1In his introductory note to Volume XXXII of The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, in reference to the thitherto unpublished private journal which Newman kept during his first twenty-nine months in Dublin, initially as Rector-designate and then as Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Francis J. McGrath states incontrovertibly that:
- 1 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII (Supplement), ed. Francis J. McGrath, FMS, (...)
The journal gives a fascinating insight into the nitty-gritty, day-to-day practicalities of such a project with its many pitfalls.1
2The sentence immediately following, where he states that the diary ‘also gives an insight into Newman’s grasp of administrative detail’ is one which could be read in more than one way. While acknowledging that Newman had published some of the material in an 1870 document about his dealings with the university, McGrath affirms correctly the value of publishing the diary in its entirety and summarises helpfully the range of material covered in the individual diary entries: the employment of professors and lecturers; the establishment of the engineering and medical schools; financial considerations; correspondence with Irish archbishops.
The diary begins with the simple entry:
- 2 Ibid., 73 where n. 4 describes the diary as ‘Ms A43.2’ entitled: «(contemporaneous) day by day My U (...)
Offered Scratton a Tutor’s place in the University with £100 a year—he accepted.2
3The entry is dated ‘November 1853’ but as the subsequent entry reads ‘November 5th’, it is safe to assume it was written prior to that date. Thomas Scratton, a convert to Roman Catholicism like Newman, subsequently became the Secretary of the Catholic University of Ireland, a post he held until 1879. This first section of the diary is concerned largely with appointments to tutorships and lectureships.
4One instance of Newman’s stepping blithely into a minefield is given in the entry for November 23rd where he refers to his offering the editorship of the University Gazette to Henry Wilberforce and instructing him to:
Propose to Duffy to take copyright, responsibility and profits. . . .3
- 4 Cf. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XVIII, ed. C.S. Dessain, London: Nelson, 196 (...)
- 5 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit.,74.
- 6 Ibid., 75.
5This was Charles Gavan Duffy, leader of the Young Irelander movement. Newman’s perceived sympathy for and involvement with this radical group was a major cause of subsequent tension with Cullen.4 Neither was this to be the last instance of Newman’s jejune dispositions in relation to the contemporary Irish political landscape causing difficulties with the Irish episcopate. A final point worth noting in the same diary entry, not least for the hint which it offers at an early stage of the very different outlook of Newman and the bishops, is his editorial instruction that the first issue of the projected University Gazette should be concerned with the history of the rise of the university and that the tone should be ‘not controversial, but courteous to opponents and Queen’s Colleges.’5 While this instruction does credit to his magnanimity, it speaks less well of the breadth and depth of his appreciation of current civic or ecclesiastical politics. Equally, one might question the perspicacity of his offer of a lectureship to Johan Ignaz von Döllinger, the Bavarian ecclesiastical historian who was to become more and more estranged from Rome in subsequent decades, dying an excommunicate in Munich, just seven months before Newman, in January 1890.6
- 7 Ibid., 75–82.
- 8 Ibid., 75.
6The set of diary entries which run from December 24, 1853 to April 12, 1854 is the most interesting of the newly published diary in terms of matters concerning the university and its failure.7 It begins dramatically: Newman writes to Cullen on Christmas Eve ‘begging him’ to provide a ‘public ceremony, in which I could take the oaths, and formally enter into my office’.8
- 9 Ibid. ‘Letter from Dr Cullen. . .to the effect that nothing of a public nature could be done, the B (...)
- 10 Born Hope, he changed his name to Hope-Scott after marrying Charlotte Lockhart, grand-daughter of W (...)
- 11 Ibid.
7The rebuff is immediate: Newman received a letter on December 28th telling him that nothing of a public nature could be done because of the less than total commitment of the bishops to the university.9 Newman’s own response, as recorded in the entry for that date, is to write to his friend James Robert Hope-Scott mentioning the prospect of resignation.10 To this downbeat note he adds, in the entry of December 30th, that he has written to Henry Wilberforce to the effect that if a public ceremony of the kind which he desires does not take place, the university is likely to ‘dwindle down to a Dublin college’.11
8From the foregoing, we might infer reasonably that Newman scarcely cuts the figure of a street fighter and does seem rather quick, to continue the metaphor, to throw in the towel. It might no less reasonably be inferred that there is at best a mixed commitment to the new university on the part of the Irish bishops. As we shall see shortly, this thought soon crystallised in Newman’s own mind in a particular fashion.
