aside an argument of Hanmer's about a non-infallible Pope and an infallible Church with devastating simplicity, dismissing Hanmer and the gallican Bossuet by the same stroke: "Bossuet would not have felt the force of this argument."

For Newman the argument with "overbearing force" was that "were St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship, not to St. Paul's Cathedral, but to Warwick Street or Moor Field." Not that Newman thought his reading of church history could be communicated to others. But he pointed out the difference between a Catholic Church "vibrant with altars, tombs, pilgrimages, processions, rites, relics, medals etc.; whereas I hardly see a trace of the Church of the Fathers, as a living, acting being, in the Anglican communion." It was useless to argue, Newman went on, that either this or that was not necessary to the Church. All these items, he wrote, make up together a great note of the Church. The Church was to be one and the same from Christ's first coming to His second. The modern Roman communion is unmistakably like the Church of the Fathers; and this great argument is confirmed by finding that the Church of England is unmistakably unlike it." The case of an Anglican trying to escape into the Greek Church was, Newman wrote, a mere absurdity. He called Hanmer's attention to the fact that whereas a Catholic could logically debate theological nuances concerning papal infallibility as a means of perfecting his knowledge, the same was "foreign to the position of an inquirer into the truth of Catholicism."21 Finally he asked Hanmer to come from Tiverton in Devon to Birmingham and have a conversation with him. Hanmer was received into the Church a month later.

In mid-June 1848 Newman pointed out to the Marquise de Salvo that no specific Marian devotion was strictly obligatory, but that he himself had found great spiritual pleasure in reciting the Rosary: "to my own feelings nothing is more delightful than the contemplation of the Mysteries of the Incarnation, under the invocation, so to call it, of her who was the human instrument of it, so that she who ministered to the Gracious Dispensation itself, should minister also to our adoring thought of it." He also told her that a new convert has to make conscious efforts "to make distinct acts of faith, love etc. when it all comes quite as a matter of course and without effort to one who has been a Catholic from birth." He concluded by saying that a short reply was better than a long but delayed one, and assured her of his readiness to answer any question he could "or [do] any thing I can do for you."22 Such was a convert-priest's pastoral solicitude for another convert.

About the same time, Newman received an anxious letter from Henry Bourne, who converted in 1845 and wanted to know whether it was true that Newman was dissatisfied as a Catholic. "I can only say, if it is necessary to say it," Newman wrote in reply, "that from the moment I became a Catholic, I never had, through God's grace, a single doubt or misgiving in my mind that I did wrong in becoming one. I have not had any feeling whatever but one of joy and gratitude that God called me out of an insecure state into one which is sure and safe, out of the war of tongues into a realm of peace and assurance." Had he said only that much, the phrase, "out of the war of tongues", would have made it one of the best characterization ever of certain aspects of theologizing that deserve only the kind of criticism which Swift handed out in his The Battle of the Books.

Newman would not have been the convert he was had he not added the note, which many recent Catholic ecclesiologists would not strike at any price: "I shrink to contemplate the guilt I should have incurred, and the account which at the last day would have lain against me, had I not become a Catholic, and it pierces me to the heart to think that so many excellent persons should still be kept in bondage in the Church of England, or should, among the many good points they have, want the great grace of faith, to trust God and follow His leading." Newman could surpass even that as if it had not been superlative in its expressiveness: "This is my state of mind, and I would it could be brought home to all and every one, who, in default of real arguments for remaining Anglicans, amuse themselves with dreams and fancies."23 One wonders if some Catholic members of ARCIC (Anglican Roman Catholic Interfaith Commission) have any inkling of these words of Newman's.

One of Mr. Bourne's sons was the future Cardinal Bourne. He read that letter as part of the sermon he gave at the opening of the Newman Memorial Church at the Birmingham Oratory, on October 9, 1906. The day was the anniversary of Newman's conversion to the Catholic Church. Similar testimonies were heard at the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Newman's conversion, but hardly at the centenary of his death. Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis, but is this a facet of genuine development of dogma as Newman held it?

