The Newman Rambler

Newman on the Formation of the Laity

14 April 2021 ‖ Paul Shrimpton

Paul Shrimpton gained his BA and MA from Balliol College, Oxford, and has taught at Magdalen College School, Oxford, since 1981, except for a gap of four years, when he worked in London. He began researching the educational ideas of John Henry Newman in 1990 and in 2000 completed his PhD, which he published as a book entitled, A Catholic Eton? Newman’s Oratory School (2005). He has also undertaken archival research on Newman's practical contribution to university education, which was published as The ‘Making of Men’: the Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin (2014). He has given talks and papers on Newman and education, as well as on Newman and the laity. His last book, Conscience before Conformity: Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany, appeared in February 2018 on the 75th anniversary of the White Rose trials and executions. He is currently completing a critical edition of Newman's university papers, My Campaign in Ireland [Part I & II], forthcoming in May and October 2021.

John Henry Newman was involved in founding a university and a school in the 1850s, in both cases being invited to undertake the task. A brief history of the foundations is called for. First, the Catholic University. At the time there was no suitable university education available to Catholics in the United Kingdom (which then included Ireland). Although Trinity College Dublin had removed the barriers to Catholics in 1794, it was permeated with Protestantism and therefore hardly attractive. Lack of access to higher education – and hence entry to the professions, social improvement, and access to the full life of country – was one of the three main grievances of Irish Catholics. In the late 1840s the British Government addressed the situation by opening three non-denominational colleges, called the Queen’s Colleges, in Belfast, Cork and Galway. The Irish bishops were divided in their reaction to the Colleges, some willing to favour them on the grounds that something was better than nothing, but Rome was strongly against ‘mixed’ (i.e. Catholic–Protestant education) and it urged the Irish bishops to set up their own university. Archbishop Cullen took the lead and in 1851 invited Newman to be its founding rector. Newman accepted, but there was a delay of three years before he could begin his work on account of disputes within the Irish hierarchy. In the meantime Newman gave his celebrated university lectures, which we know as the Idea of a University, the title they were given some twenty years later. Newman nurtured the Catholic University into life and ran it for four years. After his departure, numbers immediately dropped, then rose for a brief while, before falling off again; twenty years later the university was all but extinct. After a complicated history, which involved several changes of name, it is now known as University College Dublin.

In 1857 Newman was approached by several convert friends who had been educated at the public schools and either Oxford or Cambridge, and who were unhappy with Catholic educational provision, in particular the absence of a lay secondary school. The schools in existence were either seminary schools, such as Oscott or Ushaw, or else schools run by religious orders, which at the time made few concessions for the lay boys. What the converts wanted was a preparation for the world so that their sons could play a full part in the life of the country; they wanted a Catholic public school. Newman was cautious because there were so many difficulties facing the plan, not least the fact that they would be challenging a system and vested interests. After protracted negotiations, the Oratory School opened in 1859. Cradle Catholics soon began to patronise the new school, which had effectively been set up by converts. Tensions developed within the school and the parental body and these came to a head in 1861 when the teaching staff mutinied and walked out, leaving Newman with just one of his two matrons. Together with two friends Newman rescued the school. Thereafter he had to immerse himself fully in school life, which he did for the next three decades. The school eventually moved out of Edgbaston in Birmingham and is now situated near Reading.

A Unique Opportunity

For an historian of education like myself, these two foundations are extremely interesting because they brought together a highly gifted individual with a unique situation.

More generally, Newman was entering unchartered waters because the two foundations were at the start of the modern age when, for the first time, Christian traditions of educating were being seriously challenged and alternatives proposed. This is why Newman is so interesting for us, because he confronts non-Christian approaches at the time they were beginning to be propagated and responds to them with reasoned arguments. He acted fearlessly when there was loss of nerve, great confusion, and a tendency to retreat from engaging with the post-Enlightenment world. The current situation is not dissimilar, when we find, for the first time in living memory, that faith schools are under sustained attack in the media. Now, sadly, we feel the lack of a Newman who could articulate the case for creedal institutions of education, and not just defend them but explain why the alternatives are seriously deficient.

