![]() Years earlier, in 1848, only three years after his reception into the Church, Newman had foreshadowed his Apologia with his first novel, Loss and Gain, a fictionalised quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s quest for faith amid the scepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) is arguably the greatest autobiographical spiritual aeneid ever written, with the obvious exception of St. His greatest contribution to philosophy is his seminal work, The Grammar of Assent (1870), the product of twenty years’ labor, which highlighted the rational foundations for religious belief and the inadequacy of empiricism. To this day, Newman’s influence can be seen in the founding of new Catholic centers of higher education. His discourses on liberal education, delivered to Catholic audiences in Dublin in 1852, as he prepared to become rector of the new Irish Catholic University, would be published two years later as The Idea of a University, a book that remains one of the finest and most eloquent works advocating the efficacy of an integrated liberal arts education. Newman’s famous sermon on “Development in Christian Doctrine,” which he preached in February 1843, has become the benchmark for the study of doctrinal development, elucidating the teaching authority of the Catholic Church in the light of the Church’s claim to be the Mystical Body of Christ. In theology, philosophy, education, and literature his influence on both sides of the Atlantic has been remarkable. If Newman’s historical importance is beyond question so is the great legacy he has bequeathed to posterity. This phenomenon crossed the Atlantic, heralding a similar revival in the United States. ![]() After Newman’s conversion, however, Catholicism became a major intellectual presence in English cultural life, and, in Newman’s wake, thousands of Englishmen followed his example, converting to Catholicism in droves. These adherents to the “Old Faith” bore the Catholicism in their hearts and in their homes, but they were effectively excluded from bringing it into public life. Before Newman, the Catholic presence in England had withered to such a degree that only the remnant of the old recusant families still carried the faith from one beleaguered and persecuted generation to the next. ![]() It would, in fact, be no exaggeration to say that Newman’s conversion was the very birth of the Catholic Revival. Put simply, the reception of John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845 heralded a new dawn for Catholicism in the English speaking world. ![]() The forthcoming canonization of Cardinal Newman serves as a timely reminder of Newman’s monumental importance to the revival of Catholicism, not only in his native England but also in the United States. ![]()
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