Newman’s Campaign in Ireland Part I: Catholic University Reports and Other Papers was arranged by his secretary William Neville and printed for private circulation in 1896. It is now Volume XVI of the Newman Millennium Edition, introduced and annotated by Paul Shrimpton and published by Gracewing in 2021. The companion volume, under review here, contains what Newman envisaged as ‘My Campaign in Ireland Part II’. Some of what is found here was published in 1956 (in Newman, Autobiographical Writings), namely Newman’s revised version of his Memorandum about my Connection with the Catholic University. This Memorandum is the main document in My Campaign in Ireland Part II. It was finalized by Newman in 1873 and is republished here along with some texts from a first draft that were omitted from his final version. These omitted texts, taking up 30 pages of the present edition, are published here for the first time. So too is Newman’s ‘Appendix’ to the Memorandum, an extensive dossier entitled ‘Extracts from Letters’. The manuscript of this Appendix consists of 657 quarto pages almost all of them in Newman’s own hand and taking up 360 pages of this edition. These letters with some commentary by Newman are, as it were, the footnotes to the Memorandum, in which he illustrates and justifies, from correspondence sent and received, what he says in the Memorandum itself. These two handsome volumes, XVI and XVII of the Newman Millennium Edition, amount to c.1200 pages and Paul Shrimpton is to be thanked and congratulated for the scholarship and dedication with which he has studied, annotated, and introduced these texts.
Newman’s lectures on university education are well-known, but not so well-known is his own involvement in trying to translate the ideas he put forward in those lectures into a working university in Dublin. He gave eight years to the task, 1851–1858, and issues connected with it continued to follow him for some years afterwards. He laid the foundations for a university and he built a beautiful church (much of the cost of which came from his own pocket and as a loan from the Oratory in Birmingham). He experienced many frustrations in preparing the ground for the university and acting as its first Rector, a position from which he was eventually obliged to resign because of his ongoing responsibility for the Oratory in Birmingham. He had to contend with the two most significant clerics in the 19th century Irish Catholic Church. One was John MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, whose sobriquet, ‘the Lion of the West’, already reveals important aspects of his character. His opposition to Newman and to the university at Dublin, disdainful and often deliberate in seeking to hinder its progress, was at least open aggression, and it probably had less to do with Newman himself than with MacHale’s relationship with the other powerful cleric, the one in Dublin, Paul Cullen. One senses that Newman, caught in this as well as in other rivalries and ambivalences, preferred the honest obstruction of MacHale to the secretive manipulations and passive aggression of Cullen. He is an ‘Archbishop without trust in any one’, Newman says of Cullen (p. 478). He had earlier spoken of his ‘impenetrable silence, which I felt to be such an evil, that I did not see how we could go on any longer under it’ (p. 444).
One of the ambivalences, coming through clearly in the Memorandum and from the letters that support it, is that whereas Newman undertook the work, clear in his mind that it was something he could do for a limited time while remaining superior of the Oratory in Birmingham, Cullen seems to have hoped to inveigle Newman sooner or later into either resigning his position at Birmingham or transferring the Oratory tout court to Dublin.
Instructed by the Holy See, the Irish bishops opposed the British government’s proposal for ‘mixed education’, a proposal backed up by the establishment of Queen’s Colleges to which Catholics also would be admitted. In response the bishops were encouraged to establish a Catholic University, not only for Ireland but for the Catholics of the United Kingdom as a whole. This was another ambivalence – was it an ‘Irish’ university or a ‘Catholic’ university which just happened to be in Ireland? Newman was open to the possibility that at least one of its faculties might be in England. The English and Scottish bishops showed little interest in it, however, and so it became an Irish Catholic project although Newman always maintained a sense of it as something bigger. The manoeuvrings of Cullen, and the effective withdrawal of MacHale, made it in fact a Dublin project, in the end ‘Cullen’s university’ rather than ‘Newman’s’.
Newman’s trust in the laity is a well-known aspect of his thinking and practice, and it is another issue on which he clashed with his clerical ‘employers’. The distrust of lay people on the part of Irish clerics, as reflected in these texts, is quite extraordinary. For Newman, a Catholic University, if it is to be truly a university, must be a lay-led and lay-run institution, at least in its government and administration. This was not to deny the over-seeing role of the bishops, essential if it was to be a Catholic institution, but his fear, and that of some of his closest colleagues, was that what some of the bishops really wanted was a kind of seminary or college for laymen (no women involved here for the moment), the continuation at third level of the diocesan secondary schools that were being established at the time. A large part of Newman’s frustration was in trying to convince the bishops of the necessity of its ‘secular’ character, as they continued, Cullen in particular, to foist clerics on him with whom he was not particularly in sympathy or whose competence he quickly saw to be inadequate. The ways in which Cullen acted around Newman, and apart from him, on matters that were of immediate importance for him as Rector of the university, is quite breath-taking and one wonders why Newman stayed as long as he did.
Inevitably, the ‘national question’ was an issue from time to time. Newman was accused of wanting to fill the university with Englishmen – ‘I’m looking for the best people in the different areas’ was his reply – and even of wanting to establish Oxford on the Liffey. Newman had earlier been instrumental in changing many things at Oxford, raising the quality of the education it offered by preparing the ground for the famous tutorial system and by insisting on more demanding examinations. Many recognized his gifts and experience as an educationalist but ‘the Englishman telling us how to run our lives’ was an easy card to play. It was also quite off the mark: Newman deliberately chose not to align himself with any party in Irish politics or in Irish church rivalries but instead to keep his eyes on the principles and goals of a proper university education as he had set these out in his lectures at the beginning of his time in Dublin. Naturally, he wanted some people more than others, but this was always by reason of their qualifications and ability for the jobs he had in mind for them.
MacHale and Cullen literally ‘tried the patience of a saint’. Newman comes through in these texts as just that, a holy man in whom the virtues of patience, perseverance, and charity are clearly seen as they are tested, and in whom the gifts of knowledge, prudence and wisdom constantly guide his responses, decisions, and actions. The suggestion sometimes mooted of Newman as an over-sensitive prima donna dissolves on the many pages of this book where we meet a man of sensitivity, yes, but also of conviction, intelligence, maturity, and courage, with a preference for straight talking and an unerring respect for justice.
This volume, along with its companion, My Campaign in Ireland Part I, will be of great interest not only to Newman scholars but to those interested in Irish Catholic history, in university education and in what a ‘Catholic University’ might mean today. As the Church struggles with the reality of ‘clericalism’, there is much food for thought in this record of Newman’s experience of it: ‘I took the part of the laity generally’, he writes (regarding the right of the laity to a voice in the management of the university), ‘against the overbearing claims of Dr Cullen, and he in consequence withdrew his confidence from me, and my position became untenable’ (p. 105). Here, we see a great educationalist in action and we see a great saint growing in holiness through the mundane challenges of human relationships, achievements, and disappointments. ‘It is the rule of God’s Providence that we should succeed by failure’, Newman wrote many years later, placing this Pauline paradox within the hope he had expressed immediately after his resignation from the university, that ‘when I am gone, something may come of what I have done in Dublin’ (p. cxiv).
