In his homily at a packed Sunday Mass in Newman Church St Stephen’s Green, celebrating St John Henry Newman’s Feast Day, Fr Gary Chamberland, CSC, said the conversion of St John Henry Newman “gave him [Newman] no comfort” and Newman didn’t come from Anglicanism for emotional reasons or a sense of welcome. “He came because he believed he was following the truth and he was doing what he must”.
He said that when it came to Vatican officials examining the thousands of writings of Newman for his elevation as Doctor of the Church, he couldn’t imagine how long it took as “the man didn’t have an unpublished thought”.
He said that when Newman was made a Cardinal it was the “capstone of a life of failure”. In Newman’s view everything he had touched had come to difficulty or hardship. It was “only towards the end of his life that he saw the thread of success that wove through everything he did” Fr Chamberland said. He added that the Church Fathers were the reason Newman was Catholic and that it was in reading them that he realised there was a direct correlation, a direct connection between Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Church in the Catholic Church that protected a core of truth that he had feared his own communion had given away.” But this was no easy choice as he lost most of his friends when he converted, even a sister who didn’t talk to him for 40 years.
Full homily available on YouTube.