Three days later, on June 16, 1848, Newman assured Mrs. William Froude about his being in good health, indeed feeling better than ever. He had no more the pressing anxieties that had been his lot for so many years, but it was not in his power to efface from his face the trace of them: "At least I feel it an effort to brighten up. . . those sad long years of anxiety have stamped themselves on my face, and now that they are at an end, yet I cannot change what has become a physical effect." But the sadness of his facial features was not to be taken for a sign of something similar inside of him: "I will add that the Hand of God is most wonderfully over me, that I am full of blessing and privileges, that I never had even the temptation for an instant to feel a misgiving about the great step I took in 1845." The other side of this related to those still outside: "The hollowness of High Churchism (or whatever it is called) is to me so very clear that it surprises me, (not that persons should not see it at once,) but that any should not see it at last, and, alas I must add that I do not think it safe for anyone who does see it, not to act on his conviction of it at once."24

It took ten years before Mrs. Froude and her children became Catholics. She was to become one of those converts whose husband would not follow her. A predicament both painful and puzzling, as Mr. Froude, a naval engineer, was more than anyone else in Newman's mind as he wrote the Grammar of Assent. Puzzling it was not, however, for Newman, all too aware all the time of the supreme role of grace in any act of conversion. For even if Newman could satisfy his desire to be near Mrs. Froude and talk with her, he felt he would still need "great grace to know what to say to you." At least he could point out something all-important. It was not enough to know that the Church of England failed as a Church. To come to the true Church could not be done on failing grounds, because this would still leave one in the world which is full of troubles and failing: "You must come to the Church, not to avoid it, but to save your soul. If this is the motive, all is right, you cannot be disappointed, but the other motive is dangerous."

One impression he certainly did not wish to leave, namely, that he had tried "to disguise that Catholicism is a different religion from Anglicanism, you must come to learn that religion which the Apostles introduced and which was in the world long before the Reformation was dreamed of, but a religion not so easy and natural to you, or congenial, because you have been bred up in another from your youth." One can only guess what Mrs. Froude thought of Newman telling her that he was thinking of her that very same morning as he was saying Mass: "Oh that you were safe in the True Fold! I think you will be one day. You will then have the blessedness of seeing God face to face. You will have the blessedness of finding, when you enter a [Catholic] Church, a Treasure Unutterable, the presence of the Eternal Word Incarnate, the Wisdom of the Father who, even when He had done His work, would not leave us, but rejoices still to humble Himself by abiding in mean places on earth for our sakes, while He reigns not the less on the right hand of God."25

Ten or so days later, another letter of Newman's was sent to Mrs. Froude, a letter no less inexhaustible in its instructiveness. There Newman first told her, "my most dear Sister or Daughter as you choose to let me call you," about his own greatest concern prior to his conversion. Events brought out, Newman told her, that not a few of those who hung on to his words of assurance about the soundness of the Anglo-Catholic position, would pass into skepticism once they learned that he now considered that position a mere delusion. The very fact that so few of them followed him into the Catholic Church proved that there was "really no medium between scepticism and Catholicism." A symptom of the scepticism into which many Anglo-Catholics were sliding was the fact that while they "still profess to believe [they] secretly doubt."

And why? because they do not think that they have the obligation to submit to Truth. Applying this to Mrs. Froude's predicament, he told her that the real question she should ask herself was simply this: "Have I a conviction that I ought to accept the (Roman) Catholic Faith as God's word?, if not at least, Ôdo I tend to such a conviction' or am I near upon it?" And he asked her to respond to this question: "Now can you, my dear Mrs. Froude, say this, that, directly you feel sure you ought to believe the Catholic Faith, you will begin making efforts to control your mind into belief?" Newman was not willing to go along with the objection, cannot believe. The question to be answered was whether one felt that one ought to believe. And here Newman, this great champion of grace, often charged with rank Methodism, turned the tables on Anglo-Catholics: "Is it not plain that many of Dr. Pusey's followers are at this very time exerting an act of will, commanding their minds, . . . because Dr. Pusey believes? . . . Do you think that they could not in like manner, if they pleased, believe what the Catholic Church teaches?"26

