Sr. Kathleen Marie Dietz
Newman writes in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua that his reception into the Church was “like coming into port after a rough sea”. In this paper we would like to reflect a bit on that scene and would like to add to it one more image, namely that of a beacon light which helped Newman find that port.
Sr. Brigitte Maria Hoegemann FSO
In his first term at Oxford, on Sunday, 30th November 1817, John Henry Newman walked for the first time to “the communion table” in Trinity Chapel, his college. He had not mentioned preparations for confirmation and first communion in the long weekly letters home and did not refer to the event in the one that he wrote a week later (13th, 21st, 28th Nov., and 8th Dec., see LD I 44-48). The entry in his diary simply reads: “made first communion” (LD I 48).
A Mind Alive. Darton, Longman and Todd, London 2008, 162 pp.
Die Tagespost 21, (16.2. 2008) 7, 6.
La speranza cristiana secondo John Henry Newman, L’Osservatore Romano CXLVIII (21.2.2008) 44, 5.
The Tablet 19 January 2008, 6-7.
But there are others who look just the same to the world, who in their hearts are very different; they make no great show, they go on in the same quiet ordinary way as the others, but really they are training to be saints in Heaven. They do all they can to change themselves, to become like God, to obey God, to discipline themselves, to renounce the world …
He “calls thee by thy name.” He sees thee, and understands thee, as He made thee. He knows what is in thee, all thy own peculiar feelings and thoughts, thy dispositions and likings, thy strength and thy weakness. He views thee in thy day of rejoicing, and thy day of sorrow. He sympathizes in thy hopes and thy temptations. He interests Himself in all thy anxieties and remembrances, all the risings and fallings of thy spirit.
My God, I know well, you could have saved us at your word, without yourself suffering; but you did choose to purchase us at the price of your Blood. I look on you, the Victim lifted up on Calvary, and I know that your death was an expiation for the sins of the whole world.
O blessed day of the Resurrection, which of old time was called the Queen of Festivals, and raised among Christians an anxious duty, nay contentious diligence duly to honour it! Blessed day, once only passed in sorrow, when the Lord actually rose, and the disciples believed not; but ever since a day of joy to the faith and love of the Church! In ancient times, Christians all over the world began it with a morning salutation. Each man said to his neighbour, “Christ is risen;” and his neighbour answered him, “Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon.”