The creation of the Catholic University in Dublin was the second attempt at establishing such an institution in the modern age. Alastair MacIntyre’s most recent book, God, Philosophy and Universities (2009), places the foundation in perspective. Arguing that that there was a Catholic absence from European thought and philosophy which lasted from around 1700 to 1850, Catholics have been playing catch-up with modern ideas ever since. The first attempt to re-engage with the world of thought through a university occurred when the Belgian bishops reopened Louvain in 1834; the second was when Newman was invited to Ireland. MacIntyre explains that the Dublin enterprise was particularly significant because of the talents of its originator: Newman was a man of great energy, resilience and with a capacity to inspire others; he was highly original, a genius; finally, he was a man of great integrity, i.e. personal holiness. Moreover, he had been fully exposed to the arguments of Locke, Hume and the utilitarians. All this makes Newman’s contribution a matter of great interest.

The Oratory School was a totally new type of school, so much so that twenty years after it opened, the idea of a forming a ‘Catholic Eton’ still seemed to Catholics like W.G. Ward a contradiction in terms. This, too, highlights the extent to which Newman was a pioneer.

Borrowing from the English Tradition

Both the university and school were carefully thought out. Although Newman made use of the best practice available, he did not select piecemeal, but rather conceived of his foundations in joined-up fashion so as to make them into a coherent whole. He drew heavily from the collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and from the public school system. He refined these English models and used them as the basis for what he did, but did not feel compelled to preserve all that the traditions contained: indeed, he was aware of their deficiencies and was prepared to modify them.

Preparing Young People to Live as Christians in the World

Newman’s aim was to help form young people to take a full part in the world, to defend their beliefs and be able to spread them. He helped form the next generation of lay faithful by giving them an education “to fit men for this world while it trained them for another”.[1] He wanted the laity to wake up and become an active force both within Church and in the world. For this they needed to be trained and educated, a task that he saw himself called to undertake after his conversion in 1845. This is illustrated by his words, that “from first to last, education, in this large sense of the word, has been my line”.[2] Besides undertaking these two large projects, his contribution ranged from delivering public lectures to simply giving personal advice to individuals.

In Christianising Education, Newman Respected its Inner Autonomy

This point is important to grasp. Newman understood deeply the connaturality of education and religion, while recognising that “knowledge is one thing, virtue is another”.[3] By ensuring that education was given in a Christian setting, he did not distort the autonomy of secular education or turn it into something else.

At the time Catholic education was distorted by the clerical monopoly and control over it. In all sorts of ways, religious education was effectively purchased at the expense of secular education. Nowadays, opposite tendencies are apparent, caused by the influence of secularism and ‘laicism’, when religious education is compromised by a controlling force which is too ‘secular’. Both then and now, there has been the tendency among Catholics to take secular models and bolt on the Catholic bits: this Newman did not do.

In Dublin the laity were upset because it seemed to them that the bishops did not care enough for secular learning and for science; more significantly, the bishops were unable to conceive of any training other than that which was suited to a seminary. This is illustrated by the events of 1859 to 1873, when Newman’s legacy was undone and the University was gradually clericalised.

At the Oratory School, tensions arose between cradle Catholics, who thought Newman made too many concessions to the lay aspect of education, and the converts, who thought Newman conceded too much for the sake of the religious education. Both sides thought Newman favoured the other. Of course, this was one of the problems of being a pioneer in the development of Catholic education.

Education, in this Large Sense of the Word

This expression of Newman’s is very telling, because it emphasises that he was interested in giving a deep human and Christian formation at one and the same time. Then, as now, there was a common mistake of viewing education as the imparting of knowledge rather than the training of the mind, character formation, and the acquisition of habits. The danger of this tendency is that it diminishes what education is about and neglects important dimensions of it.

In the 1850s many of the clergy associated with the Catholic University struggled to grasp that education amounted to more than just lectures and classes, and hence the implications of Newman’s broader approach. The same tendency is evident today in the way Christians fail to recognise the difference between lay and ‘secularised’ education for the very same reason: viewing education as the imparting of knowledge rather than training of the mind, and so on. It is about the whole person, not just part. When Newman involved himself in education it was not merely to teach subjects, but to form people.

