The friendship of a saint (part 2)

In this second part of Paul Shrimpton’s exploration of how John Henry Newman practised friendship, he shows that the saint was a true friend to very different people, also in adversity.

Difficulties as a Catholic

Shortly after his conversion Newman was sent to Rome, ordained a priest, and returned to England to establish the Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham. His Catholic life was very different from his Anglican. He was treated shabbily, misunderstood, and suspected of heresy and of not having gained a fully Catholic spirit. He was the target of gossip and misinformation, and effectively endured a silent martyrdom until he was made a cardinal at the age of 77. 

He spent his years as a priest working with Irish immigrants in Birmingham and in parish life, but he also singlehandedly founded and ran the Catholic University in Ireland, aided and briefly edited a Catholic journal run by converts, and founded a new type of Catholic school with his convert friends. 

Despite the way he was treated, Newman was always restrained and generous in his dealings with others.

Many were won over by his patience and understanding, thus exemplifying his maxim that ‘we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend’.

Newman’s early exchanges with William Ullathorne, his bishop after 1850, were somewhat chilly if not strained due to misunderstandings and their completely different backgrounds. But over time they came to understand and have a high regard for each other. Newman joked at the outset that, ‘just as gentlemen make acquaintance with bowing and civil speeches, so the way to be good friends with him is to begin with a boxing bout’. 

Ullathorne dedicated his last book, Christian Patience (1886), to Newman with the words, ‘you have honoured me with a friendship and a confidence that have enriched my life’.

Newman was profoundly grateful for being blessed with many close friends and acknowledged in his Apologia pro Vita Sua that ‘never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had’. 

One of these was the parliamentary barrister Edward Bellasis, who along with their mutual friend James Hope-Scott, acted as co-founder of the Oratory School, and helped Newman through thick and thin. 

Newman expressed his gratitude by dedicating to Bellasis his major philosophical work, “in remembrance of a long, equable, sunny friendship, in gratitude for continual kindnesses shown me, for an unwearied zeal on my behalf, for a trust in me that has never wavered, and for a prompt, effectual succour and support in times of special trial.”

Newman’s friendship with the convert John Hungerford Pollen began when Pollen called on him in Dublin. Though he had been a senior academic at Oxford and was a man of great energy and humour, Pollen was apprehensive about meeting Newman, but after entering the rector’s house, he soon found himself chatting over port and biscuits as the two reminisced about their times in Oxford. 

As Pollen reported to his fiancée, Newman was ‘most kind, ever so nice, and full of fun’.

As a professor at the Catholic University, Pollen spent time with Newman walking around the parks, despite all the work pressing down on the rector, and they even visited Dublin Zoo. As with other academics at the University, Newman helped to launch his career, in Pollen’s case as an architect and interior designer. 

Eleanor Bretherton 

It is natural for us to forge close relationships with those at roughly the same phase of the life cycle and from similar social backgrounds, but the chemistry of friendship is unpredictable and sometimes surprising. It can happen that we make unexpected bondings with people who are vastly different in age, temperament or background. True friendships can straddle these boundaries, as in the case of Eleanor Bretherton and Newman.

Eleanor was one of Newman’s more unlikely friends. She was born in 1845, raised in a Catholic family and had Newman as her confessor from childhood. Her father, who ran a horse and carriage business in Birmingham, got to know the Oratorians first at Alcester Street then at Edgbaston. 

Daisy, as she was known, was a sickly baby, and when she was in danger of death, Newman visited her with a relic of St Philip Neri and prayed for her; after her recovery he dedicated her to our Lady. All this created a special bond between them, and for the rest of his life, she was the object of Newman’s special care. 

His letters to her begin ‘My dear Child’, even when she was a middle-aged married woman, with children of her own, and they reveal a friendship that was as playful as it was profound. 

When she was thirteen Eleanor was sent to a school run by the Dominican sisters while her parents went abroad for the sake of her father’s health. At the time, Newman was in his late fifties and immersed in the life of the Oratory, yet he kept up a correspondence with Eleanor. 

She was not at all in awe of her eminent priestly friend and pestered him to visit her at school. Tongue in cheek, he reprimanded her, insisting that he was ‘not a locomotive’ to be summoned.

He told her that St Philip Neri had not left Rome for sixty years, so on that basis, as he had only been in Birmingham for fourteen years, she could expect a visit when he was 108 and she was an elderly schoolgirl of about sixty-two!

Their friendship became more serious when, a year after her father died, she became engaged to Frank Watt, who was not a Catholic. Newman was aware that there were doubts about Frank’s character, and, after talking to Eleanor as her father might have done, became still more concerned when he learned that Frank had not told his parents of the engagement. Newman reported to Eleanor’s mother that he was deeply concerned to find that ‘All her playfulness was gone’ and that her manner ‘had the appearance of a mind anxious and uneasy’; he urged Mrs Bretherton ‘if possible to come to some understanding with his [i.e. Frank’s] parents’.

Newman’s fatherly concern was also evident in the way he pointed out to Eleanor’s mother the danger of a long engagement, as Frank was a solicitor’s clerk in Oxford and received little financial support from his parents. 

Newman’s experience of Oxford told him that, without any relations there and not being part of the university scene, Frank would struggle to find good company and after a hard day’s work would either end up ‘passing some lonely hours in his lodgings’ or else ‘seeking recreations which are not innocent’. Unless Frank’s parents took up the case in earnest, ‘the affair will linger, languish on – nothing settled – every thing in prospect – hope – disappointment – hope again – to and fro, to and fro, and no end of it.’ 

Newman also tried to find him better employment. After Frank had been received into the Church, Newman officiated at the wedding of Eleanor and Frank, though he thought it a foolish match. 

