Paul Shrimpton
It is an honour to be asked to speak about St John Henry Newman in the Catholic University Church that he built and where he preached on eight occasions. I am grateful to the Newman Centres at UCD and Notre Dame for inviting me to speak. What I have to say draws largely on the two documents that make up My Campaign in Ireland, Part II: a long memorandum by Newman entitled ‘My Connection with the Catholic University’ (which I will refer to as the Memorandum) and a much longer, related item entitled ‘Extracts from Letters’ (or simply Extracts). Newman went to great lengths to compose these two substantial documents – 829 pages in length, when combined – in the period 1870–73, because he wanted to ensure that his legacy as founder and first rector of the Catholic University would not be distorted. But – somewhat counter-intuitively for us, perhaps – he did not envisage that they would be published.
The university papers and other documents that comprise Part I of My Campaign in Ireland were collected by William Neville, Newman’s secretary from 1875 until his death in 1890, and then his literary executor; he arranged for them to be printed for private circulation in 1896. Neville realised that Part II could not be circulated – not, at least in his lifetime, and probably not for a long time afterwards – because of its sensitive contents. The Memorandum was eventually published in 1956 as part of Newman’s Autobiographical Writings, but the Extracts have never appeared in print.
There are in fact two manuscripts of Newman’s Memorandum. The earlier one, a rough copy begun in November 1870, runs to 155 pages and contains a good deal of material that Newman later omitted. The other manuscript is the fair copy and runs to 172 pages. It is supplemented by the Extracts, 657 pages in length, comprising letters or excerpts of letters, as well as memoranda and journal entries. When Newman copied out the documents that make up the Extracts in 1872–73, he added a running commentary of his own; some of the marginalia have merely explanatory value, but often Newman gives his verdict on events and does so in forthright fashion. The final version of the Memorandum was completed by May 1873 and represents Newman’s considered view of his ‘Irish campaign’, some fifteen years after standing down as the founding rector.
The Memorandum and Extracts describe and illustrate, respectively, Newman’s work in laying the foundations for the Catholic University (1851–54) and acting as its first rector (1854–58); they contain highly sensitive information and reflections about his dealings with priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and even Pope Pius IX. In analysing the causes of his ‘campaign’s’ failure and the frustrations he encountered, Newman is not afraid to criticise those who shared responsibility with him, above all his co-founder Archbishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen. These candid writings show Newman’s toughness and fairness in his dealings with others and reveal how his powers of diplomacy were stretched to the limit as he sought to turn his idea of a university into a reality. While My Campaign in Ireland, Part I presents the public face of Newman’s educational endeavour, Part II provides the behind-the-scenes picture by telling the private reality of Newman’s experiences in Ireland. Criticisms about Newman in his Irish campaign – and there are plenty – will be referred to later.
Re-ordering, revising, and republishing
The fact that Newman went to such trouble composing the Memorandum and copying out the accompanying Extracts raises the question of why he undertook this lengthy task and what purpose he thought it would serve, particularly as they were too sensitive for publication. We know that Newman regularly went through his papers, reordering them and writing summaries or commentaries about them, but this is a task of a completely different order. When he retired from the Catholic University, he hoped to put his papers in order, but he immediately found himself busy answering another educational call, that of establishing a Catholic public school for the sons of his convert friends, as well as advising the editors of The Rambler, a periodical run by Oxford converts. The problems involved in the foundation of the Oratory School were more time-consuming than Newman had anticipated, and he was forced to spend a good deal of his time overseeing the venture. He was also preoccupied with composing his major philosophical work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).
By the late 1860s Newman was busy revising and republishing his already-published works for a uniform edition. By the end of 1872 twenty- three volumes had been completed, and he had plans for eleven more. In some cases, new titles were formed as he amalgamated previously published works, as with the publication of The Idea of a University (1873): the first part comprises nine of the ten discourses that were published (first separately and then together) in 1852; the second half comprises ten lectures he delivered at the Catholic University, which were published in 1859. Besides all this editorial work, Newman was acting as provost of the Birmingham Oratory and taking on his fair share of Oratorian duties; and he continued to deal with friends and others by post or in person. In the midst of all this, he worked on ordering his private papers.
Newman began composing a rough draft of his Memorandum in November 1870. The draft is a messy document: it is without a proper structure as Newman abruptly abandons one line of argument for another. It is clear that he was attempting to write from memory; though he had a small number of letters to help him, he soon realised that he needed to search for the correspondence that would authenticate and fill out his memories. The largest collection came from his friend Robert Ornsby, the former professor of Latin and Greek. In thanking him, Newman wrote: ‘what a capital history I found your letters to be of the University campaign. […] I have read enough of the letters to see how important they are to me. They bring out turning points, which I had quite forgotten.’2 The letters from Ornsby were so important for reconstructing the tale of his Irish campaign that Newman quotes from no fewer than 78 of them in his Extracts. Over a period of two months Newman read through and organised the whole of his Dublin papers – over 2,400 items – a task he accomplished around November 1872.
