Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Nineteenth century England was notoriously intolerant of the Catholic Church within its borders. Newman delivered these addresses to a fraternal group of Catholic priests and professors advising them how to remain faithful to their vows within an established Protestant culture. Newman's intention is to point out the logical fallacies undergirding the Protestant prejudices of Rome. He carefully dissects the Protestant misunderstanding of key tenets of Catholicism and then suggests ways for Catholics to faithfully handle these misinformed viewpoints.
- Extensive studies on Church history from an author burdened for the Church of Jesus Christ
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Top Highlights
“If you trace back your reasons for holding an opinion, you must stop some where; the process cannot go on for ever; you must come at last to something you cannot prove, else life would be spent in inquiring and reasoning, our minds would be ever tossing to and fro, and there would be nothing to guide us. No man alive, but has some First Principles or other.” (Page 267)
“prejudices are opinions formed upon grounds, which grounds the prejudiced person refuses to examine” (Page 266)
“I propose to give you some description of those views, theories, principles, or whatever they are to be called, which imbue the educated and active intellect, and lead it, as it were, instinctively and spontaneously, first to pronounce the creed and worship of Catholicism absurd, and next to pronounce its professors hypocritical.” (Page 264)
“It is a First Principle that man is a social being; a First Principle that he may defend himself; a First Principle that he is responsible; a First Principle that he is frail and imperfect; a First Principle that reason must rule passion.” (Page 268)
The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.
The philosophical and theological thought and the spirituality of Cardinal Newman, so deeply rooted in and enriched by Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers, still retain their particular originality and value.
—Pope John Paul II
Newman placed the key in our hand to build historical thought into theology, or much more, he taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments.
—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
- Title: Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England
- Author: John Henry Newman
- Publisher: Burns and Lambert
- Publication Date: 1851
- Pages: 346
John Henry Newman (February 21, 1801 – August 11, 1890) was a priest and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was a banker and his mother's family was French Huguenot. Newman was raised in a strict Calvinist home and received his primary education at the famous Ealing School. John Henry Newman graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1821 and was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford in the following year. On June 13, 1824 he was ordained into the Anglican priesthood. From the early 1830's until 1845, Newman was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, a group of Anglican priests and scholars from Oxford who sought to restore the rites of the Anglican church to their Apostolic roots in the Early Church. Between 1842 and 1845, during a time of solitude and the completion of Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman underwent a process conversion to Roman Catholicism. Newman also published the Oxford Conservative Journal during this time period as a platform for retracting any negative remarks he previously assailed towards the Roman Church.
He was officially received into the Catholic Church on October 9, 1845. The conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism was the result of a life's long struggle to reconcile the historic faith handed down from the Apostles with his own Anglican tradition. Frustrated with the errors inherent in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, Newman abandoned his search for the via media (or, middle way) of Anglicanism and converted to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1848, Newman founded the Birmingham Oratory at Maryvale and began ministering to the Catholic population of the city. In 1851, the Bishops of Ireland elected to start a Catholic university in Dublin and they appointed Newman to be the founder and first rector of the institution. Maintaining his ministry at the Birmingham Oratory, Newman established what would become University College, Dublin. His Idea of a University was prepared for founding faculty of the university at Dublin. On May 12, 1879 Pope Leo XIII appointed Newman to the college of Cardinals. John Henry Cardinal Newman died on August 11, 1890. Cardinal Newman is currently under consideration by the Vatican for sainthood.