What was then to be done? One was to make acts of will that all too often are the starting points of faith. Faith may not come suddenly, and in a startling manner, "but in reality faith is always so begun, so sustained, so increased. This, and this only, makes martyrs." One was not, however, to begin with what one might end with. Newman advised Mrs. Froude to read Paradisus animae (a Greek Orthodox book of devotions, just translated into English), not in order to nourish her piety, but to help her to "make acts of faith, hope, charity, contrition etc. daily."27

As one may expect, Mrs. Froude found most painful Newman's reference to scepticism as the only alternative to Rome. In his reply Newman urged her "to cultivate that great virtue, faith, which I acknowledge may be possessed in the Anglican Church; which, knowing your earnestness and sincerity, I will believe that you possess in it, if you tell me so." But this did not save Mrs. Froude from having to face up to the question of whether one had the duty to believe and whether it was possible to believe without believing in a creed. Catholics had clear statements in which they believed. As an Anglican, Newman said in his next to final remark, "you should either have in your hand your whole Creed, or be able to ascertain any point of it when necessary."28 His last remark was a promise that she would be remembered daily in his Mass.

No exchange of letters took place between the two until about a year later when, on July 14th, Newman felt, as he put it, tempted to write. The day was the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the Oxford movement, in which the Froudes were heavily involved. Having known her from days even antedating that beginning, Newman expressed his fear that she might fall back into the kind of religiously coated agnosticism from which the Oxford movement had rescued her. But he had an even greater fear. As one who had become familiar with the true object of faith, he felt that Mrs. Froude seemed to be, by her reluctance to become a Catholic, taking the risk of losing "a state of mind which cannot live except in its Object! Alas, how many instances do we see around us of a wrecked and ruined faith! Of those who either deliberately, or at least virtually, have preferred scepticism to Rome! Surely faith is the gift of God, as it was in St. Paul's day, and the divine election is as wonderful now as then."

Newman must have lived up to his promise to remember Mrs. Froude daily in the Mass. Otherwise his next remark would not have referred to the awesome responsibility of those for whom the Masses were being said. In no other letters written by Newman to prospective converts do we come across the following frightful alternative: "What passionate efforts have I witnessed after the conversion of individuals. What multitudes of Masses were said for Pusey! I have heard those who said that they would have him. I have never liked this way of talking, and have never given in to it. I believe that it is an awful thing to say Mass for a conversion, for it may bring down a judgment on the person whom you offer it for, if it does not convert him. I have fancied I have seen this. No, the election is with God; we can but co-operate with him, and we must submit to His decision. . . . Yet is it dreadful to have to give up the hopes of those one has loved so much, and has worked with."29 Two brief letters of Newman's to Mrs. Froude from 1851 contain no reference to her spiritual state. The year 1859, when she would become a Catholic, was still eight full years away. Newman kept praying.

One should only touch upon a long letter which Newman wrote about that time to E. J. Phipps, who acted as an intermediary between another Anglican clergyman G. Dawson and Newman. It is not clear to what extent Mr. Dawson considered conversion. Instead of conversion, Dawson seems to have looked forward to the eventual union or fusion of Rome and Canterbury. Newman firmly stated his conviction that there could be no such fusion because the two were two different religions. The difference between the two was not that "one believes a little more and the other a little less." Newman listed a large number of points of crucial difference, including the question of intention in administering the sacraments, and above all that of ordination: "It is a dream then to think of uniting the two religions; I speak from experience of both. And, in finding this to be the case, I am recording no disappointment on my part. I joined the Catholic Church to save my soul; I said so at the time. No inferior motive would have drawn me from the Anglican. . . . Never for an instant have I had since [then] any misgiving I was right in doing so, never any misgiving that the Catholic religion was the religion of the Apostles." His final remark had for its target Anglican presumptions about what Catholicism really was. To be sure, there has been a great variety of Catholics. But you can find it would as easy "to make the philosophy of Epictetus or Plotinus like Catholicism, as you can identify with Catholicism any form of Anglicanism that ever existed though in only half a dozen minds."30

