John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman was born February 21, 1801, in London, the eldest of six children in a family of comfortable means. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1822 won a fellowship at Oriel College, then the most intellectually formidable common room in the university, a circle prized for rigorous argument over inherited assumption. Ordained in the Church of England, he became vicar of St Mary's, the university church, in 1828, and it was from that pulpit that his sermons began to reshape a generation of Oxford men.

In 1833 Newman became a leading voice of what came to be called the Oxford Movement, alongside John Keble and Edward Pusey, a call to recover the church's catholic and apostolic character against an Anglicanism its adherents saw as hollowed out by liberalism and institutional complacency. He wrote extensively in the movement's Tracts for the Times, and it was the last of these, Tract 90 (1841), that broke him. In it he argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles, properly read, did not exclude core Catholic doctrine. The essay was condemned by his own bishop and by the university; Newman was effectively silenced and withdrew to a semi-monastic retreat at Littlemore outside Oxford.

There, over several years of isolated study, his doubts resolved in a direction that cost him nearly everything he had built. On October 9, 1845, he was received into the Roman