- 12 Ibid., 76.
- 13 Ibid., 77.
91854 began with the question of Newman’s status upmost in his own mind, as captured in the entry for January 1st describing letters he has sent to both Cullen and Cardinal Wiseman.12 Further correspondence throughout that month, much of it around Newman’s need for a brief to confirm his status as rector coupled with his anxiety that Rome will expect too much too soon from his Dublin undertaking, reached a quasi-climax on January 31st with receipt of a letter from Wiseman intimating that the Pope wished to make Newman a bishop in partibus ‘in order to set the university off’.13
- 14 Ibid.
- 15 Mac Suibhne, Peadar, Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries: with their Letters from 1820–1902, vol. II (...)
10The entries for February of that year see Newman contend with a range of administrative and ambassadorial issues. On February 8th he refers to a conversation with a senior Jesuit who is pessimistic about Newman’s prospects of recruiting students to his university.14 In the same entry, he refers to conversations with younger priests who were more sanguine about his prospects in this regard. Moreover, it is evident from this and other conversations that he was at pains to seek out suitable Irish recruits to staff the university.15
- 16 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit., 79.
11He met with Cullen on February 13th and they went over the designs for University House and agreed that Newman should go round Ireland and meet the other bishops. This in itself proved to be a mixed blessing as the bishops were less than wholehearted in their expressions of enthusiasm for his project: Ossory asked him for a paper on his wish to have students’ names on the university’s books; Kildare & Leighlin referred him to James More O’Ferrall for information about the gentry in Kildare; Cork brought his Vicar General to the meeting with Newman and left as soon as he was asked for advice; finally and worst of all, Limerick consented to have his name on the books—on condition that he not be bound to give any funding and that he ‘should not be supposed to prophesy anything but failure’.16
- 17 Cf. Donal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catho (...)
12While at Cork, the Vincentian Fathers told Newman that the Queen’s College there was already a manifest failure. The Queen’s Colleges, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1845 might be described as yet another failed British solution to an Irish problem. Peel intended them to address the problem of the provision of university education for the Irish but without inflaming public opinion by having them seen as an instrument of proselytization. For all his effort and good intention, he merely ended up falling into the denominational trap by another route. Having become known in popular parlance as ‘Godless Colleges’ because of their prohibition of the teaching of religion, the Queen’s Colleges were condemned formally at the 1850 Synod of Thurles, sealing their fate with the Roman Catholic majority.17
- 18 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit., 78.
13His earlier visit to Carlow brought him an encounter with Thomas O’Meara, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons since 1839, who told him that ‘Colleges at Cork and Galway never would gain first-rate men for Professors.’18 The pivotal entry in the entire diary, however, is perhaps that of March 1st, 1854. In this entry, written when back in Dublin, Newman describes an encounter with Michael Errington which itself is an account of a discussion the latter had with his fellow lay member of the Catholic University Committee, James More O’Ferrall, both of them having been co-opted at the Synod of Thurles in 1850.
O’Ferrall is described as follows:
[he] had a more desponding view than ever of the University. . . . He thought there was simply no demand for it. He told me last November that the Catholic party had been obliged to move in order to oppose the Queen’s Colleges—Perhaps many will content themselves with their [the Queen’s Colleges] failure—looking on the prospect of a University merely as something negative—19
14Here it seems that we have the kernel of the matter. Already, in March 1854, three months before he was officially installed as Rector and eight months before the Catholic University opened its doors, he raised a number of questions that went to the heart of his entire mission as rector of the Catholic University. We might well speculate as to the extent Newman himself grasped the ramifications of these insights. It is the contention of this article that Newman’s failure in this regard has been replicated in much subsequent historiography and in the writings of advocates and critics alike.
- 20 Ibid., 80f. Cf. Fergus Kelly, ‘O’Curry, Eugene (1794–1862)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biograph (...)
15Before going on to more detailed analysis of these points, it is worth taking a quick look at the remaining material in the diary. Subsequent entries for March 1854 saw him consider matters pertaining to examinations and university costume. Much more significant, in historic terms, are his conversations of March 11th and 18th with Eugene O’Curry whose appointment to the faculty of the Catholic University is one of the enduring intellectual monuments to its significance, as it is indeed to Newman’s own judgment.20
- 21 See letter to Hope-Scott, April 7, 1854 and letter to Cullen, April 15, 1854, in The Letters and Di (...)