On Uniting Secular and Religious Education

Newman fought tooth and nail against the separation of religion and secular learning, as enshrined in the new foundations of University College London and the Queen’s Colleges. The mischief of separating them was brought out in the first sermon which he preached at the University Church he had had built in Dublin. He began by stating that ever since the Fall of man, religion was in one place and philosophy in another. The object of the Catholic Church in setting up universities was to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and had been separated by man. He refused to accept the argument that Church involvement would lead to distorting and stunting the growth of the intellect; or that a compromise was entailed, as if religion must give up something and science something else.

I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons.

I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men converse with science all day, and lodge with religion in the evening. It is not touching the evil […] if young men eat and drink and sleep in one place, and think in another: I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral discipline. […] I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.

This is no matter of terms, nor of subtle distinctions. Sanctity has its influence; intellect has its influence; the influence of sanctity is the greater on the long run; the influence of intellect is greater at the moment. Therefore, in the case of the young, whose education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there is the influence. Their literary, their scientific teachers, really have the forming of them.[4]

Newman was firmly convinced that a residential setting made for a deeper education – even if it allowed for greater de-formation as well as greater formation. As a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford, he sought to combine academic and pastoral roles and to break down the barriers between tutor and tutee. In the Idea of a University he says that if he had to choose between a university which offered lectures and exams, but no residence, and another which dispensed with official teaching and exams, but offered residence and tutorial assistance, he would chose the latter.[5] By trying to ensure that the students of the Catholic University who were living at home or with friends or relatives were at the same time affiliated to one of the collegiate houses and spending the greater part of the day there, he hoped to offer a deep formation to everyone.

A Liberal Education

No-one has championed the idea of a liberal education better than Newman. At the heart of his concept of a liberal education was the principle that knowledge is its own end; that is, it need not be pursued for immediate tangible benefits but for its own sake, for the cultivation and perfection of the intellect. At the time he considered classics and mathematics as the subjects best suited for the training of the mind and learning how to think, because the science of the time was not sufficiently developed.

On a Sunday evening in November 1854, the day before the first lectures were to be given, Newman addressed the first seventeen students of the Catholic University. He told them they had not come there to become lawyers, teachers or doctors, because there were other places which could do that, but they came to be made into men; they came to the University to develop as human beings and become useful citizens.[6]

He had referred to the benefits of such a liberal education in the Idea of a University:

[…] the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgement, and sharpened his mental vision, will not at once be a lawyer, […] a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any of these sciences or callings [...] with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. [7]

Yet Newman was not wedded to abstract learning on account of an unworldly mindset nor was he unwilling to incorporate practical learning and training. In 1855 the Catholic University medical school opened and it proved to be the most successful faculty. Later he made a start on an engineering faculty and oversaw the setting up of a chemistry department. Irish studies got going thanks to his initiative, and he thought about starting a school of agriculture. At the Oratory School, a liberal education was on offer, but when boys had to prepare for the entrance exams for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, he ensured they were given the necessary tuition. If touch-typing had been required he would probably have incorporated that!

A Good Secular Education

What are the best methods for forming young minds and preparing them for a life of work? This is a question which has to be faced by all planners, organisers and leaders of education. Newman made his own contribution in this area, for which he is highly respected. He has said many things better than anyone else, and on account of this carries a good deal of intellectual clout.

I can throw out a few of his maxims: it is better to learn a little, but well, rather than pick up a smattering of many things; it is advisable to secure a balance between being self-taught and totally reliant on teachers; regular testing can be a very useful way to identify what has been learnt and understood, but if overdone it tends to creates prigs; reading is to be encouraged, but if done without evaluation or analysis it can easily become mere gratification; study is not amusement, but hard, as is life, and we should not disguise this from young people; considerable understanding and patience is required for the fitful process of adolescent maturation; do not be over-eager for quick gains, as teenagers cannot be forced like plants – each will bear flower and fruit in his own season.

A common mistake then (as now) was in relying too much on novelty in learning.

A chief error of the day was to think that our true excellence comes not from within, but from without; not wrought out through personal struggles and sufferings, but following upon a passive exposure to influences over which we have no control. They will countenance the theory that diversion is the instrument of improvement, and excitement the condition of right action; and whereas diversions cease to be diversions if they are constant, and excitements by their very nature have a crisis and run through a course, they will tend to make novelty ever in request, and will set the great teachers of morals upon the incessant search after stimulants and sedatives. [8]

All-round Development of the Individual

School and university are principally about forming people rather than teaching subjects, something the universities of today are prone to overlook.

