THE
P RTAL
October 2016
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Newman and
the Rosary
Dr Stephen Morgan finds the devotion on the ill-fated Mary Rose,
and Newman’s music teacher
One of
the most wonderful relics of Blessed John Henry Newman is the pocket Bible – Authorised
Version, of course – that his father gave him in 1807, when he was six. On the fly leaf at the front of the
volume, now at Downside Abbey in Somerset, is a drawing of what Newman, when he wrote his Apologia pro
vita sua, recognised as a Rosary.
He mused that there can only have been one credible
source from which, in his youth, he would have been
familiar with such a thing. He had been taught music
by a French émigré Priest, one of the thousands
driven out France following the imposition of the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1794 – a politicoreligious coup with more than a passing resemblance to
both the Henrician Reformation and the Elizabethan
settlement. Newman remembered the man as a gentle
and pious creature and the sight of him praying the
Rosary must have made a significant impression on
him.
The genius of the Rosary for Newman in later life was
in its synthesis of the profoundly affective dimension
of the Christian faith with the dogmatic truths
about the person of Christ, which had been of such
importance since his first “conversion” in 1816, when,
as he records in the Apologia, he ‘received into [his]
intellect impressions of dogma, which through God’s
mercy have never been effaced or obscured”. What
he came to know intellectually through the Greek
Fathers, he came to love deeply through his devotional
life and particularly through the Holy Rosary of the
Blessed Virgin Mary.
In “A Short Service for Rosary Sunday”, composed
by the Oratorian Newman, he refers to ‘the very
image” of Mary “as a book in which we may read
at a glance the mystery of the Incarnation, and the
mercy of the Redemption”. It was this profound
Christ-centred truth of his love for Mary that made
sense of a devotion that, on encountering it in Italy in
1832, Newman had thought ill-suited for the English
religious sensibility.
the Norman monastery at Bec, St Anselm – surely the
finest theologian to sit upon the Chair of St Augustine
– grasped the inescapable importance of Mary in the
Christian faith. “Without God’s Son, nothing could
exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed”,
he wrote in a Sermon on the Blessed Virgin.
It was a truth that found a ready soil in which to grow
in Anselm’s England, the England that was coming to
know and love that most English of Marian shrines,
Walsingham.
We now know, from the artefacts found in the wreck
of the Mary Rose, that the Rosary was a frequent and
persistent devotion in late-Medieval and early-Modern
England. St Mary’s is the most popular dedication
for medieval parish churches in Britain and a Wales
without its “Llanfair”s (the word means “the parish/
place/village/glebe of Mary”) is unimaginable. King
Richard II was clearly not coining a new expression
when he referred to England as Mary’s Dowry.
Many Ordinariate members will have been serial
habitués of “the National” and will hold England’s
Nazareth in particular affection.
Newman lived to see neither Charlotte Pearson
Boyd’s nor Alfred Hope Patten’s restoration of
Walsingham, but little would, I think, have given him
greater satisfaction than to see she, who in that Short
Service he called “great Mother of God, Queen of the
Saints, Royal Lady”, as his principal co-patron of the
Ordinariate in these islands.
The need to hold the affective and the dogmatic in
close union had motivated him from the earliest days
The great eleventh century Archbishop of of the Oxford Movement and in Mary and her Crown
Canterbury, the Italian from the Val d’Aosta, Monk of of Roses he found it.