Diarmaid MacCulloch
A DIFFERENT CLOTH
Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint
By John Cornwell (Continuum 273pp £18.99)
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'I have nothing of a saint about me, as everyone knows.' I could warm to a man who says that about himself, as long as I thought he meant it. Evidently Pope Benedict XVI disagrees with Newman, given the plans for beatifying this most celebrated English Roman Catholic and ex-Anglican of the nineteenth century. The title of John Cornwell's excellent biography reveals that the proposal raises problems - not least because, unlike St Thérèse of Lisieux, bits of whom recently visited our shores, Newman will never be available to be toured around in a glass box. His mortal remains have inconsiderately melded with the soil in which they were buried, leaving only brass, wood and cloth. But that is the least of the difficulties with Newman's unquiet grave. Plans to remove him to a shrine in preparation for sainthood only drew attention to his most unusual request in death, that of burial in the same grave as the intimate friend who predeceased him, the fellow convert to Rome Father Ambrose St John. In the case of a saint, the Church apparently knows better than the dead man himself; and removal does get him away from a proximity to St John which in the light of current culture wars has become something of an embarrassment. If the justification for such highhanded coffin-ferrying is sainthood, that returns us to the question of whether Newman has anything of a saint about him.
There is an industry of hagiography around Newman, which does not appear to be a great spontaneous upsurge among the Catholic faithful. In the past, saints emerged by acclamation: miracles happened, pilgrims flocked to their gravesides. Even lately, the same popular phenomenon happened in the case of Padre Pio, the charismatic Italian Capuchin who exhibited stigmata and who was already drawing crowds in his lifetime. Newman has not stirred comparable interest in the Catholic world, although one perceives vague gratification among English Catholics that an Englishman is now proceeding to sainthood. The description of him on the official website of the upcoming papal visit as 'the much-loved Victorian theologian' is an underwhelming encomium by the standards of St Patrick or St Francis of Assisi. Newman's partisans have been hard put to find the necessary miracle to prove his sanctity, even in an age when, thanks to Pope John Paul II's enthusiasm, saints have rolled off the Church's production line in quantities that would win the envy of Henry Ford. At last, in 2008, came a report of the healing of a chronic back condition for an elderly Catholic in Boston, Massachusetts, whose attention had been drawn to Newman through the wonders of modern technology: a well-known American television programme founded by the nun and Catholic televangelist Mother Angelica. The Postulator for Newman's cause of sanctification appealed on the programme for evidence of miracles to help the work along, and that appeal struck home to Jack Sullivan, whose serious illness stood in the way of his ordination to the diaconate. Prayer with Newman in mind produced very considerable relief, and Sullivan has duly been ordained.
Miracle, or very unusual medical event? Cornwell reports the circumstances in detail and with notable neutrality; indeed, the report forms the very last section of his biography, in a style that makes the book end with the opposite of a punchline or the final triumphant chords in a Beethoven symphony. This is symptomatic of a study which, from its rueful opening anecdote about Cornwell's first visit as a seminarian to Newman's then very quiet grave, strives to paint a full and fair picture of an extremely talented, driven, passionate human being. It gives guardedly sympathetic reference, for instance, to Frank Turner's recent iconoclastic study of Newman, whereas Newmanolators would demand automatic condemnation of heretical Turnerism. The result is an absorbing story, absorbingly told.
The agonised, perennially self-scrutinising journey of this Victorian cleric from initial religious certainty via another religious certainty to a very different final religious certainty forms a fascinating diptych with his exact contemporary and fellow Oxonian, William Ewart Gladstone. Both ended up as Grand Old Men, though Newman had committed a cardinal sin in more than one sense by abandoning his rise through the English Establishment and finding a senior (though always problematic) place in the organisation symbolic for most Victorians of un-Englishness: the Roman Catholic Church. Both were great orators who could galvanise huge audiences, but Newman's prose can still thrill and beguile on paper, whereas Gladstone's alas cannot.
In Cornwell's biography there is, to my eyes, one stumble: that matter which so preoccupies both admirers and detractors of Newman in this prurient age - his sexuality. Newmanolators cannot abide the idea that he could have been gay. As conservative Roman Catholics, they can't just accept that homosexuality is one unremarkable and morally neutral variant in human behaviour; and so Newman's enthusiastic biographer, Father Ian Ker, has insisted emphatically on Newman's heterosexuality. Reading Cornwell's account of Newman's emotional life - his passionate friendships with other single men (St John was just the most long-lasting), his tortured opinions about his own sinfulness, his obvious revelling in the homosocial world of early Victorian Oxford - it is difficult to avoid applying to him that useful variant of Ockham's Razor: 'Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck - can it be a duck?' Cornwell, otherwise so clear-sighted, avoids this conclusion, though undoubtedly after careful thought. He bolsters his rejection by reference to the homosocial circle of another Anglican convert to Catholicism, Father Frederick William Faber, a monumentally silly man who was undoubtedly and almost explicitly gay. Cornwell's logic seems to run that because Faber behaved in a certain way and was gay, and Newman did not behave like Faber, ergo it is 'ill-conceived' to consider Newman gay. Not a strong argument.
All this matters because Newman's sanctity is tangled up with current politics in the Roman Catholic Church, and not just its woes about sexuality. Newman's valence has changed interestingly in the last few years. Once, devotion to Newman was a coded way of championing changes in the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council, simply because, all his life, Newman remained enough of an Anglican (or a nuanced and pluralist Catholic, if you prefer) to deplore the First Vatican Council and its declaration of papal infallibility. That declaration might indeed have been a good deal more extreme if the likes of Newman had not encouraged restraint. He who deplores Vatican I, by implication favours Vatican II. But why, then, are Pope Benedict and his like, who now busily pretend that Vatican II didn't change much at all really, so suddenly enthusiastic for Pio Nono's critic? Because Newman has taken on another significance: prince of Anglican converts. The Curia in Rome is excitedly fishing for more clerical converts like Newman in the present: witness the Pope's recent antics in offering a Roman 'Ordinariate' for Anglo-Catholics who oppose the ordained ministry of women. It is notable how many of those pressing for Newman's sanctification are themselves ex-Anglicans. Reading John Cornwell's graceful and scholarly account of Newman's life, one clear reason emerges for advocating his sanctity: he survived all the childish and mean-spirited things done to him after his conversion by his fellow Catholics (some of them fellow converts from Anglicanism), and still died loving the Roman Catholic Church. That certainly sounds like a job for a patron saint.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Fellow of St Cross College and Professor of the History of the Church, Oxford University. His latest book is 'A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years' (Penguin/Allen Lane).