Besides excelling in his studies as a schoolboy, Newman participated enthusiastically in life at Ealing School, acting in Latin plays, taking part in debates, learning to play the violin, leading a boys’ society and editing several school magazines. As an undergraduate at Oxford he tried his hand at verse, attended lectures in the emerging sciences of chemistry and geology, played first violin in a music club, co-founded the Trinity College Book Society for the dissemination of modern novels, and started a periodical with a friend, which appeared just two years after the first truly undergraduate magazine.

At the Catholic University, Newman dismayed the ecclesiastical authorities by what he allowed or encouraged the students to do. Archbishop Cullen complained to Rome that he permitted them to row, had acquired a cricket pitch and a billiards table, and allowed the students in his collegiate house not only to go out after dinner but even to go hunting and to balls. Newman even thought about licensing a theatre for the University. His pet project was the L&H (Literary and Historical Society), which acted as a debating society, a forum for the reading of original compositions, and an outlet for student journalism.

At the Oratory School his pet project was the Latin play, for which he adapted the original texts and coached the schoolboys in their acting. Besides the usual array of games, the School offered a full range of music-making and journalism, as well as less formal activities.

Newman also appreciated the formative value and importance of the ‘unofficial’ side of university education, all those informal moments in the day, of relaxation, recuperation and amusement, when ‘mutual education’ took place. Newman contended that education in the sense of personal development was continually taking place in its most informal settings, such as in mealtime and social gatherings, as described in the Idea:

When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day. [… Life at university] is seeing the world on a small field with little trouble; for the pupils or students come from very different places, and with widely different notions, and there is much to generalise, much to adjust, much to eliminate.[9]

All this constituted preparation for life in the world.

Religious Education

It is useful to distinguish between religious training and religious instruction. As regards training, each collegiate house of the University had its own chapel, where daily Mass was said, and all the students received spiritual direction and had a confessor. After Newman’s departure, many of these practices were made obligatory rather than optional. At the School, boys could opt in for the Rosary, and there were devotions for all such as Stations of the Cross in Lent and processions in May and on the feast of Corpus Christi; all boys were expected to go on an annual retreat. There is nothing noteworthy to say here, except there were far fewer obligatory practices than was the norm.

Newman’s approach to religious instruction is in many ways more interesting, particularly at the University. He had three questions to consider. How to teach? What to teach? And, how much? Certainly, he felt, the University was under an obligation to feed student minds with divine truth as they gained in appetite and capacity for knowledge. But how? There were two common approaches at the time: to entrust the task to the theology department; or else to allow the teaching of religion unlimited scope in the province of the humanities. The latter meant replacing classical literature by Sacred Scripture and the writings of the Fathers, and teaching scholastic theology to all. Newman’s solution was to admit religious teaching into the arts faculty, but to confine it within limits – and he argued that this need entail no sacrifice of principle or lack of consistency. By treating religion simply as a branch of knowledge, then, just as students study general history, literature or philosophy, they should gain a parallel knowledge of sacred history, Biblical literature and Christian philosophy. And he certainly thought there should be exams for all students on the subject:

If the subject of religion is to have a real place in their course of study, it must enter into the examinations in which that course results; for nothing will be found to impress and occupy their minds, but such matters as they have to present to their Examiners.[10]

It is instructive to descend into detail here because Newman’s approach is very applicable to the situation today. Church history was important for the young Catholic, as he was bound to mix with educated Protestants of his own age and would “find them conversant with the outlines and the characteristics of sacred and ecclesiastical history as well as profane.” (Having listened to Christopher Hitchens in the Sheldonian Theatre last week, perhaps we should substitute ‘secularist’ or ‘militant anti-theist’ for ‘Protestant’ in what follows.) Newman thought it was desirable that the young Catholic should be able to keep up a conversation with them and that he should be familiar with the course of Christianity down to the present day: the early spread of Christianity; the Fathers and their works; the Christological controversies and heresies; the origins of the religious orders; the Crusades.

He should be able to say what the Holy See has done for learning and science, the place which these islands hold in the literary history of the dark age; what part the Church played in the revival of learning.[11]

Something similar would apply to the study of biblical literature.

