The Portal June 2017 | Page 10

THE P RTAL
June 2017 Page 10

Thoughts on Newman

Practicalia

The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan muses on Newman and domestic maters

There is always a temptation to imagine that the saints or our great heroes travel through life without stooping to deal with the practical things of life . We find it hard to imagine Alexander the Great needing to trim his toenails or St Catherine of Siena concerning herself with whether she had the necessary firewood laid by for the winter .

Our own experience of life is so hedged in with the details of daily life – I ’ m trying to write this to the accompaniment of the drips from the ceiling which has collapsed in the next room and awaiting the plumber to solve the problem – that this can often create for us a distance from the great figures of our faith or of history that really should not be there .
Soon after Newman took up his fellowship at Oriel in 1822 , he started to acquire practical responsibilities in the College and later in its neighbouring dependent , Alban Hall .
Here , as Vice-Principal from 1825 and in the absence in his Suffolk living at Halesworth of its Principal , Richard Whately ( later Archbishop of Dublin ), he was “ Dean , Tutor and Bursar ” ( JHN , Letters and Diaries , I , 222 ).
His correspondence and diaries contain a host of letters and entries that relay his engagement in settling bills , balancing books and arranging other practicalities .
None of this lessened once he was appointed to the University Church and he set about building the school and rebuilding the chapel-of-ease at Littlemore .
His literary output required him to become concerned with both the distribution and financing of various projects and , after his conversion in 1845 and the subsequent establishment of the Oratory two years later , Newman was scarcely , if ever , freed of the need to engage himself in business , at least until he was an old man .
Few men and women ( if any ) have been raised to the Altars of the Church for showing heroic virtue and sanctity in administration , domestic chores and financial management but few of those who have been beatified or canonised for other reasons have been
spared , at least at times , the need to get on with the practicalia .
Newman ’ s correspondence concerning these matters gives ample witness to the fact that in discharging these responsibilities , he brought to the task precisely the same level of attention to detail and scrupulous honesty that matched his endeavours in more spiritual or intellectual fields .
In this regard – as with the evidence we have from the other Saints and Blesseds – what we see is evidence of the integrity that must surely mark the life of those who recognise the universal call to holiness . But we see something else too : an unwillingness to be distracted from the main purpose of our work as those called to bear witness to Christ .
It was precisely whilst he was building at Littlemore ( and despite daily involving himself in the management of the school ,) that Newman was so heavily involvedin the preaching , writing and publishing that was his chief contribution to the nascent Oxford Movement .
As he struggled to establish a Catholic University in Dublin , he both articulated quite simply the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the purpose of university education and began to see clearly the philosophical truths he was later to articulate in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent .
Newman ’ s contribution to the Church was – as it must be for those who point us most surely towards Christ – a thoroughly incarnational one .
It was a contribution that took seriously the truth that God became man in Jesus Christ , flesh like us in all things except sin – Newman would have known that writing this article and attending to the collapsing dining room ceiling was where I am called to live out my Christian life today .