Cardinal Newman: The Urban Legend

by Michael Rose

We’re sure you’ve heard the term “urban legend” — that genre of folklore that gets told and retold as an account of actual incidents and that comes to be believed simply by virtue of its dissemination and perpetuation. Stories of alligators living in the sewers of New York City and ghost hitchhikers haunting the highways are some of the classics of the twentieth century. In recent years, urban legends have gained steam and amplification through news stories and the Internet, despite their apocryphal origins. One particularly scurrilous urban legend of the day involves Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman and the particularities of his burial.

According to the legend, Newman requested that he be buried next to fellow Oratorian Fr. Ambrose St. John because he was his homosexual lover — or “boyfriend,” if you will. That might sound like pure rot to your ears — because it is — but the legend has gained traction among those who want to believe that Newman, arguably the most brilliant and erudite of all Anglican converts, clung to sexual peccadilloes until and even after his death. Gay activists, for example, are enraptured by the opportunity to either point a finger at an ostensibly holy man and say: hypocrite, he! or elevate him to the status of a gay icon.

As you might guess, the September 19 beatification of John Henry Newman by Pope Benedict XVI occasioned the perpetuation of this myth — not only through whispers from ear to ear, but also by certain less-than-scrupulous media outlets.

Fr. Dermot Fenlon, an Oratorian formerly of New­man’s home Oratory in Birmingham, England, has spelled out the facts in an effort to debunk the burgeoning myth. In an article in the September issue of Standpoint magazine, titled “Friends & Saints: Newman’s Last Mystery,” Fr. Fenlon explains that Cardinal Newman left specific instructions that he be buried near Birmingham in ground reserved for the priests and brothers of his Oratory. In a specific and strongly worded request in his will, dated July 23, 1876, Newman wrote, “I wish with all my heart to be buried in Father Ambrose St John’s grave — and I give this as my last, imperative will.”

That part of the legend is true. Cardinal Newman did indeed make such a request. He even added a postscript to his will in 1881, reiterating in even stronger language his seemingly peculiar request. Without any further knowledge of the facts surrounding the request, one could easily jump to untoward conclusions — but those conclusions would be both hasty and wrong. The request needs to be put into context — the context of the time, and the context of Newman’s life and his personality. And that’s exactly what Fr. Fenlon does.

Just as the faithful of early Rome wanted to be buried near the saints in the consecrated ground of the catacombs outside the city, Newman wanted to be buried near the man he looked to in his day as the one priest who most fully lived a life of heroic virtue — defending the Catholic faith against the hostilities of nineteenth-century England. Newman had a keen understanding of the role of the saints in the Church and a “deep sensitivity to the spirit of a place, its genius loci,” particularly of the cemetery where the Oratorian fathers were buried. According to Fr. Fenlon, just as St. Gregory, out of devotion to St. Benignus, wanted to be buried ad sanctos, near that saint, so too Newman wanted to be buried near a saint: “He believed not only that Father Ambrose St. John was a saint, but that he had become a saint and given his life through the stress of overwork.” Further, Newman felt that it was Fr. St. John who helped him in his intellectual life and ministry to put to rest “fears and suspicions rooted in centuries of bitter mutual recrimination between Protestants and Catholics.” Between 1850 and 1853, Newman had helped to protect the Catholic Church in England from a potentially destructive resurgence of anti-popery. Newman felt that without the labors of Fr. St. John, his own work would not have been possible. In Fr. Fenlon’s words, “Newman wanted permanently to leave a sign, redressing the balance, pointing away from himself, towards his community and under the one Cross.”

These are most obviously not the sentiments of an old man who had a homosexual funny bone for a confrere. Nevertheless, many modern folk are simply not spiritually equipped to understand the bond of true fraternal Christian love, whether it be between those of the same or the opposite sex. They view the world — and especially Christians — with a suspicious eye, rejecting even the possibility that a man or a woman could be a saint, could have lived a life of heroic virtue, and could serve effectively as a model of the Christian life for our day as well as for future generations.

Nevertheless, with the Pope’s beatification ceremony in September, the Church has, to the consternation of many, given Newman her seal of approval. Next step: canonization.

[Michael Rose is Associate Editor of New Oxford Review. The foregoing article, "Cardinal Newman: The Urban Legend" was originally published as a New Oxford Note in New Oxford Review (November 2010), and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.]

Related:

See the video trailer linked in the foregoing post (below), "Newman film coming in 2011" (Musings, December 5, 2010), which indicates that the forthcoming film on Newman, The Unseen World, addresses the slanderous character defamation of Newman referenced in the present post.