Yeah, Cardinal Rampolla, another example of the problems of Pope Leo XIII’s papacy.

The Point newsletter, October 1952:

BY FATHER FEENEY

John Henry Newman was constantly praised for the clarity of his English prose and the limpid lucidity of his style. That he possesses these qualities, no one can deny. But his is the cold clarity of clear water in a fish bowl, in which one looks in vain for the fish.

The more you read Newman, the less you remember what he says. He is an author whom it is impossible to quote. What you recall, after you have finished reading him, is never what the clarity of his style was revealing, but some small, unwarranted queerness that it was almost concealing. You remember that Newman said that a chandelier “depends” from a ceiling; and if you look up “depends” in the dictionary, you will find that “hangs from” is exactly what it means. You remember that Newman felt entitled to mispronounce deliberately one English word to show his proprietorship over the language. He pronounced “soldier” as sol—dee—err. You remember that Newman was perpetually fussing about Reverend E. B. Pusey, who seems, in some refined way, to have gotten under his skin.

You remember Newman was shocked that Catholics were giving Protestants the grounds for declaring that “the honor of Our Lady is dearer to Catholics than the conversion of England,” as though anything else could be the childlike truth. You remember that Newman particularly disliked the Marian writings of St. Alfonso Liguori, a Doctor of the Universal Church, and said of these writings, “They are suitable for Italy, but they are not suitable for England.” You remember that, with regard to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Newman insisted, in scholarly fashion, that “her case is essentially the same as St. John the Baptist, save for a difference of six months” — which is precisely the difference this dogma demands. You remember that, though Newman was in favor of Papal Infallibility, he was not in favor of its being infallibly defined by the Pope.
(from London is a Place, The Ravengate Press, Boston)

The Newman Clubs

Amid the ordered barbarism which the late Dr. Roosevelt was wont to call “our American way of life,” there is established a pattern which may be identified by the name of “our club culture.” For the levels of American sociability lend themselves admirably to a breakdown by “clubs” — beginning at the top with the polo club, the yacht club, the country club, descending through the women’s club, the bridge club, the Lions Club, and terminating inelegantly at “Mike’s Club — Beer Ten Cents a Glass.”

Distributed up and down this vertical hierarchy (generously in the middle, sparsely at either end) are the subsidiary clubs — aggregations of button collectors, bird watchers, and the offspring of American Revolutionaries. With pompous Mesdames President and dutiful sub-chairmen, the members of the clubs sustain themselves in that one interest which provides their common unity — to wit, bizarre buttons, odd birds, or rabble-rousing ancestors.

In the midst of these lesser gatherings, and willing to be taken for one of them, is the Newman Club Federation, that appraisal of the Catholic Faith as “something to have a doubt about.”

Newman Clubs are now about fifty years old. Their members are those tragically misplaced persons, Catholic students at non-Catholic colleges. And their very name, Newman, gives them away.

It was the spirit of Newman’s writings, quite as much as his over-esteemed clarity, which made him so fit the purposes of American Catholics at non-Catholic colleges. For in everything that Newman said in print, after he rationalized his way into the Church, there is a clear determination to dissociate himself from all that he considered vulgar (that is, not English) in his new-found religion. He felt, for example, that devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was being carried too far, and that the infallibility of the Pope was something to keep quiet about!

As they started off, the Newman Clubs selected John Henry Cardinal Newman as their patron for many reasons, one of which was their certainty that he would never embarrass them by getting canonized and turning into a patron-saint. Newman, they decided, was an eminently acceptable variety of Catholic to bring to the attention of our secular universities. To begin with, he was not a noisy Irish-American Catholic, but an ex-Anglican English one. And he was not only literate, he was even literary.

The establishers of the Newman Clubs must have realized, however, that in importing his spirit, much of Newman’s Oxford refinement and Anglican propriety would be lost in transit. For when it is found on a Midwestern university campus, clad in blue-jeans at a Newman Club weenie roast, the spirit of John Henry Cardinal Newman as stripped of all but its most basic elements: compromise of and apology for the Faith.

The Newman Club maintains that a Catholic student can “stick it out” at a secular college and preserve his Faith by means of weekly teas, monthly dances and an occasional festive breakfast, preceded by a hasty Holy Communion. In fact, Newman Club bulletins point proudly to recent surveys which report that although the percentage of Catholic students who leave the Faith at secular colleges is very high, the number is considerably lower among those students who are Newman Clubbers.

