The Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-90) is the first person in this country to be raised to the altars of the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation who was not martyred for his faith. Pope Benedict himself declared the beatification during his visit to this country. Newman was an Anglican scholar and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, but who converted to the Roman discipline in 1845. Today he is widely regarded as the most significant convert to the Catholic Church from the C of E. The most important Anglican theologian since Richard Hooker in the sixteenth century, he is the single most luminary intelligence of the nineteenth century and who is still a towering influence on the Roman Catholic Church. That is why the Pope chose to come to England and conduct the beatification himself.
One of Newman’s friends was the Rev. Leicester Darwall, Vicar of Criggion, just south of Melverley. According to local tradition at Criggion and the Darwall family, Newman would occasionally come to stay at the vicarage. It was on one of these visits that Darwall, himself a keen bontanist, took Newman out walking and they climbed up to Rodney’s Pillar. The view is said to have inspired Newman to write the words we now know as Praise to the Holiest. Originally this formed part of his long devotional poem called ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ that famously was set to music by Edward Elgar. In fact, Newman thought so little of it that he consigned it to the waste paper bin from where the various scraps of paper on which it was written were recovered by his secretary and put in a desk drawer where it lay for some time. Later Newman found it and sent it to a Catholic magazine that needed material from him and so it was finally published.
Today the words of the fifth choir of angelicals are the popular hymn found in most hymnbooks. It has been described as the most profound theological hymn ever written, for instance, although we often sing it, do we really know what can possibly be a ‘higher gift than grace’ or what the ‘double agony in man’ are? Space will not allow me to venture an explanation here only to invite you to think of Newman walking on the Breidden and give thanks for this wonderful product of his inspiration.
Christopher Jobson
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