That same month he wrote down his thoughts about a future biography after his death. He declared – quite unrealistically – that he did not want a biography written about him: he considered that his Anglican life had been covered in his Apologia; but if his life as a Catholic were ‘attempted other men’s toes will be trod upon, and the Life will be answered and a controversy ensue’. Not knowing how long he had to live, Newman explains that he has ‘put into order several large collections of letters […] which are not for publication – either because they are mainly the letters of others […] or because they relate to matters, which cannot be touched upon without getting into controversy’. The latter collections were about four matters: The Rambler and its successor the Home and Foreign Review; the dispute between the Birmingham and London Oratories; the translation of the Scriptures he had been asked to undertake; and the Catholic University. ‘These collections I make with the view of their being used, and only used, in defence — i.e. if enemies make misstatements or impute motives, these collections are authorities to refer to.’ 3 He reiterates this point in 1876, when he writes: ‘There is very little to say, unless at the risk of causing great scandal, controversy, partizanship.’4 Referring to the same four matters, he says,
I wish all statements which reflect on others to be withheld from publication, unless and until reflections are published in any quarter against me […] But such publication is not to be determined on hastily, or without real necessity. […] It is only on great provocation and [for] grave reasons of expedience or propriety that one could consent to reopen the past.5
By far the largest of the four collections on ‘controversial matters’ is Newman’s Dublin papers which contain 2,413 items, divided into 65 packets. Newman was keenly aware of how sensitive some of the letters were, especially four of the packets: about the vice-rector, about Archbishop Cullen, about the sale of this church, and his correspondence with the bishops. Newman draws heavily from these four sub-collections when he writes his Memorandum and he quotes extensively from their contents when compiling the Extracts. There was simply no way that Neville could have considered printing them for private circulation, let alone publishing them, because to reveal Newman’s critique of Pius IX’s ignorance of Ireland and his doubts about the Pope’s practical judgement – his ‘gift of sagacity’ – would have been unthinkable, to say nothing of his extensive comments highlighting the shortcomings of Archbishop Cullen. Nevertheless, the most sensitive parts did appear in print in 1912 in Wilfred Ward’s authorised two- volume biography The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Ward used the Memorandum and Extracts as his main primary source in the chapters on the Catholic University.6 Neville would have been dismayed in the extreme if he had lived to see Ward’s biography. So how did this come about?
The correspondence between the Birmingham Oratory and Ward about this biography shows that Neville was wary about Ward and how he would deal with the archival material that was loaned to him and did all he could to frustrate him.7 But after Neville’s death in 1905, it seems that Ward had a freer hand in how he could use Newman’s memoranda and correspondence, and that he felt at liberty to ignore the caveats that Newman had stipulated or else was unaware of them. Hence it was that Newman’s ‘side of the story’ appeared first, exactly the opposite of what he had anticipated: effectively, Newman’s defence of his actions was made public before the criticisms that they were intended to counter. With the passage of time, it was inevitable that Newman’s wishes would be set aside and that all his letters would eventually be published, but to put such sensitive papers in the public domain twenty- two years after Newman’s death was bound to trigger a reaction. It did.
The Memorandum and Extracts bring out several characteristics of Newman. On the practical level they show the man of action and his psychological toughness as he set up and then ran a university almost singlehandedly; and how he attempted to navigate his way through a complex political and social situation in order to protect the University from the controversies raging in Ireland. The documents also illustrate the way in which he liked to work with the educated laity – and this is the major point I wish to develop. The Catholic University was one of two large educational projects that Newman undertook – the other being the establishment of the Oratory School in Birmingham – and he did so by working closely with lay Catholics. He wanted the laity to become an active force both within the Church and in the world, and so he set himself to form the next generation of lay faithful by giving them an education ‘to fit men for this world while it trained them for another’.8 This was a task that he saw himself called to undertake after becoming a Catholic in 1845; it is illustrated by his words, that ‘from first to last, education, in this large sense of the word, has been my line’.9
Newman’s relations with Cullen
In dealing with the personality clash at the heart of Newman’s Irish ‘campaign’, it should be pointed out that in his Memorandum Newman outlines what he thought were the key differences between Cullen and himself, and even lists Cullen’s complaints about himself. Interestingly, he overlooks one of Cullen’s chief concerns: Newman’s approach to discipline. Throughout Newman’s rectorate a steady stream of complaints from Cullen reached Rome: Newman was too lax; there was no fixed time for students to study; he allowed them to smoke and play billiards, to attend dances, go to the theatre or watch rowing matches; he only seemed to have Oxford in mind and was introducing practices that would be dangerous in a country like Ireland. Cullen’s anxiety about the situation was real enough, indeed so acute that it contributed to a nervous breakdown in November 1855.
Now, it should be said that Cullen was able to imagine a university along Newman’s lines, at least as regards the content and scope of its liberal arts teaching; but as regards its administration and discipline, his mind was steeped in the workings of the major seminary. This was in fact true, not only of most Irish bishops, but of the episcopate worldwide: they could not envision a university that would not include clerical control of administration and discipline. But while Cullen was convinced that control of education should lie with the clergy, Newman saw the task as one that should be undertaken with the active cooperation of the laity. In a sermon preached in Oxford in August 1827, Newman maintained 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’.10 This fundamental difference of approach made it impossible for Cullen and Newman to act as truly collaborative partners.