One of the Anglicans with an acute mind able to make a case for his Church and also with great hunger for truth was T. W. Allies. In 1848 he was still three years away from becoming a convert at great personal sacrifice. Newman's letters to him dealt with intellectual points, precisely because he was fully aware of the mental powers of Allies whom he found bogged down in an elementary fallacy in logic. Newman formulated it in a form that could not have been simpler yet more telling: "Say the Catholic Church is not, that it has broken up, this I can understand: I don't understand saying that there is a Church, and one Church, and yet acting as if there were none or many. This is dreaming surely. . . . When I think of your position and that of others, I assure you, it frightens me."31

Allies meanwhile kept drifting toward the Church. Early in 1849 his book of reminiscences of his travels through Italy and France in 1845, 1847 and 1848, caused a furor. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, almost prosecuted Allies for promoting Catholic dogmas. Allies sent a copy of the book to Newman and suggested that Newman had spoken contemptuously of the Church of England. Newman's reply came swiftly and with a theological incisiveness. He stated once more that he had left the Church of England only because of his conviction that "salvation was not to be found in it." It was therefore logical for him "to wish others to leave it." Nay, much more. "The position of those who leave it in the only way in which I think it justifiable to leave it, is necessarily one of hostility towards it. To leave it merely as a branch of the Catholic Church for another which I liked better, would have been to desert without reason the post where Providence put me. It is impossible then but that a convert, if justifiable in the grounds of his conversion, must be an enemy of the Communion he has left, and more intensely so than a foreigner who knows nothing about that Communion at all."32

A further consequence of that logic was the sense of anxiety in the convert for those whom he had left behind, on seeing them sink further "into a state in which there is no hope." Then Newman explained this hopelessness by referring to those who put themselves forward as "teachers of a system which they cannot trace to any set of men, or any doctor before themselves; who give up history, documents, theological authors, and maintain that it is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to deny the signs of Catholicism and divine acceptance, as a fact, in the existing bearing and action of their communion." Newman's final words were prophetic: "But of such as you, my dear Allies, I will ever augur better things and hope against hope, and believe the day will come when (excuse me) you will confess that you have been in a dream; and meanwhile I will not cease to say Mass for you and all who stand where you stand on the 10th day of every month, unless something very particular occurs."33 And he excused himself for having spoken so freely.

Newman therefore could be blunt, in a letter to Henry Bittleston, another hesitating Anglican clergyman, about Allies' great effort, The Church of England cleared from the Charge of Schism (1846). He described it as full of "apparently incontrovertible arguments" which his admirers would eventually find to be "ashes in their mouths."34 Outspokenness once more proved to be right medicine. Four days after Bittleston received that letter, he was received in the Birmingham Oratory. By then Allies was writing his The Royal Supremacy viewed in reference to the two Spiritual Powers of Order and Jurisdiction (1850). It carried on its front page the question of St. Athanasius, "When did a judgment of the Church receive its validity from the Emperor?" Clearly, Allies' arguments were turning ashes in his mouth too, as predicted by Newman, who knew that plain words were not alien to Christian spirit. A point still to be appreciated by some latter-day Catholic ecumenists, who abhor nothing more than the prospect of making converts.

The four long letters Newman wrote to Catherine Ward between October 12 and December 18, 1848, are certainly a testimony to Newman's readiness to explain patiently the details about history and dogma to one hardly an expert in them. Once more Newman counted it no loss of time or energy to come to the help of anyone in whom he saw a sincere inquirer after truth. Catherine Ward became a Catholic and a most devout one, in July 1849.