As for theology itself, Newman recommended excluding the detailed teaching of pure dogma, and confining coverage to a broad knowledge of doctrinal subjects as contained in catechisms of the Church and in the writings of the lay faithful. “I would have them apply their minds to such religious topics as laymen actually do treat, and are thought praiseworthy in treating.” He clarifies this by saying he refers to “Christian knowledge in what may be called its secular aspect, as it is practically useful in the intercourse of life and in general conversation; and I would encourage it as it bears upon the history, literature, and philosophy of Christianity”. The University authorities needed to realise that their students were going out into a world, not of professed Catholics, but of “inveterate, often bitter, commonly contemptuous Protestants” [12] (or, nowadays, militant atheists) who had been versed in their own doctrines and arguments. Newman hoped the University would be able to help its students grasp what the difference was between the Church and a sect, between ecclesiastical and civil authority, what the Church claims for itself of necessity and what it can dispense with, what it can grant and what it cannot. The students needed to know how to answer questions commonly asked of Catholics: whether the celibacy of the clergy was a matter of faith or of Church discipline; whether the Pope, by appointing a hierarchy, was interfering with the prerogatives of the monarch;[13] whether, and in what sense, Catholics consider Protestants to be heretics.

Questions such as these, which occur naturally in conversations, often did not require sophisticated arguments, but just a few pertinent words stating the facts.

Half the controversies which go on in the world arise from ignorance of the facts of the case; half the prejudices against Catholicity lie in the misinformation of the prejudiced parties. Candid persons are set right, and enemies silenced, by the mere statement of what it is that we believe.[14]

What was not satisfactory was for a Catholic to say, I leave it to the theologians, or, I will ask a priest – or, as we might say today, look it up on the internet! Instead a Catholic ought to gratify the curiosity of even those who speak against Catholicism by giving them information, because it was generally the case that “such mere information will really be an argument also”.[15]

Newman liked to illustrate this point by telling the story of three Tractarian friends of his, all clergymen, who were touring Ireland in the early 1830s and on one occasion found themselves with a boy aged thirteen, who was acting as their guide. Amusing themselves by putting religious questions to the young Catholic, they soon found themselves silenced by his replies – not by refined theological arguments, but merely by his knowing and understanding the answers in his catechism.

Yet, Newman did not think that arguments were out of place for laymen moving in the world. This point needs clarification. Theologians, in determining the detail, viewed Revelation from within; others, in mapping out schema for religion, from without – “and the office of delineating it externally is most gracefully performed by laymen”.[15] He pointed out that in the first age of the Church, laymen figured prominently among its apologists, as in his own day some of the most able defenders of the Church – [Joseph de] Maistre, Chateaubriand and Montalembert – were laymen.

A New Attitude to the World

Newman’s approach to education represented a shift in emphasis as he sought to encourage young Catholics to play their part in society. His concern to prepare people with a readiness to face world was shared by other converts, who were keen to see through the consequences of Catholic emancipation and to ensure that the rising generation of young Catholics were not excluded from public life, the professions, and so on. Newman had his finger on the pulse; as soon as the Government passed the India Act (1853), which opened up to competition appointments to the India civil service, he wrote about the implications for Catholics in the University Gazette (which he edited). One other point can be mentioned here: he ensured that both schoolboy and student received what I would call an ‘education in freedom’. At the time, Catholic schools and colleges operated regimes characterised by their strictness, lack of flexibility and the absence of a gradation of privileges; there was no overriding sense that they were being trained to be their own masters and independent. Newman replaced this heavy-handedness by placing an emphasis on trust and appealing to reason. In Oxford he had been regarded as a disciplinarian; in Dublin as lax. Nowadays, the assumption is prevalent that once a young person has reached the age of eighteen he should be accorded full independence and treated as an adult. Newman would have disagreed: the process to independence is a gradual one.

Newman’s emphasis on ‘facing the world’ can be detected in the advice he gave young men who suspected they had a priestly vocation. When John Marie Stokes returned to the Oratory School with the priesthood in mind, a year after leaving, Newman was concerned that if he changed his mind later he would lose those years “for the purposes of any secular pursuit, and have to begin life again.” In accepting him at the Oratory, Newman assured his father he would “take care to advance his education while he is with us, so that he will not have lost even for secular objects so important a portion of his youth”.[16] Stokes taught at the school for several years, but in the end did not become a priest; instead he married and made his career in the Post Office. The point about the story is that it shows the extent to which Newman valued training for the world.