16The pithy entry for April 6th, referring to the arrival from Rome of the brief on the Catholic University for the forthcoming synod, was to be the harbinger of no little personal pain for Newman. For the glowing praise for him contained therein served only to obscure in the short term the fact that the plan to make him a Bishop had been dropped, due to Cullen’s intervention.21 There can be little doubt that this episode was the cause of immense anguish, if not humiliation, for Newman and significantly coloured his post-factum writings about his time in Dublin.
- 22 This view was given particular emphasis in the context of the centenary celebrations of the Catholi (...)
- 23 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit., 102.
17The highlight of the subsequent months was the process around the securing of the Medical School House in Cecilia Street, something which was later hailed as among Newman’s outstanding legacies.22 There were tensions with Cullen about the appointment of English staff which continued into the autumn months. The lengthy entry on September 25th contains the draft of a lengthy letter to Cullen setting out his staffing rationale, modified versions of which, intended for the Archbishops of Cashel and Tuam, are in the entry for October 3rd. On October 10th he recorded that he sent a corrected copy of the October 3rd draft to all four archbishops: Armagh and Dublin gave their assent; Cashel assented conditional on the others doing so; while Tuam accused Newman of acting ultra vires. He states that he replied ‘with studied respect’.23
18There is little of enduring interest in the remaining entries, running up to the final one on March 29, 1856. The entries become notably less frequent in 1855 and they are largely restatements of what had arisen in prior entries. Contemporary academics may smile at Newman’s justification, in that final entry, of the £200 professorial salary:
For the reason why a Professor has £200 is that he gives his mind to the subject of it and makes it his profession.24
- 25 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XVIII, op. cit., 509f.
- 26 Ibid., 473.
19The final act of John Henry Newman’s rectorship of the Catholic University was played out in the autumn of 1858. It reached its climax on November 12th of that year when, in a letter written in the Birmingham Oratory and addressed to the archbishops of Ireland, Newman finally and formally resigned.25 This consummatory gesture was precipitated by Newman’s receipt of a letter, dated October 2nd, from Dr Patrick Leahy, archbishop of Cashel. This letter included a reference to a letter he, Leahy, had himself received from Cullen which stated the necessity of Newman’s residing in the University ‘for. . . some considerable time each session’.26
20To this, Newman replied, in his resignation letter, citing his obligations to the Birmingham Oratory:
I beg to bring before your Graces the words of the Fathers of my Oratory in this place. . . . ‘Such a further leave of absence from the Oratory is simply incompatible with our duty to St Philip and we cannot with a clear conscience make ourselves partners to it’
Newman goes on to make seven further observations:
-
- 27 Cf. ibid. In these letters of April 1857, he referred to the growing claims on his time of the Birm (...)
That he had signified to the Bishops of Ireland individually his intention to resign as early as April 1857;27
-
That at that time, he had signalled November 14, 1857 as his intended date of resignation;
-
- 28 Cf. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XVIII, op. cit., 144f. These requests were: (...)
That the attempt to find a compromise position between the requirement for continual residence on his part and no residence at all had come to naught because of the archbishops’ failure to grant requests which he had made in a letter of October 16, 1857;28
-
That he had written to Leahy on February 3rd, declining from that date to receive any salary as rector;
-
That, effective February 3, he had been holding the office ‘only provisionally, without salary, and waiting for a successor’;
-
That he had done all that he could do while unable to reside in Dublin;
-
That he has now received a letter ‘by which, without other words, the duty of residence is simply and absolutely urged upon me’.
He concluded:
Under these circumstances, one course alone is in honour left to me. I hereby resign into your Graces’ hands the high office, the duties of which have occupied my mind now for seven full years: and, begging you to pardon all my shortcomings in fulfilling them, during the time for which I have had so distinguished an honour.
- 29 Ibid., 502ff.
- 30 Ibid., 504ff.
