Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (26 page)

CHAPTER 10
‌‌

Oratory

‘Catholicism is a deep matter – you cannot take it up in a teacup.’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO J. SPENCER NORTHCOTE, 8 FEBRUARY 1846

By New Year of 1848, back in England, Newman was seeking a suitable site for his Oratory in Birmingham. The fledgling community included five fellow priests – Fathers St John, Dalgairns, Penny, Coffin, and Stanton; but an opportunity had now arisen to join forces with Wilfrid Faber’s recently founded group, known as Brothers of the Will of God, or Wilfridians. Faber, who was of the generation of Oxford students that had idolised Newman during his Oriel days, was a self-willed egotist, but he nourished a romantic ideal of obedience to a religious superior and spiritual director. As Faber would put it later, he wanted to be ‘a cadaver in the Superior’s hands’.
¹
Newman at first acquiesced and welcomed Faber in. The decision would give rise to personality clashes, as well as problems over finance, property and authority. In the final analysis, the conflict would reveal profound differences about the nature of spiritual life and Catholicism in England in the nineteenth century.

Newman’s intent was to find a property that would house the expanded community. But Faber and his Wilfridians had recently settled in a rural location at Cotton Hall (renamed St Wilfrid’s) in North Staffordshire, where he had made commitments to his generous patron, John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and was already successfully converting the local population to Catholicism. Faber had somehow hoped that Newman and his group would make St Wilfrid’s the motherhouse of the English Oratorians, or at least keep the house going as a country retreat, or novitiate. Newman knew that St Wilfrid’s would not do as a principal residence since the Oratorian ideal was to work and live in cities. St Wilfrid’s moreover would be too expensive to maintain in addition to two city houses. Nevertheless, while preparing a Birmingham location, Newman and his five priests came to live at St Wilfrid’s as a temporary measure in October of 1848.

St Wilfrid’s was situated on the side of a remote glen below the North Staffordshire moors. The main house was a fine regency mansion facing out across steep woods. The Earl of Shrewsbury, with help of the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, had been attempting to create a romantic medieval enclave in the

surrounding district – a sort of religious theme park along the valley of the River Churnet. At one end Pugin was constructing a bizarre family seat for the Shrewsburys – part gothic folly, part residence, with galleries and banqueting halls, known as Alton Towers (later to become a twentieth century secular theme park). On a cliff above a neighbouring ravine, with the River Churnet below, Pugin had designed a Rhineland-style ‘castle’ known as St John’s. At the other end of the valley, on the site of Cotton Hall, the Earl had envisaged a picturesque monastery, and had made funds available for a suitable church and extensions to house the Wilfridians.

Faber, Lord Shrewsbury and Pugin had been busy. In Cotton village arose a free and, crucially, gothic elementary Catholic school; in the local town of Cheadle, a church decorated with brilliant Medieval-style colours and an elaborate rood screen. Newman attended the dedication of the church, and would four years later let slip his true early impressions of some of his new co-religionists, and the sharp side of his tongue. ‘Dr Gillis … at the opening of Cheadle Church he preached a sermon half screaming and bellowing, half whining – and Lady Dormer and other ladies of quality were in raptures with it. The same is seen in a parallel way in the after dinner conversation of priests, and the recreations of nuns. They are to be cheerful and they have
nothing
to be cheerful upon. So they are boisterous or silly.’
2

At St Wilfrid’s, Pugin had built a curious twisting cloister with leaded windows, a romantic sacristy, and the foundations of a neo-gothic church. Faber had designed for his Wilfridians flowing soutanes and cloaks; on their breasts were sewn in red the letters VD, Volente Deo, by the will of God. Rosaries and crucifixes dangled from deep waist bands. Pugin’s idea, promoted in his best-selling book
Contrasts
, ordained that gothic architecture and Italianate Catholic emblems and banners made people better, happier, more religious – more
Roman Catholic
. Faber’s idea of pre-Reformation Catholicism thrived entirely in his imagination; and central to his Catholicism was a keen devotion to the Virgin Mary (whom he liked to address as ‘Mamma’).

In keeping with his enthusiasm for Southern European piety, Faber had embarked on an edition of the
Lives of the Saints
, based on a translation of the more extravagant accounts of Latin saints. One of the hagiographies that drew vehement criticism was the life of Saint Rose of Lima, a seventeenth-century Peruvian saint, famous for her fasts and self-mutilation – she disfigured her face, which in babyhood had transformed itself miraculously into a rose bloom, in repudiation of her own beauty. Newman, as Faber’s new superior, supported the series, but his doubts about the project were palpable. He submitted the texts to Bishop William Ullathorne, who had succeeded Wiseman as Vicar Apostolic of the Midlands. Ullathorne, in the event, supported the publication, but with considerable unease.

