On Sunday, October 13, the much anticipated canonisation of John Henry Newman will take place in Rome. Newman will be the first English person who has lived since the seventeenth century to be officially recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church. That this is a great event for England is borne out by the fact that Prince Charles will attend the ceremony.
However the canonisation of Newman is also very significant on this side of the Irish Sea. For one, the Irish, and especially some of our nineteenth century bishops, can claim a degree of credit for the sanctity of Newman: they ensured that the years between 1851 and 1858 which he spent setting up a Catholic university in Ireland were painfully frustrating (and hence sanctifying!).
A great deal of his bitter frustration was caused by the differing conceptions of the role of the laity held by Newman and the Irish hierarchy. Newman’s appreciation of the laity was ahead of its time, and contributed to the the Second Vatican Council’s radical reappraisal of the role of the laity in the Church.
In contrast, the attitude of the Irish hierarchy was to treat the laity, as Newman put it, “like good little boys – told to shut their eyes and open their mouths and take what we give them”. Unfortunately the kind of Catholicism which was consolidated in Ireland during the nineteenth century was intensely clerical and anti-intellectual, and Newman’s efforts to establish a Catholic university here were severely hampered by precisely these features of Irish Catholicism.
Undoubtedly the storm to be unleashed on the Church in Ireland in the following century would never have been so severe had Ireland been more open to Newman’s insight regarding the importance of “an intelligent, well-instructed laity”. We can only hope that Newman has forgiven the Irish by now, and is interceding for us, in particular for the hierarchy of Ireland and for the students, staff and graduates of that university, now University College Dublin, whose founding cost him so dearly.