For the rest of her life of impoverished motherhood, punctuated by life-threatening illness, Newman was always there, with prayers and encouragement, with a warm welcome when she visited, and with money to help make ends meet.

He never forgot her passion for stamp collecting, and continued to send her any interesting and exotic stamps his correspondence brought him. 

He encouraged and supported her through poor health, constant house moves and the raising of her four children. Ten years after being married, when she was close to dying and had received the Sacrament of the Sick, Newman visited her at Southampton. Before doing so he sent her two short letters of the sort he had been writing for two decades.

In one of these he wrote:

I said Mass for you on your birthday. He, who is the Life of it, the Eternal Priest and Sacrifice, will in all your weakness be your Life too. […] He will be with you in all you have to suffer. He will not forsake you, though for a while you may not feel that He is near you.

In fact, she recovered and outlived Newman, though only by five years, despite being much younger than him. Even in his last frail years, Newman would send brief notes, sometimes written for him by others, to remind her that he was always thinking of and praying for her. One of his last acts, in May 1889, was to send a cheque for £50 to her parish priest, to be used for her benefit. Newman’s letters to Eleanor reveal his capacity for love and tenderness, and the depth of his instinctive human wisdom. 

Comfort in sorrow

As Newman lived to a great age, he outlived most of his contemporaries and as a result found himself writing countless letters of consolation to relatives or friends of the bereaved. None of his letters of consolation read as if they were mere formalities; instead, we see Newman sharing the grief of his recipients and meditating aloud on the inscrutable will of God and his saving plan for the human race. 

He also corresponded with friends about illness, old age, loneliness, and loss of energy and enthusiasm, commiserating with them by sharing his own sufferings or ailments. 

In the case of Miss Munro, who had known Newman as an Anglican before becoming a Catholic, Newman counselled her on how to battle against sadness in the face of the passage of time and the frustration of feeling under-used by God.

If Newman was truly interested in his friends and those who approached him for guidance, never more was this apparent than when they suffered bereavements of relatives and close friends. In all his letters of condolence there is an uncompromisingly supernatural conviction which underpins his sympathy, as he reminds his readers of the reality of the next life and of the communion with the faithful departed. 

At same time, he enters fully into the suffering of the bereaved, a suffering he shared with them. His letters are also suffused with a supernatural optimism, seeing in sorrow the fulfilment of the inscrutable Will of God and his loving plan for everyone. 

The geography of Newman’s prayer 

One of the ‘secrets’ of Newman’s capacity for friendship is the way he grounded them in his life of prayer.

Within the ‘geography’ of his prayer we can see the prominence his friends occupied in his mind and heart, as well as his concerns for other souls both inside and outside the Church. 

Although Newman did not preserve all his prayer lists and destroyed parts of his private diary, enough survives to piece together the range of his petitions. Intercessory prayer for friends and family was central to Newman’s life: he describes it in 1835 as ‘the characteristic of Christian worship, the privilege of the heavenly adoption, the exercise of the perfect and spiritual mind’. 

He never wavered in this conviction, and decades later, when as a cardinal he was obliged to have a private chapel, he adorned its walls with pictures of friends for whom he wished to intercede while he celebrated Mass: loyalty to his friends meant praying for them after they departed from this world. 

As early as 1816 Newman began composing long prayers for daily use, which included intercessory prayers for those near to him. By 1824, when a Fellow of Oriel and an Anglican deacon, Newman’s prayer routine took a more serious turn; he drew up a framework for each day of the week, which incorporated petitions for individuals or groups of people. 

On Sundays, for example, his particular prayers of intercession were for ‘Parents and whole family’; on Mondays, for ‘Oriel College. Provost and fellows individually’; on Tuesdays, for his ‘Flock at St Clements’ and others; on Wednesdays, for his closest school and Oxford friends (by name).

Within a few years, he began composing lengthy prayer lists, which included the names not just of friends but of academic colleagues and tutees, parishioners and those who attended his sermons at St Mary’s. The list of 1835 has 44 names on it, with seven added in pencil, presumably to update the list. The list of 1836 contains around a dozen entries of the type ‘Froude’s friends’, as well as the wives and sisters of his friends. The prayer list for 1839 contains over two hundred names and is heavily thumbed. In the 1840s he began to group the names under headings (pencilled in Greek). He continued and even intensified this practice of intercessory prayer after he became a Catholic.

Newman’s deceased friends were never far from his mind because he made for himself a Book of Anniversaries, which he kept on his desk. The date and other circumstances of death (time of day and age) of his friends and relatives is faithfully recorded in it from 1825 up to 1888. It contains over six hundred names and would, in all likelihood, have been kept open at the relevant day.

Doctor of Friendship?

Newman had ‘heart-knowledge’ in abundance and understood human nature so well that he was able to show sympathy by speaking out of it. His dealings with others exhibit a solidarity with them, not least in the way he readily acknowledged his own frailties, doubts and shortcomings. 

Newman teaches us that patience and time are needed to forge proper friendships. At times, the pace of life today can lead us to neglect our friends: we have to know how to ‘waste time’ with them, as Newman did with Pollen in Dublin when he was completely overwhelmed with university as well as Oratory work. 

Getting to know others well is an adventure, with its high and low points, its joys and sorrows, as we see in his dealings with Eleanor Bretherton. But like any adventure, investing in friendship is investing in something worthwhile. Everyone we meet is unique as is every relationship of friendship. And we can nurture our friendships by including them in our prayer life, as Newman did. 

This is an abridged and slightly edited version of an article which first appeared in the newsletter of the International Centre of Newman Friends. For the original article see here: https://www.newmanfriendsinternational.org/en/newman-newsletter-2024/. It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission. This is the second part of this article. For the first part, see here.

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