On a practical level Newman had to contend with the high-handed attitude of Cullen, who acted as if he were above the law and exempt from the normal rules of engagement. Cullen thought nothing of flouting the university statutes to make appointments which were, according to the statutes, Newman’s prerogative. But what really irritated Newman was the way he appointed key people at the University, such as the vice-rector, without so much as consulting him – which he was supposed to do by the statutes. Cullen also indulged in nepotism, dismissing Newman’s choices and putting in his own men instead.11 His choice of the priest Michael Flannery as the first dean of St Patrick’s House – which occupied the upper two storeys of 86 Stephen’s Green – was to give Newman countless problems, as Flannery was simply not up to managing students. It was this sort of ‘clerical jobbing’ that the laity disliked. Newman devotes a whole section – there were nine – of the Memorandum to his differences with Cullen over the selection of a vice-rector and cites some sixty letters in the Extracts as evidence. It was one of those cases, he relates, when Cullen tried to treat him ‘not as an equal, but as one of his subjects’.12
Alongside this clericalism – and, to some extent, feeding off it – there existed a strong contrary tendency among some of the educated Catholic laity. It was particularly prevalent among those in the rising professions in Dublin, Cork and other larger towns and was characterised by a marked tendency to place professional promotion and social recognition above allegiance to the Church. These laymen were contemptuously referred to as ‘Castle Catholics’. As early as 1848 Archbishop MacHale was convinced that a Catholic university would fail because ‘Our high Catholics are rotten to the heart’s core, and our middle Catholics are fast corrupting in the same manner, by love of self and place.’13 In a pen-portrait of the Castle Catholics intended for ears in Rome, the Dublin priest Peter Cooper described this respectable class as ‘conceited, ill-informed, and merely subservient to our heretical Government. It lives on the smiles of Court and on the hopes of Court preferment for its own. It is an eminently venal class.’ What makes this letter particularly interesting is that it comes from a priest who acted as secretary to the Catholic University before it opened and who understood the need for the appointment of lay professors.
Newman was not unaware of the lay–clerical divide. Before composing his university discourses, his friend Robert Ornsby had provided him with a description of Irish Catholics. Ornsby explained that Catholic ‘society’ in Dublin was small and on the whole pro-Castle, and that the general mind of this class was unconsciously imbued with Protestant notions ‘caused by the long habit of conciliating Protestants by softening their faith and pretending liberality’.14 As for the aristocratic class in Ireland, Newman was surprised by the lukewarm responses of those who would not even give their names as patrons to the Catholic University; other than converts, not a single peer would lend his name. (In their defence, as one of them explained, having previously supported the Queen’s Colleges, they felt could not give their names to the Catholic University without appearing inconsistent.)
At the time, Catholic – and indeed Anglican and Church of Ireland – education reflected clerical monopoly and control: in all sorts of ways, religious education was effectively purchased at the expense of secular education, in the sense of downplaying or even distorting the provision of a preparation for life in the world. This was perhaps inevitable in colleges where both lay and ‘church’ boys (those intended for the priesthood) were educated together. But the Catholic University was established, as Newman insists, ‘mainly for the sake of the laity’. His approach represented a shift in emphasis; his concern to form Catholics ready to face the 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 and the professions.
Newman’s idea of a university
The principles behind Newman’s line of action are conveyed in the university discourses. In arguing that the end of a university was intellectual culture, he was defending the university against those who burdened it with some other end, such as practical utility on the one hand, or religious training and morality on the other. Newman was faced by two dominant outlooks, each of which showed a marked tendency to use the university as a vehicle for something other than its primary end, and on this account tended to distort the education that it imparted. The champions of ‘useful knowledge’ held that education alone was needed to make the public moral, and that religious teaching was thereby redundant; ecclesiastics, on the other hand, had a tendency to be interested in education only insofar as it ministered to religion and the Church. Newman dealt with both tendencies by defending what he maintained was the proper business of a university:
Its direct business is not to steel the soul against temptation or to console it in affliction, any more than to set the loom in motion, or to direct the steam carriage; be it ever so much the means or the condition of both material and moral advancement, still, taken by and in itself, it as little mends our hearts as it improves our temporal circumstances.15
Although Newman was able to mould the University along his own lines, he was entirely constrained in one crucia l aspect: the manner in which the funds were collected. Since the hierarchy organised the annual collections for the University throughout Ireland, as well as the collections overseas, Newman might have been relieved that this was one task he did not need to worry about; but he came to realise that this manner of proceeding involved a fundamental contradiction. The collections were organised by the clergy, while the University was for the laity; besides, most of the contributions came from the poor, while the University was only likely to attract the better off, at least initially. Newman expressed his misgivings in a letter to the editor of The Rambler:
while the priests collect the money, [the University] will scarcely be a lay institution. […] As it is mainly for the good of the laity, the laity ought to be the formal movers in the matter. The heads of the Irish Church almost ignore the laity, for the laity do very little; the Irish gentry less than England.’