Newman's fourth letter to her from 1848 has a conclusion that deserves to be quoted in full, because there he considers the case of a Catholic converting to Protestantism. Without mincing a word, Newman stated as his most considered view that behind all such conversions there lay some criminality, some moral failure, to be revealed on Judgment day. But long before that one could see an unfailing pattern unfold: "Look too at the sequel of their history, they turn from the Church, but they turn to nothing. When was there a seceder from the Church who remained in one state of mind? They have no peace." Then after recalling the sad fate of Blanco White, he concluded: "What a contrast to the satisfaction of mind which the convert to Catholicity experiences!"35

But before she converted, Mrs. Ward needed another nod from Newman. The nod was rather blunt. Newman, the logician, found little merit in the illogicality with which she went back on her earlier agreement with him that the Church must have one policy, or else its unity is illusory. Now she tried to shift the dispute to miracles. She received a firm lesson from Newman: "So you give up what I certainly think was your, as well as my view of this proposition, because others (viz. [some Anglican] controversialists) dissent from it; and you wish a new proof, one from miracles, because what for four months has passed between us is not of an Anglican character. Is it not so, my dear Madam? and are you not in the way to be of those who ever seek and therefore never find? Alas I can believe how wayward the mind may be under the fearful pressure of perplexities in faith; but how many there are in the Anglican Church who would leap for joy to attain that intellectual conviction which you have possessed."

Newman's patience was running out, though not his good will. "Let me not seem harsh, but I have no heart, as I have no call, to enter upon a fresh discussion, which when completed may be simply put aside without better reason than the allegation that some third persons for whose judgment you have no great opinion do not see the force of our common concordant conclusion. I have mentioned your name in my daily Memento, since I first told you I should do, and shall continue it, though with less cheerful feelings."36 Three years later Newman was able to register the victory of grace in Mrs. Ward's soul and to write to her: "I congratulate you with all my heart on your reception into the Catholic Church, and pray, and am sure, you will enjoy to the full those blessings which there alone are to be found."37

A few months later, in June 1851, Newman wrote what may be his most incisive letter ever written to a prospective convert. She was Mrs. Lucy Agnes Phillips, the widow of an evangelical clergyman who had died in 1847. Newman began by noting that he had put her (without disclosing her name) "on our private prayer list." Then he assured her that she was absolutely right in thinking that "the Catholic Church claims absolute submission to her in matters of faith. Unless you believe her doctrines, as the word of God revealed to you through her, you can gain no good by professing to be a Catholic you are not one really."38 Of course, Newman went on, the Catholic Church puts forward most worthy proofs on behalf of her claims, but as in other cases of intellectual persuasion, it is not necessary to clear up all problems prior to coming to the conclusion that the case has indeed been proven.

Newman in particular mentioned the great notes of the Church as so many assurances that the guidance of the Church was most reliable because it was a visible concrete, living guide, something far superior to anything written, be it the Bible itself: "How ignorant we are! do we not want a guide? Is the structure of Scripture such as to answer the pur poses of a guide? How can a bare letter, written 2000 years ago, though inspired, guide an individual now? Every thing has its use. God uses it according to its use. Is it the use of a written Word to answer doctrinal questions starting up to the end of time? as little surely, as it is the use of a spade to saw with, or a plough to reap with."39 Three months later Mrs. Phillips entered the Church, went abroad to prevent that her two children be brought up as Protestants, trained herself as a nurse in France, returned to Birmingham, and died on March 3, 1857, as she was setting up a hospital near the Oratory.

From the end of 1851 there is a brief letter of Newman's to a woman whose name is not known. Perhaps her anonymity may qualify that brief letter as one which countless anonymous souls, who have ever looked and still can look for guidance from Newman, may take as something written to them: "Of course, my only answer to you can be that the Catholic Church is the true fold of Christ, and that it is your duty to submit to it. You cannot do this without God's grace, and therefore you ought to pray Him continually for it. All is well if God is on our side."40