Collaborating with the Laity

It is one thing to form young lay people at school and university, and it is another altogether to form adults by means of collaborating with them in educational projects. What Newman also did in setting up both school and university was to form adult lay persons by working with them and guiding them on how to exercise their rights as well as fulfil their duties: not just advising, but encouraging, showing by example, making demands, and holding himself back from doing what more appropriately done by them.

The usual reasons given for the failure of the Catholic University are the Great Famine; the lack of an endowment or any Government backing; the absence of a charter and hence the ability to grant degrees; the lack of understanding among the Irish over the purpose of a university education; the state of Irish politics at the time and the way the University was drawn into Irish controversies; and the stand-off between the professional classes and the clergy. Newman, however, identified a different root cause.

When in Dublin, he had wanted “to make the laity a substantive power in the University”.[17] Fifteen years after leaving he recalled “the absolute refusal with which my urgent representations were met, that the Catholic laity should be allowed to cooperate with the Archbishops in the work”.[18] He told Bartholomew Woodlock, his successor as rector:

It is essential that the Church should have a living presence and control in the action of the University. But still, till the Bishops leave the University to itself, till the University governs itself, till it is able to act as a free being, it will be but a sickly child, even though it has a charter and an endowment.[19]

His verdict was even clearer when he told Woodlock, the “bishops won’t further the University till they trust educated lay Catholics more”.[20]

The unwillingness of the University authorities to win over the gentry and enlist their support blocked their rightful contribution to its affairs. Not only did the enforced clerical monopoly on its governance stifle its growth, but it distorted what there was of life, by basing it on practices and assumptions that were more suited to the seminary than education of the young man for life in the world. Newman’s attempts to entrust the management of the University finances into their hands was deliberately obstructed. The result was that the educated classes were antagonised: “They were treated like good little boys – were told to shut their eyes and open their mouths, and take what we gave to them – and this they did not relish.”[21]

The University academics were put to one side in 1859 when an Episcopal Board replaced the Senate as the executive authority. Gradually the professors saw the lay characteristics of the University being whittled away. They complained when they found they had not been consulted on negotiations with the British Government over its future; and the scientists among them were upset at the bishops’ neglect of science.

Former students were also excluded from contributing to negotiations about the University’s future, and they voiced their opinion by means of a Memorial to the press. Newman’s response is often quoted to convey the contemporary attitude towards the laity:

As far as I can see, there are ecclesiastics all over Europe, whose policy it is to keep the laity at arms-length; and hence the laity have been disgusted and become infidel, and only two parties exist, both ultras in opposite directions. I came away from Ireland with the distressing fear that there was to be an antagonism, as time went on, between the hierarchy and the educated classes.

You will be doing the greatest possible benefit to the Catholic cause all over the world, if you succeed in making the University a middle station at which clergy and laity can meet, so as to understand and to yield to each other – and from which, as from a common ground, they may act in union upon an age, which is running headlong into infidelity.[22]

The foundation of the Oratory School shows that Newman viewed it as a working partnership with parents, both in its establishment and in its running. Parents were asked to provide the funds and boys, while Newman delegated the running of the School to an Oratorian priest, assisted by a lay staff. Newman ensured there were close contacts with parents over their sons’ education at a time when this was uncommon. The early history of the Oratory School is a fully-worked out example of Newman’s vision of collaboration between laity and clergy. [23]

Further Thoughts

There is a deeper principle at work above – where it was explained that Newman dealt with education in such a way that, in Christianising it, he did not distort it – which is that grace does not destroy nature but builds on it and raises it to a higher level. Therefore there is in principle no contradiction implied in having good secular and good religious education at the same time.