21Another letter, addressed to Newman and dated October 31, 1858, from the Professors of the Catholic University is worth mentioning in the course of any consideration of his failure or otherwise as rector.29 In the opening paragraph of this rhetorically charged document, they ‘beg leave . . . to express the extreme regret and even alarm with which [they] have heard a rumour, [they] trust unfounded that [Newman] contemplate[s] an early resignation of the office of Rector’. Newman replied, graciously, on November 6th, that their expression of feeling is a ‘speedy. . . and. . . large reward’ while outlining, as per above, the reasons for his inevitable resignation.30
22Finally, and to evidence just how seriously and conscientiously Newman took his duties as Rector, right to the end, let us consider briefly his letter of November 2—written from Maynooth on the day of the funeral of Dr Matthew Kelly, his vice-rector manqué, and addressed to George Anthony Denison, a high-churchman opposed to all compromises in relation to church control over education. Denison was an intimate of Joseph Warner Henley, President of the Board of Trade in Lord Derby’s government and, as such, responsible for the granting of university charters. Newman’s argument to Denison, requesting his intervention with Henley to plead for a charter for the Catholic University of Ireland, was that with a charter, it would become the alma mater for Catholic youths who might otherwise go to Oxford. Newman appealed to their shared dislike of mixed education and pointed out that his argument for a charter for the Catholic University should have the support of ‘those who desire the supremacy of the Established Church’ as the success of his university will lessen the likelihood of either Trinity College Dublin or Oxford having their identity diluted.31
- 32 Colin Barr, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865, Leomi (...)
23In his book on Cullen, Newman and the Catholic University, Colin Barr attributes the overall failure of the Catholic University to its failure to secure a charter and the failure to attract sufficient students.32 So complete a failure does he deem Newman that he takes to task Fergal McGrath, author of the magisterial 1951 work on the Catholic University, for calling his work ‘Newman’s University’—it should rather be called, Barr argues, ‘Cullen’s University’.
24But before turning to questions of success or failure, however, let us advert briefly to Newman’s own retrospective summary of his objectives and achievements as set out in the chapter ‘What I Aimed At’ in his privately published My Campaign in Ireland. He begins:
- 33 John Henry Newman, My Campaign in Ireland, Part 1. Catholic University Reports and Other Papers, (P (...)
Universities have been spontaneously born, grown, matured and at length and then only, been recognised and not been made to order, as the one committed to my handicraft.33
25He considered as successes the University Church, the establishment of the Catholic University Gazette and the purchase of the Medical School House in Cecilia St. His express view was that the medical school did for that branch of knowledge what the university church would do for theology. He makes particular mention of Eugene O’Curry’s’ lectures, he being ‘a man of unique knowledge in Celtic Mss’ and one whose works would ‘have been lost to the world but for the university’.34
26What is striking throughout both his contemporary diary and his other, post-Dublin writings is the total lack of appreciation on Newman’s part of the politics of the Irish hierarchy. In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Cullen, Emmet Larkin summarises:
- 35 Emmet Larkin, ‘Cullen, Paul (1803–1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.co (...)
The emergence of Cullen as the leader of the Irish church. . . was bitterly resented by MacHale. . . . There was hardly an issue or an institution in the Irish church that MacHale did not use to confront or contest Cullen’s power and influence.35
27It was Newman’s fatal political weakness both to miss the larger picture, in terms of ecclesiastical politics, and to see its individual manifestations as having to do particularly, if not exclusively, with him.
28Up to the publication of McGrath’s Newman’s University, the interpretation of Newman’s Irish sojourn had been most strongly influenced by the three chapters devoted to it in the first volume of Wilfrid Ward’s biography: The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Ward’s version saw Newman brought over to Dublin to be the rector of the Catholic University, clashing with the Irish bishops and, after seven years of nominal and four years of actual control, abandoning his task as hopeless. The whole episode is deemed disappointing—even disastrous—and only redeemed by the production of The Idea of a University and other essays.
- 36 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit., vii.
29McGrath, in his foreword, states that this part of Ward’s work is unsatisfactory, erring both by omission and false emphasis. It omits both the historical background to Newman’s difficulties and what he calls ‘the great body of constructive work which he was able to carry through’.36 While McGrath’s work is the most significant in terms of retrieving Newman-in-Dublin from the outer darkness into which he would have been—and would continue to be—cast by some, there are other Dublin publications which complement McGrath’s effort.
30January 1954 saw the publication, for the Governing Body of University College Dublin of five lectures, delivered in the Aula Maxima of Newman House in October 1952 to mark the centenary of Newman’s Discourses On The Scope And Nature Of University Education. In his introductory note, the editor and then UCD President Michael Tierney leaves us in no doubt as to his views on apostolic succession:
- 37 M. Tierney, ed., Newman’s Doctrine of University Education, op. cit., Introductory Note.
