October 9--St. John Henry Newman, Priest

John Henry Newman, by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt (died 1896), licensed under Public Domain.

“God has created me to do him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission; I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I have a part in a great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.”

St. John Henry Newman was a late-comer to Catholicism. Born in 1801, he became an Anglican priest in 1825 and leader of the Oxford Movement, which tried to move the Church of England closer to Catholicism. Eventually, he saw that he could not be an Anglican and converted to Catholicism in 1845 and ordained a Catholic priest in 1847. He wrote extensively in theology, apologetics, education, and more. He is known today for his teachings on the development of doctrine, which were taken up in Vatican II in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei verbum: ″[T]he understanding of the things and words handed down grows, through the contemplation and study of believers, [...] [which] tends continually towards the fullness of divine truth” (8). He was created cardinal in 1879 without becoming a bishop and died in 1890. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2019.

St. John Henry Newman was a brilliant, humble, and holy man. Saints like him are models for us, so that we may “keep His commandments and serve Him in [our] calling.”