Ecumenical Christian Library

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John Henry Newman

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John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was born in London, brought up an evangelical Anglican, and underwent at fifteen the conversion he describes in the Apologia. He became a Fellow of Oriel in 1822 and Vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in 1828, and from 1833 led the Oxford Movement with Keble and Pusey, writing a large share of the Tracts for the Times. In 1845 he was received into the Catholic Church. He founded the Birmingham Oratory in 1848, was the first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland (1854–1858), and was made a cardinal by Leo XIII in 1879. He was beatified in 2010, canonised in 2019, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 2025.

Newman’s Anglican sermons and his Grammar of Assent are read by Protestants and Catholics alike. The Essay on Development, the Apologia and the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk are the works that explain why he left the Church of England, and they are the ones Protestant readers most often argue with.

1,038 notes. Newman’s own works are all here, most of them in the uniform edition (Longmans, Green & Co.) that he revised himself.

  • Text. Every note is taken from the Newman Reader of the National Institute for Newman Studies, which claims copyright in its presentation (2007). Newman’s text is public domain.
  • The Apologia is here twice, deliberately. Apologia pro Vita Sua is the 1865 revision that Newman kept in print. Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) is Wilfrid Ward’s 1913 Oxford edition of the original pamphlets, which carries the Kingsley correspondence and marks every difference between the two texts, with double square brackets round words of 1864 dropped in 1865 and angle brackets round words added. Its Reading Note explains the marks.

Anglican period (1826–1845)

Catholic period (1845–1890)

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