JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion

Cardinal John Henry Newman is an intellectual icon to many Catholics, particularly those who gather on college campuses in the "Newman Centers" that bear the famous convert's name. Turner, a Yale University history professor, dispels some of the aura that has collected around Newman over the years by examining his earlier life and writings, which reveal an intense antipathy toward the evangelical Protestantism of the day and its influence on the Church of England. In this weighty work, Turner focuses largely on "Tracts for the Times," which Newman and his circle of colleagues began publishing in 1833 in an effort to challenge Anglicanism by seeking to recover parts of the ancient Catholic faith that had been lost. Later, however, their writings had the unintended effect of drawing many of the so-called "Tractarians" into the Roman Catholic Church. Turner suggests strongly that Newman's religious character and his own eventual conversion to Catholicism in 1845 were less the result of a natural progression toward Rome and more due to "contingency after contingency," including the departure of his own followers and his rejection by the Church of England. Indeed, he writes, the Newman found in his later spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, is hardly the same Newman of the Tractarian period. Turner's work is unlikely to sway Newman devotees and those promoting his cause for sainthood, but it is absorbing nonetheless and certainly will attract readers with a bent for revisionism. (Oct.)