As the College is this year celebrating the Centenary of its formal opening in November 1854 as the Catholic University of Ireland under the Rectorship of Dr Newman, it has been decided to republish the lectures in a more permanent form.37
- 38 Ibid., 1.
- 39 Ibid.
- 40 Ibid.
31In his own lecture, entitled ‘Newman’s Doctrine of University Education’, Tierney declares as his explicit objective the defeating of the Ward interpretation of Newman’s time in Ireland as a failure.38 He aims to ‘dispel that illusion’ and make a ‘justifiable claim on the part of our College to a founder whose reputation seems to grow with every year that passes’.39 Far from withering away, Newman’s university ‘was well-founded and has endured’.40
- 41 John Henry Newman, University Sketches, ed. Michael Tierney, Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1961, xii ff (...)
- 42 On the evolution and character of the National University of Ireland, cf. John Coolahan, ‘From Roya (...)
- 43 The theological depth of Newman’s The Idea of a University is captured in Joseph S. O’Leary’s semin (...)
32In the introduction to the edition of the University Sketches which he edited, Tierney gives what we might call a ‘thick’ description of the continuity between the Catholic University pre- and post-Royal University, the Jesuit-run University College and the ‘university masquerading as a college’ that was UCD in the National University of Ireland (NUI).41 Tierney’s capacity to glide over the statutory secular nature of the NUI is facilitated by his eschewing of all explicit theological reference in his writings on Newman.42 While fully understandable in its context, the absence of any reference to the Latin or Greek fathers in texts rich with reference and allusion to secular Greek and Latin writers, as one would expect from the former Professor of Greek, is striking. All the more so when one considers that Tierney was deeply aware of the patristic scholarship of the one he was so determined to cast as his linear predecessor.43
33To conclude this brief reflection on Newman’s Dublin Diary and other related writings, three questions in particular seem pertinent.
- 44 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXXII, op. cit., 79.
34What was the primary intention of the Irish bishops? Specifically, were their intentions in relation to the positive role of the Catholic University of Ireland in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland ever fully developed in a positive sense? Or was the primary objective always a negative one: to ensure that the Queen’s Colleges were a failure? Newman himself had the insight, reflected in his diary entry of March 1st, 1854, that it was at least possible that this perverse via negativa might be what actually held sway within the collective of the Irish episcopacy.44
- 45 As well as Coolahan cf. Daire Keogh, ‘William J. Walsh, 1908–21’, in Tom Dunne, ed., The National U (...)
35Related to the foregoing, did a model such as that which emerged within the National University of Ireland actually suit the bishops better? As discussed above, the NUI had a statutory secular status. This meant that the Irish Roman Catholic bishops were not financially committed to the institution. They were nonetheless effectively guaranteed pre-eminence, through the presence of the Archbishop of Dublin as Chancellor and with the bishops exercising a de facto control over appointments in key subject areas. This was, one might argue, the Irish hierarchy’s kind of university; one where they had a maximum of influence with a minimum of financial or even direct personal involvement.45
36Finally, to what extent has subsequent historiography been influenced excessively by the schematic architecture of Newman’s post-Dublin writings? Newman is the most silken of prose stylists, the most seductive of rhetoricians and the most subtle of logicians. It is virtually impossible to find fallacy, flaw or infelicity in his argument. Neither is it easy to feel much sympathy for those he depicts as his foes. All the more understandable then if historians have occasionally fallen prey to a version of the siren’s song and felt impelled to embrace Newman too closely or, in a movement of over-compensation, to reject him with excessive vigour.
- 46 There has been as of yet no adequate treatment of the relationship of Archbishop John Charles McQua (...)
- 47 O’Leary’s is the most succinct treatment of this theological dimension.
37It is the contention of this article that a mature assessment of Newman’s Dublin career, so much of which is encapsulated in that pithy diary entry of March 1st 1854, demands a longitudinal study of the interactions between the see of Dublin and Newman’s university and its successors. Such a study would encompass the roles of Archbishops Walsh and, in the later period, McQuaid in relation to the National University of Ireland as much as it would that of Cullen in relation to the Catholic University of Ireland.46 It would also involve taking seriously, in a way not always respected by contemporary historiography, the central theological intent of Newman’s nine Dublin discourses, later published as The Idea of a University.47 It is only such a study, in which his contemporary Dublin diary will be a key resource, that will enable any definitive verdict to be reached on the success or failure of Newman’s university.