In his opinion, ‘you cannot have a University, till the gentlemen take it up’.16 Newman realised that the laity had been side-lined; they were expected to contribute financially to the University and send their sons but nothing more; their views were not to be taken into account as the hierarchy would organise everything. Peter Cooper, the first secretary of the University, was acutely aware that ‘The public does not give us priests credit for ability to fit young men for the world’, and he suggested that pious laymen should be appointed instead – but his was a lone clerical voice. The voice of the educated laity, on the other hand, is a major theme in both the Memorandum and the Extracts.
All along Newman had wanted ‘to make the laity a substantive power in the University’.17 He had been confirmed in his thinking by reports he received, that ‘many of the higher classes of laity would co-operate with the University, were it not for the utter want of confidence they felt in the management of it by the Bishops alone’.18 He saw the Catholic University as a means to heal the breach between the educated laity and the higher clergy.
A University, unlike a Seminary or Diocesan College is pre- eminently an institution for the laity, and it may be advantageously used as a means of bringing the educated classes under the just and beneficial influence of the Church. The Bishops ought to be supreme, as the sanctioning, controlling power, and the ultimate authority; but, as the Directors of a bank appoint a Manager […] so, I conceive, will their Lordships best provide for the interests of the University, and conciliate the laity, if in the management of the current expenses they employ one or two able and zealous men of business to be their Managers.19
Entrusting the financial matters of the University to laymen, whose sons were to be educated there, made sound financial sense, and besides ‘would interest them in the University more than anything else’. Instead, Newman observed, ‘They were treated like good little boys – were told to shut their eyes and open their mouths, and take what we give to them – and this they did not relish.’20
Newman’s attempts to entrust the financial management of the University to laymen were deliberately and repeatedly obstructed by Cullen, who urged him instead to consult priests rather than laymen, even on practical matters, and he recommended the names of priests who were ‘well versed in the management of temporal affairs’ and ‘intimately acquainted with the state of public feeling in Ireland’.21 A layman on the Catholic University Committee complained to Newman that ‘the tendency is to make the University a close borough of clergymen and a clerical College, which was neither the intention or wish of those who have encountered much obloquy in trying to establish it’.22 As for Newman, he did not ‘consider ecclesiastics were the best advisers in a great lay undertaking’.23 Meanwhile, little use was made of energetic and able laymen on the Catholic University Committee such as Myles O’Reilly, a prominent educationalist and politician, or Charles Bianconi, a successful businessman, mayor of Clonmel and founder of Ireland’s public transport system. Cullen even managed to thwart Newman’s scheme for compiling a list of lay patrons for the University. Newman told his successor Bartholomew Woodlock that the ‘bishops won’t further the University till they trust educated lay Catholics more’.24
Like Newman, Woodlock was keen to involve the laity in the university, but he met with persistent opposition from Cullen, who managed to out- manoeuvre him throughout his rectorate. When negotiating with the British government for a charter for the University, Cullen ignored not only the laity in general but the professoriate of the University and its ex-alumni. In November 1873 former students, with the support of current students, published a Memorial addressed to the Episcopal Board of the University asking for their voice to be heard. In the final paragraph they declared that they had been encouraged by Newman’s assertion that, ‘from the co- operation of the Students, with the Superiors of the University, in shaping its future, he looked forward to the creation of a “permanent community of feelings and interest on educational and religious subjects, which it will doubtless foster among the educated laity of the country in after life”.’25 Newman was delighted, and wrote the author a stirring reply.
One of the chief evils which I deplored in the management of the affairs of the University twenty years ago when I was in Ireland, was 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.
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 learn 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.26
Though the failure of the Catholic University has generally been attributed to the lack of a charter (and hence of publicly recognised degrees) and an endowment, Newman thought that, at root, the real problem had more to do with clerical control. This is evident from a letter he wrote to Woodlock in 1868:
… 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.27
Criticisms of Newman and his Irish campaign
Biographers of Newman who rely solely on Newman’s accounts of events when dealing with the Newman–Cullen relationship have rightly been criticised for ignoring the complex situation that Cullen had to grapple with in his attempts to reform the Church in Ireland at a time of endemic clerical infighting. But, equally, those intent on promoting Cullen’s reputation have often done so at the expense of Newman’s. While proclaiming even- handedness, the historian Colin Barr protests that the view of Cullen that emerges in Newman’s Memorandum is ‘an essentially hostile one. [Newman] believed that Cullen treated him poorly throughout his time in Dublin and made an already difficult job nearly impossible’.28 Barr also blames Fergal McGrath, the author of Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (1951), for perpetuating this ‘hostile portrait of Irish obscurantism that has become the popularly accepted one’.29 As Barr has written at length on Newman and Cullen, it is worth reflecting on some of his criticisms.