Ullathorne, a former Benedictine Abbot, in common with other Catholic bishops in England at the time, was increasingly embroiled in tensions between different Catholic factions, especially recent converts like Faber and the so-called ‘Old Catholics’, whose Catholicism had endured, despite persecution and hardship, ever since the Reformation. The new converts believed that the Old Catholics were a snobbish, self-satisfied, stagnant group, resistant to evangelis-ing zeal. The Old Catholics, meanwhile, despised the newcomers for their extravagant devotions and excessive enthusiasm.

Newman, taking a middle position, did not see eye to eye with Faber on ways of prayer and styles of asceticism. Faber’s group was attached to indulgences, saint’s relics, imagined struggles with the devil. On one occasion Faber practised the rite of exorcism over a recalcitrant Irish lay brother. There were quarrels about rood screens, statuary, vestments. Faber favoured outdoor processions along newly laid paths at St Wilfrid’s with swaying banners, incense, and chants. Newman was happier with silent prayer on his knees, in solitude or in chapel.

Faber was a strange mixture of harshness, mawkishness and exaggerated feelings. He suffered from poor health, exacerbated by ascetical practices such as wearing a horse-hair cord around his bare waist, and fasting in a haphazard fashion. Often his cures were worse than his illness. We learn of his falling ill with a ‘most impetuous diarrhoea’. He took ‘doses of laudanum … every hour as well as some astringents’. Finally he arranged for his back passage to be stopped up with ‘three large suppositories … forced in one after another before the fury of the purging would give way’. The stoppage caused his body to swell. Then ‘horrid perspirations’ came on after his request that he be caked all over with ‘atrociously smelling’ cod liver oil. At length, after the community had prayed a novena to St Philip, his health rapidly improved, and he allowed that the ‘terrible oil’ be removed, ‘to the inexpressible relief of all the community’.
³
Then serious tensions and high feeling arose over Newman’s ‘particular friendship’ with St John. Petty personal envies evidently lay beneath the anger, as well as the perception that Newman had offended Tridentine discipline in the matter. Having accused Newman of ignoring the younger members of the

new community, Faber wrote to him:

Then here is another grief: advise me about it. Several of them have what amounts to a positive dislike of F. Ambrose [St John] … they cannot get on with him; for his manner is either a series of snubs or ‘a condescension’ … which is quite ‘insulting’. You would think I exaggerated if I told you how strong this feeling really was and still is. Then they consider him as identified with you – they say he colours your view of them, and if they can’t get on with both, they think it useless to try with one – that you are different with him from what you are with others – that he stands between them and you.
4

Faber went on to say that when he spoke to young members of his former Wilfridian community ‘about a particular friendship growing up between them’,

there came the answer that Newman had scandalised the younger community by his friendship with Father Ambrose [St John]. Faber himself, Newman riposted, had shown special affection for a younger confrere called Father Anthony.

‘Special’ or ‘particular’ friendships were clearly avoided in order to reduce the possibility of homosexual relationships as well as to inculcate charity towards all members of a community. Over many years Newman had fostered deep friendships at Oxford, especially towards Hurrell Froude, and he was not about to alter an inclination for such intimacies on becoming a priest. Newman wrote back at length in terms that revealed his rejection of the entire ‘particular friendship’ principle:

As to particular friendships, I have much wished a
definition
of what is meant. St James and St John had a sort of particular friendship among the Apostles – so must brothers in a Congregation ever –
i.e.
there
must
be feelings between them which are not between others. The point, I conceive, is that they should not
show
it, – should not
act
upon it. The only way of hindering the
fact
, is for them to be in separate Congregations … Again what is more striking, think of our Lord’s love for St John.… To me
now
the hopeless thing is this, that when the idea has
once got
into people’s minds, it
cannot
get out; for if from circumstances I
have
been brought closer to F. Ambrose than to others, let me
hide
the fact as I will, I can do nothing to
undo
it, unless I actually did cease to love him as well as I do.
5

Newman, much as he had chosen to live his life in all-male communities, was not a gregarious person, try as he might. And much as he was aware that Catholic ascetical theology forbade the formation of particular friendships, he was determined to continue funnelling his affections and emotional needs into relationships that suited him.

BIRMINGHAM AND LONDON

While still searching for a suitable London site, Newman purchased and renovated a former ‘gloomy gin distillery’ on Alcester Street in Birmingham to serve as their first city chapel and Oratory house. He had brought with him his collected volumes of the Fathers, spraining his wrists with the task of hauling them into the building.

The chapel opened for Mass on 2 February 1849 with a congregation of six hundred. Newman’s first sermon was ‘The Salvation of the Hearer the Motive of the Preacher’. It was a strict homily, reminding his hearers of the reality of mortal sin and the need for the Church to combat the Devil. The Catholic baroque
coloratura
and content is unmistakable: