“The LORD is with me to the end. LORD, your mercy endures forever. Never forsake the work of your hands! – Psalm 138:8 -- The above verse is one of importance to John Henry Newman. He chose Psalm 138 as the epithet for his younger brother, Charles’s, headstone. Newman’s biographer, Sheridan Gilley, refers to Charles as “the black sheep of the family.”
When I first read the late Fr. John O’Malley’s survey text What Happened at Vatican II (2008), I was struck by a passage in the conclusion. O’Malley gave a tantalizing rundown of the “ghosts” present on the council floor—the popes, theologians, philosophers, and politicians whose lives and legacies had indelibly marked the Catholic world. These voices from the past had shaped, positively or negatively (sometimes both), the work of the council fathers:
Introduced here are three examples of lay women who were deeply influenced by Newman in particular as well as by the greater Oxford Movement. These three women had varying degrees of interaction with Newman personally.
Part I presents “the public face of Newman’s educational endeavour,” while Part II provides “the behind-the-scenes picture by telling the reality of Newman’s experience in Ireland” (xv).
It was all the more remarkable when I discovered a collection of “Newman detractors” on the premises, a collection indicating the conflict between Newman, the champion of Roman Catholicism in England, and mainly evangelical Free Church academics around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Despite their differences, and although Newman and Browning never met, they shared similar life experiences, and literary techniques, and both were concerned with the justification of Christianity, as well as the struggle between faith and doubt.
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