The consistency of Newman’s approach with the Church’s traditional teaching on the essential unity of religious and secular knowledge is brought out when Newman states:

Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education. Where it has been laid as the first stone, and acknowledged as the governing spirit, it will take up into itself, assimilate, and give a character to literature and science.[24]

It is interesting to ask the question, When did Newman ‘see’ all this and gain his understanding of the role of the laity? In a sermon delivered in 1827, he said that “the clergy are not to be considered as controlling education in their own right; but as representatives and instruments of the general body of Christians, for whose good God has appointed them to the office of superintendence”. In this remarkable sermon, which encapsulates so many of his ideas on education, he also said; “It seems indeed to be a fundamental mistake in a system of education, when the instructors of youth in general knowledge are not also their religious instructors.”[25]

Not only did Newman develop these insights by his mid-twenties, but there is a surprising consistency with his actions and writings in later life which show that there was a gradual deepening of his appreciation of the lay condition. However, time does not allow me to show other instances of this rich awareness.

* This text is based on a lecture delivered at Oxford in 2010. It was previously published as “Newman and the formation of the laity”, The Legacy of John Henry Newman, Grandpont Papers 2 (2012): 27–45. The permission to reproduce the paper has been graciously granted by Grandpont Papers to The Newman Rambler: Faith, Culture & the Academy.

Notes:

[1] Historical Sketches, vol. iii (1872), p. 152.

[2] 21 January 1863, Autobiographical Writings (1956), p. 259.

[3] Idea of a University (1873), p. 120.

[4] ‘Intellect, the instrument of religious training’, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (1870; 1898), pp. 13–14.

[5] Idea of a University, p. 145.

[6] ‘Address to the Students on the Opening of the University’, November 1854, My Campaign, pp. 314–18.

[7] Idea of a University, pp. 165–66.

[8] ‘The Tamworth reading room’, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (1872; 1891), p. 266. ‘The Tamworth reading room’ is a collection of satirical letters originally written to The Times in 1841 on the occasion of the opening of a public ‘reading room’ at Tamworth by Sir Robert Peel. Newman wrote them to ridicule the belief that secular knowledge could lead to virtue and knowledge of God; and he challenged the utilitarian attitudes that Peel espoused by arguing that education ought not to be confused with vocational training.

[9] Idea of a University, pp. 146–47.

[10] ‘Letter of the Rector to the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters on the Introduction of Religious Teaching into the Schools of that Faculty’, My Campaign in Ireland (1896), pp. 159−60.

[11] ‘Letter on the Introduction of Religious Teaching’, My Campaign, pp. 161−62.

[12] ‘Letter on the Introduction of Religious Teaching’, My Campaign, pp. 162−64.

[13] The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850 and the manner in which it took place produced a strong no-popery reaction. Protestant outrage was vented from the pulpit and the press, Anti-Catholic demonstrations were mounted across the country, and the allegiance of Catholics to the Crown was questioned publicly.

[14] ‘Letter on the Introduction of Religious Teaching’, My Campaign, pp. 164−65.

[15] ‘Letter on the Introduction of Religious Teaching’, My Campaign, p. 165.

[16]. Newman to C. S. Stokes, 8 February 1864, Letter & Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. xxi, p. 45.

[17] ‘Memorandum about my connection with the Catholic University’, 1870–73, Autobiographical Writings, p. 327.

[18] Newman to Fottrell, 10 December 1873, Letters & Diaries, vol. xxvi, pp. 393–94.

[19] Newman to Woodlock, 4 May 1868, Letters & Diaries, vol. xxiv, p. 46. Emmett Larkin came to the same conclusion, arguing that the real reason why the University was doomed to fail in the long run was because of the refusal to allow lay participation in its governing body (The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870 (1987), p. 178; Roman Catholic Church, 1870–74 (1990), pp. 387–88).

[20] Newman to Woodlock, 4 November 1874, Letters & Diaries, vol. xvii, p. 151.

[21] ‘Memorandum about my connection with the Catholic University’, 1870–73, Autobiographical Writings, p. 328.

[22] Newman to Fottrell, 10 December 1873, Letters & Diaries, vol. xxvi, pp. 393–94.

[23] It is a major theme running through my book, A Catholic Eton? Newman’s Oratory School (2005).

[24] ‘The Tamworth reading room’, Discussions and Arguments, p. 274.

[25]. ‘On general education as connected with the Church and religion’, preached on 19 August 1827, sermon no. 162; reproduced in J. Arthur & G. Nicholls, John Henry Newman, appendix B, pp. 219, 217.