Barr notes that the Memorandum was written at a time when Newman felt under-appreciated and marginalised in the Church. He argues that Newman’s insistence on employing Englishmen at the University was due to ‘a certain distaste for the Irish’; his ‘numerous derogatory comments’ about them show that, ‘In modern terms Newman unquestionably harboured “racist” views towards the Irish’; this explains why Newman made so few friends in Ireland, for he ‘remained a proud and somewhat insular Englishman all his life’. Newman’s dealings with the Young Irelanders were naïve; to maintain friendly relations with Frederick Lucas and to appoint men like John Pigot could only have been interpreted by Cullen as a ‘calculated snub’. Though Newman claimed he wished to remain neutral in the Irish Church’s internal battles, ‘it is difficult to credit that he truly believed that he would be successful’; for Newman to aspire to neutrality was ‘simply ludicrous’, and possibly the result of his ‘own bitterness at the archbishop’s shabby treatment of him’. Newman was ‘never able or willing to commit his time or energy totally’ to either the Catholic University or to the Birmingham Oratory; his remark about his appointment as Rector and the archbishop’s expectation that he would leave Birmingham – ‘if that was his judgment, he ought not have asked me to be Rector’ – was, says Barr, ‘truthful but disingenuous’. In arranging his resignation of the rectorship, ‘all Newman’s old bitterness over how he had been treated came welling up the surface’.30 Like other critics of Newman, Barr misunderstands the purpose of the Memorandum. Newman uses it, Barr says, to blame Cullen for the failure of the University and sought to ‘set out this case at length’: ‘Cullen had obstructed him at every turn, treated him appallingly, starved him of money, and wrecked the university, too narrow-minded to understand what Newman had aimed at’.31 But, as I have already explained, Newman did not compose the Memorandum for publication; it was to be used solely to defend himself, and then ‘only on great provocation and grave reasons of expedience or propriety’. In the early 1870s Newman assumed he had not long to live and feared that after his death others would produce erroneous accounts of his Irish campaign. But something very different happened. Cullen died long before he did, and Patrick Moran, who was commissioned to write a life of his uncle, never finished it; nor was his work taken up by others. Instead, Wilfred Ward’s life appeared.
Ward’s two-volume biography is problematic: it is strong on Newman’s participation in the intellectual battles of the day, but weak on his educational ventures in Dublin and Birmingham. His almost exclusive reliance on the Memorandum and his disregard of any correspondence that did not feature in the Extracts gave him a very partial view of his subject; it meant that he focused on the difficulties and misunderstandings rather than the normal routine of university life. Thus Ward speaks of the hopelessness of the Catholic University from the outset, and about how Newman reflected on it bitterly in the 1870s. The University years, he claims, did much to break Newman’s spirit, as he was not strong enough in temperament to handle the problems that he encountered; the accumulating trials led to the feeling of crushing disappointment. Overwhelmed by sadness, even bitterness, he became deeply despondent;32 but then, as a singularly sensitive spirit embarking on an impossible endeavour, he was ill-suited to the task. Ward’s picture could only have emerged by neglecting most of Newman’s Dublin correspondence and dwelling solely on the problems that were analysed at length in the Memorandum. He has, rightly, been criticised for providing a distorted image of Newman’s personality during his Dublin days and for exaggerating the sensitive side of his nature, as if he were ‘hyper-sensitive’.33 Significantly, those who perhaps knew Newman best in day-to-day life, the Birmingham Oratorians, also disliked Ward’s stress on the suffering side of Newman’s personality, and felt that the picture that emerged was not that of ‘the natural, energetic, humorous and practical man they had known’. This would explain why the Birmingham Oratory refused Ward permission to bring out a projected third volume of the Life, comprising letters only.34
Relying on limited sources, Ward misrepresented the educational views of both Cullen and Newman, exaggerating the differences between them. On one page, besides describing Cullen’s aspiration that the University might become ‘a new centre for enforcing ecclesiastical rule in Ireland’, he makes three other inaccurate claims: that Newman preferred laymen to priests as professors; that he regarded the nationalists ‘with special favour’; and that he intended the ‘quasi-seminary’ living favoured by Cullen ‘to be set aside for the free habits of Oxford undergraduates’.35 Without qualification, none of these statements are true. They are the origin of the claim in Cuthbert Butler’s life of Bishop William Ullathorne that all Cullen and the Irish bishops wanted was a ‘glorified Seminary for the laity’,36 a charge repeated by David Newsome in his Convert Cardinals.37 Actually, during Newman’s rectorate it was the Protestant press which mocked the Catholic University by calling it Dr Cullen’s College, the Seminary in Stephen’s Green, and the Ultramontane Establishment.38
While there is much to admire in Ward’s biography, its legacy and the controversy it provoked can be seen in the polarised Cullen–Newman debate. The lawyer and architectural historian Constantine Curran – who attended lectures at the Catholic University with James Joyce – was the first to react to its appearance in 1912. In championing Cullen’s cause and arguing for his side of the story to be told, he blamed Newman for the ‘rigidity and unpractical nature’ of his ideas and spoke of him entering a ‘confusing welter of cross-currents and conflicting purposes […] with a temperament admirably adapted to misunderstand’. He asserted that Newman ‘never seriously gave himself to a thorough objective consideration of what Ireland wanted in the matter of a University’, and that the main reason for his resignation was his ‘sense of discouragement and impending failure’.39 Thus Curran began the Irish, anti-Newman narrative that emerged of a rector who was ‘obsessed with Oxford, ignorant of Ireland, and temperamentally unsuited to the task’.40
Terence Corcoran, an ardent cultural and political nationalist who taught at UCD for many years, added his eccentric contribution to the anti-Newman narrative. He attacked Newman’s educational ideas in his introduction to two collections of Newman’s university discourses which were published in 1929 and 1930 for the use of UCD students. Interestingly, he criticises Ward’s reliance on Newman’s papers and correspondence, arguing that the ‘real Newman is not to be found in the despondencies, the petulancies, the recurrent suspicions, the besetting subjectivities which are the staple of these exorbitant registers of specially sensitive temperament’, but rather in the ‘real record of his Irish achievement’.41 The academic and Sinn Féin politician William Stockley brought a different brand of Irish nationalism to bear on Ward’s account of Newman. He wrote approvingly of the Young Ireland movement and of Newman’s attempts to involve the laity in the University, arguing that ‘Cullen’s party […] failed its rector, or misunderstood him’.42
Corcoran’s views were later championed by Alan McClelland in his five chapters on the Catholic University in English Roman Catholics and Higher Education 1830–1903. Colin Barr – to give him credit – dismisses McClelland’s contribution as a ‘sustained and bitter attack on Newman’,43 yet he regurgitates several of McClelland’s distortions, such as the claim ‘that Newman either could not or would not grasp that he was Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland’,44 and that the Memorandum was written to pin the blame on others for the failure of the University. Other criticisms of Newman’s years in Ireland usually dwell on his supposed ‘supersensitive character’,45 his poor administrative skills, his propensity to overspend,46 his obsession with Oxford University and its customs, his reluctance to get to grips with the political situation in Ireland,47 and his failure to address the needs of Ireland at the time.48 He was incompetent, touchy, stubborn, and ‘failed to maintain a working relationship with his patron’; these character flaws provide a compelling explanation for the University’s failure.49
Some of these criticisms persist because of ignorance of the full story, others because deeds and letters are open to various interpretations. I flag up all these criticisms in my long introduction in My Campaign, Part II in order to alert the reader to the counter-arguments to Newman’s persuasive prose. But I don’t answer them, as Newman does so himself in his Memorandum and in the correspondence in the Extracts. He can stand on his own two feet. Only on occasions do I have to come to his aid in a footnote, as in the instance of the charge of racism. Not living in a politically correct age, Newman readily used terms like Paddy and Yankee in his letters. When the educational reformer Oscar Browning stayed overnight at the Birmingham Oratory in 1866, he was ‘struck with Newman’s marvellous copiousness of language and his abundant fluency, also with his use of harmless worldly slang, that he might not appear priggish or monkish’.50
I also provide some commentary on the accusation of obstinacy in Newman’s dealings with Cullen. What Newman was not willing to budge on was the core ideas of his educational scheme, when it had been agreed upon at the outset that he should be granted a generous liberty in setting up the University; he refused to be cowed into submission by Cullen, unlike the clerics around the archbishop. By the end of the third academic year, Newman’s frustration was evident:
Dr Cullen has no notion at all of treating me with any confidence. He grants me nothing […] He has treated me from the first like a scrub, and you will see he will never do otherwise. […] he has never done any thing but take my letters, crumple them up, put them into the fire and write no answer. And so with ever thing else.51
A year later, before visiting Dublin for the last time, he summed up his feelings:
Dr Cullen is the only one of whom I have cause to complain […] He has been, and is, ruining us. He will do nothing, let us do nothing; he will give no answers to questions, or imply he grants and then pull you up when you have acted. He is perfectly impracticable.52
Ornsby was one of Newman’s most trusted colleagues at the University and had been privy to Newman’s frustrations. Attuned to all that was going on in the University, he offered Newman sympathy at the way he was treated by Cullen.
Your unsparing exertions, in the whole idea and scheme, and each point of it, worked out step by step with nothing to blame yourself for, statutes, lectures, classes, sermons, the church and all its cost and trouble, with the provoking treatment you have sustained, and all this merely the visible points of a whole world of business and vexation. I can only wonder you have not broken down under it long before.53
Irishmen, such as the lawyer John O’Hagan, were also aware of how shabbily Newman had been treated and felt ashamed at proceedings.
I fear your associations in connexion with Ireland will dwell very unpleasantly in my memory, as a country that never understood or appreciated you. Well – so far as regards the Irish Professors in the University (I speak of those whom I know as laymen) it is quite the opposite. We have always felt that you only wanted power and freedom of action to make the institution march. It is painful not to be able to do anything beyond expressing sincere sympathy.54
Newman annotated this letter in November 1872 with a pungent comment: ‘It was not Ireland that was unkind to me. The same thing would have happened in England or France. It was the clergy, moved as they are in automaton fashion from the camarilla55 at Rome.’ He spoke equally plainly in 1859 when he heard that a move was afoot to move the University away from the Louvain model; if this happened, it would become ‘simply priest-ridden’, meaning ‘men who do not know literature and science will have the direction and the teaching’ and as a result the professors ‘will be simply scrubs’.56
As these snippets show, Newman comes alive in his letters. Reading them is the nearest we can get to listening to his conversation. Newman believed that ‘a man’s life lies in his letters’. As he told his sister Jemima, ‘Biographers varnish; they assign motives; they conjecture feelings; they interpret Lord Burleigh’s nods; they palliate or defend.’57 Many consider Newman’s sermons to be his finest compositions, and others recommend the Apologia, the Idea, or the Grammar; but there is little doubt that it is in his letters that we come closest to meeting the man himself. We see this in the Extracts, which bring to life the founding rector: dealing with people and problems, encouraging and inspiring those around him, resolving difficulties and clashes of personality, and elaborating on his grand ideal in the process. The letters from his co-workers at the Catholic University show that he had their respect and confidence, and not infrequently their affection – and this included the Irishmen among them as much as the Oxbridge converts. These men knew from personal experience how much weight he had to shoulder and how little support he received from others.
Newman vs. Cullen?
I would like to make one final point. The reader of Newman’s Memorandum and Extracts need not feel called upon to decide between Cullen and Newman, for both men made impressive contributions to the life of the Church, and both lived holy lives and sought to spread the Christian message according to their different talents and mindsets. Despite all their differences they remained respectful and gracious to each other after Newman’s return to England. When Newman’s sermon ‘The Pope and the Revolution’ (7 October 1866) had been denounced to the Index of Prohibited Books, Pius IX approached Cullen for advice on how to proceed: Cullen assured him of Newman’s orthodoxy. In his turn, Newman, in his Address to the Rector and Senate of the Catholic University of Ireland on 28 October 1879, commented, ‘I ever had the greatest, the truest reverence for the good Cardinal Cullen. I used to say of him that his countenance had a light upon it which made me feel as if, during his many years at Rome, all the saints of the Holy City had been looking into it and he into theirs.’58 Rather than attribute the failure of the Catholic University to either of these energetic men, it might be more appropriate to point the finger of blame at the wealthier and professional classes, both in England and Ireland, for their apathy: they had not bothered to support their university with patronage, or money, or even by sending their sons to it. Even the laymen most closely involved with the University failed to support it with their sons.
Dr Paul Shrimpton teaches at Magdalen College School, Oxford. He has published extensively on the subject of Newman and education, most notably The ‘Making of Men’: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin (2014) and a two-volume critical edition of Newman’s Catholic University papers, My Campaign in Ireland, Parts I & II (2021 & 2022), all published by Gracewing.
Notes
1 This paper was the 2023 annual Newman lecture of the Newman Centre for the Study of Religions,
a Recognised Research Centre of University College Dublin, based in UCD School of Philosophy. It
was delivered on 26 October 2023 in the Catholic University Church, Dublin.
2 Newman to Ornsby, 9 September 1872, Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (abbreviated to
LD) ed. C. S. Dessain et al. (London: T. Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–2008),
vol. xxvi, p. 164.
3 Newman, ‘Memorandum on Future Biography’, 15 November 1872, LD xxvi, pp. 200–1.
4 Newman, ‘Memorandum as to a Biography’, 24 July 1876, LD xxviii, p. 92.
5 Newman, addition (dated 22 October 1876) to the memorandum of 24 July 1876, LD xxviii, p. 93.
6 Ward, The Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), vol. i,
p. 320.
7 Neville to Ward, University of St Andrews, Special Collections, Papers of the Catholic Modernists
(RCMO), Papers of Wilfred Ward, ‘Life of Cardinal Newman’, 38347 /VII/219/8, 9, 14, 16, 17.
8 Newman, ‘Schools of Charlemagne: Paris’, Historical Sketches (1872; London: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1909), vol. iii, p. 152.
9 Newman, Journal entry, 21 January 1863, Autobiographical Writings, ed. H. Tristram (London:
Sheed & Ward, 1956), p. 259.
10 Newman, ‘On General Education as Connected with the Church and Religion’, John Henry
Newman: Sermons, 1824–1843, ed. F. J. McGrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. v,
pp. 426–7.
11 For an account of Cullen’s habit of appointing relatives and others to colonial sees, see C. Barr,
‘“Imperium in Imperio”: Irish episcopal imperialism in the nineteenth century’, The English
Historical Review 123:502 (June 2008).
12 Newman, ‘Memorandum’, My Campaign in Ireland, Part II, ed. P. Shrimpton (Leominster:
Gracewing, 2022), p. 46.
13 Quoted in W. F. P. Stockley, Newman, Education and Ireland (London: Sands & Co., [1933]), pp.
101–2.
