Newman College, Oxford

Start point of a 46-mile pilgrimage in honour of the newly canonised St John Newman from his Oxford college home to Deddington, where he began his public ministry

Highlights

• St John Newman’s community home

I first visited St John Henry Newman’s college three days after he was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his trip to England in 2010. It was a happy coincidence: the place was alive with enthusiasm for the great churchman’s legacy. Since then, he has been recognized as a saint, on 13 October 2019, accorded full veneration at this college home and his place of burial at the Birmingham Oratory.

One of the nuns from the community had greeted the Pope, and she showed me around Newman’s bedroom, chapel, and library. A small statue of the cardinal had been installed in the chapel immediately after his beatification; it could not be displayed beside an altar beforehand.

The college is now home to an international community of nuns, running a study centre based on St John Newman’s teaching and copious writing. It is open to visitors, preserving an atmosphere of monastic peace and devotion that the cardinal himself instigated. He lived here from 1842 to 1846 in a small community run with such discipline that it was nicknamed the Anglican Monastery before his switch to Roman Catholicism in 1845.

The college is effectively a shrine to Newman’s memory, with his rooms much as he would have known them. Although he spent most of his working life in Birmingham, this college has dozens of his personal effects on display. It rates as one of the most intimate and authentic Catholic shrines in Britain, the sparse bedroom alone speaking eloquently of his total calling and commitment to a simple life.

St John Henry Newman was originally an Anglican priest who switched to Roman Catholicism in 1845. This high-profile event dominates his popular memory, but he actually wrote a huge amount that had nothing to do with Christian division. He argued that religion is both a natural and a revealed knowledge of God. A non-Christian can have access to the divine, inspired by creation, which means all religions contain some truth.

As befits his place in England’s spiritual map, St John Newman also has a pilgrimage in his honour, the Newman Pilgrimage from Oxford to the village of Deddington (listed on the British Pilgrimage Trust website). His saint’s day is 9 October, unusually in Roman Catholic tradition not the date of his death but selected instead because it comes at the start of the university year, education always being close to his heart. The saintly cardinal had his own reasons for switching denominations and was not overtly sectarian about Christian division, something which a visit to this college helps to illustrate.

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Directions

Newman College, College Lane, Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 4LQ

www.newmanfriendsinternational.org

W3W: exams.pilots.movie

GPS: 51.7221N 1.2212W

The college is on the south side of Oxford. Its opening hours are Mon–Fri 10:30 am–12noon and 2 pm–5 pm, Sat 2 pm–5 pm, and the first and third Sundays of the month 2 pm–5 pm.