19th century
Feast: October 9
The most famous Anglican in England became Catholic and spent the next forty-five years being distrusted by both sides — until they made him a cardinal at seventy-eight.
John Henry Newman was the intellectual star of the Church of England — a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, leader of the Oxford Movement, and the most influential Anglican preacher of his generation. Then, in 1845, he became Catholic, and the bottom fell out. His Anglican friends considered it a betrayal. The Catholic establishment in England didn't quite trust a convert who was smarter than most of them. He spent years in a kind of wilderness — founding the Oratory in Birmingham, attempting a Catholic university in Dublin that largely failed, and being treated with suspicion by some in Rome. When a Catholic magazine accused him of teaching that clergy didn't need to be truthful, he wrote the Apologia Pro Vita Sua in seven weeks — a defense of his intellectual honesty that became one of the great autobiographies in English. His Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine argued that Catholic teaching grows organically over time without changing in essence — an idea that influenced the Second Vatican Council a century later. His motto was 'Cor ad cor loquitur' — heart speaks to heart. He was made a cardinal at seventy-eight, largely as an apology for decades of neglect. He died in 1890 at eighty-nine. His beatification and canonization took another century.