14 Ornsby to Newman, 16 April 1852, quoted in F. McGrath, Newman’s University: Idea and Reality
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951), p. 145.
15 Newman, ‘Knowledge its Own End’, Idea of a University (1873; London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1907), p. 120.
16 Newman to John Moore Capes, 1 February 1857, LD xvii, pp. 513–14.
17 Newman, ‘Memorandum’, My Campaign, Part II, p. 110.
18 Scratton to Newman, 15 October 1855, My Campaign, Part II, p. 236.
19 Newman to MacNamara, 29 July 1856, LD xvii, p. 337.
20 Newman, ‘Memorandum’, My Campaign, Part II, p. 111.
21 Cullen to Newman, 28 September & 7 October 1854, My Campaign, Part II, pp. 196, 207.
22 J. O’Ferrall to Newman, 17 December 1854, My Campaign, Part II, p. 211.
23 Newman, ‘Memorandum’, My Campaign, Part II, p. 30.
24 Newman to Woodlock, 4 November 1874, LD xvii, p. 151.
25 LD xxvi, p. 394n.
26 Newman to Fottrell, 10 December 1873, LD xxvi, p. 394.
27 Newman to Woodlock, 4 March 1868, LD xxiv, p. 46. Emmet 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 (Consolidation of the Roman Catholic
Church, p. 178; The Roman Catholic Church and the Home Rule Movement in Ireland, 1870–1874
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 387–8).
28 Barr, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865
(Leominster: Gracewing, 2003), p. 6.
29 ‘Historical (Mis)understandings of The Idea of a University’, Receptions of Newman, ed. F. D.
Aquino & B. J. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 129.
30 Barr, Paul Cullen, pp. 92, 103, 141, 149, 153, 159.
31 Barr, ‘Ireland’, Oxford Handbook on John Henry Newman, ed. F. D. Aquino & B. J. King (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 67. In a separate piece, Barr comments that the Memorandum
Studies • volume 113 • number 449 69
Newman’s ‘Campaign in Ireland’: Frustration and ‘Failure’
‘amounted to an extended and detailed indictment of Cullen’s conduct and placed much of the blame
for both the university’s failure and Newman’s own departure upon it’ (‘Historical’, p. 132).
32 Ward, Life of Newman, i, pp. 373, 386–9.
33 C. Butler, The Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne, 1806−1889, vol. ii (London: Burns, Oates &
Washbourne, 1926), p. 312n. See also Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), p. vii.
34 C. S. Dessain, LD xi, pp. xix–xx.
35 Ward, Life of Newman, i, p. 369.
36 Butler, Life of Ullathorne, ii, pp. 312−13n.
37 David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning
(London: John Murray, 1983), p. 217.
38 Newman, My Campaign in Ireland, Part I, ed. W. P. Neville (privately printed, 1896); ed. P.
Shrimpton (Leominster: Gracewing, 2021), p. 502.
39 ‘Cardinal Newman in Ireland: a Note on Three Chapters of Ward’s Life of Newman’, The Irish
Review 2:13 (March 1912), pp. 45–50.
40 Barr, ‘Historical’, p. 126.
41 Newman’s Theory of Liberal Education: The Discourses on Liberal Knowledge, ed. T. Corcoran
(Dublin: UCD, 1930), p. ix. Corcoran asserted as ‘the plain truth that Newman was the
psychological victim of his own diaries and of his multiform personal correspondence’ (ibid.).
42 W. F. P. Stockley, Newman, Education and Ireland (London: Sands & Co., [1933]), p. 109.
43 Barr, Paul Cullen, p. 7.
44 Barr, ‘Ireland’, p. 67.
45 A. O’Rahilly, ‘The Irish University Question, V – the Catholic University of Ireland’, Studies. An
Irish Quarterly Review 50:200 (winter 1961), p. 359.
46 Barr, ‘Ireland’, pp. 65, 67.
47 Newsome, Convert Cardinals, p. 216.
48 Corcoran, Newman’s Theory of Liberal Education, pp. xxxxv–xxxxvii.
49 Barr, ‘Ireland’, pp. 48, 67.
50 Browning, Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere (London: John Lane, 1910),
p. 269.
51 Newman to Ornsby, 17 October 1858, My Campaign, Part II, p. 398.
52 Newman to Monsell, 18 October 1858, LD xviii, p. 490.
53 Ornsby to Newman, 8 January 1858, My Campaign, Part II, p. 337.
54 O’Hagan to Newman, 9 October 1858, LD xviii, p. 483, fn. 1. Newman replied on 11 October that
he had received ‘nothing but kindness and attention’ from everyone in Ireland, other than Cullen and
MacHale (LD xviii, p. 483).
55 The Italian term ‘camarilla’ was widely used in the nineteenth century to refer to a small unofficial
group wielding power behind the scenes.
56 Newman to Ornsby, 18 May 1859, My Campaign, Part II, p. 461.
57 18 May 1863, LD xx, p. 443.
58 28 October 1879, My Campaign, Part I, p. 526.
