A leading scholar describes a complex character and a life punctuated by conversions – that saw humiliation and vindication, darkness and joy, doubt and assurance
When Newman heard that a woman had described him as a saint, his reaction was crisp: “I have nothing of a saint about me.” Now the Church has decided otherwise. That does not mean, however, that he was perfect. At a public audience in 2007, Pope Benedict reminded us that “the saints have not ‘fallen from Heaven’. They are people like us, who also have complicated problems. Holiness does not consist in never having erred or sinned.”
Newman himself said something similar, when he remarked of one of his theological heroes, Cyril of Alexandria, that although he was a great servant of God, we are “not obliged to defend certain passages of his ecclesiastical career. It does not answer to call whity-brown white.”
Newman himself could get angry, tetchy, and over-sensitive – often, like many of us, with those closest to him. An outstanding example is the letter he wrote to his sister, Jemima, on 31 October 1865. Their brother, Frank, had come to stay with her and she suggested that he, too, might come and visit them. It was the first invitation he had had from her for many years and his reply, declining the invitation, is filled with hurt and bitterness: “You have let your children grow up, and I not know them … None have so acted towards me as my near relations and connexions.”