The Newman policy is blithely and blindly to assume that the student who does not openly break with the Faith must therefore still have it. And this policy explains the Newman Club alumni, those secularly-educated thousands who are, in name, Catholic, but who are, in sympathy, outlook, judgment, appreciation, manner, in their very impulse, non-Catholic, and what is worse, unconcerned that this is the case.

The declared purpose of the Newman Club movement is, “the religious, intellectual, and social betterment of its members.” Understood, is the qualification, “provided such betterment in no way interferes with that primary consideration, the Catholic student’s acquisition of a secular college degree.” Thus, the effectiveness of a Newman Club as a secular college is the effectiveness of the boy who held his finger in the leaking dike, hoping to keep back the flood which was pouring in over the top.

Our necessary conclusion? We prefer degree-less Catholics to drowned ones.

THE PRESENT POSITION OF CARDINAL NEWMAN

Q. What is it about John Henry Newman, English convert and Cardinal, that Catholics chiefly remember?

A. His mastery of English prose.

Q. What is it about John Henry Newman that Catholics of our day generally forget?

A. They forget, or never have been told of, his Jєωιѕн descent.

Q. If we Catholics were to bear in mind Newman’s real ancestry when we are appraising his literary ability, could we not then boast that we have had in our fold the greatest Jєωιѕн writer in the English language?

A. We could — except for the fact that there have been in the English language other Jєωιѕн writers, like Robert Browning, Max Beerbohm, and Philip Guedalla, who never once thought of joining the Catholic Church.

Q. Apart from his literary abilities, did not Newman make a good conversion to the Catholic Church?

A. He made a nostalgic conversion.

Q. What sort of conversion is that?

A. It is a conversion effected in a typical Old Testament manner, in which one is always sighing after the “flesh-pots” of things one has abandoned, and which in Newman’s case required an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, an apology for his own life, to justify.

Q. After his conversion, and his ordination to the priesthood, is it really true that Newman used often to forego theological studies and pastoral pursuits in order to devote more time to reading from the pagan Greeks?

A. Biographers disagree. Newman’s only comment in the matter was his repeated remark, “I shall never be a saint, for I love the pagan classics too intensely.”

Q. Did not the blood which he inherited, from the Jєωιѕн moneylender who was his father, allow Newman to bring to the Faith some of those same racial qualities possessed by the very earliest Christians, by Our Lord’s own Apostles and disciples?

A. The Jєωιѕн qualities which Newman brought to the Faith have been very tidily set in order by Canon William Barry, S. T. D., the eminent English authority on Newman. Canon Barry reports that to Newman’s “Hebrew affinities” the following qualities are attributed: “ … his cast of features, his remarkable skill in music and mathematics, his dislike of metaphysical speculations, his grasp of the concrete, and his nervous temperament.”

Q. What was it that Newman called those fellow Catholics of his who, at the time of the Vatican Council, were in favor of having the Pope’s personal infallibility defined?

A. Newman nervously called them, “an aggressive and insolent faction.”

Q. Was this attitude toward the definition of Papal infallibility the reason why Pope Pius IX so totally mistrusted Newman?

A. It was one of the reasons.

Q. If Pope Pius IX so frowned upon him, why was Newman made a Cardinal?

A. Newman was made a Cardinal after Pope Pius IX died, when the Catholic Duke of Norfolk prevailed upon the newly installed Leo XIII to brighten the aged Newman’s final years with a red hat.

Q. Is it in England that Cardinal Newman’s spirit best survives today?

A. It is not. Modern Catholic Englishmen, without analyzing it, sense that Cardinal Newman was, religiously, the kind of interloper in their midst that Prime Minister Disraeli was politically.

Q. Where then have Newman’s name and fame been most perpetuated?

A. In America, in the form of clubs. Newman Clubs, they are called.

Q. What is a Newman Club?

A. It is an organized excuse for the presence, the sinful presence, of Catholic students at secular universities founded and fostered by Masons and, lately, indoctrinated by Jews.

This propensity for Judaizing young Gentiles was one of Dr. Sachar’s principal recommendations for the Brandeis presidency. The other was a repeated declaration, following necessarily from his Zionist loyalty, that America is not a “melting pot,” and that Jews must not only stick to being Jews, they must even rejoice in their Jєωιѕнness.

In order to attract Gentile students, for processing under his experienced direction, Dr. Sachar has allowed a Newman Club and a Student Christian Association to take their places beside Brandeis University’s lively Hillel chapter. Profoundly touched by the limitless opportunities thus afforded him, Dr. Sachar has resolved upon a rededication of himself to the spirit and ideals of that Rabbi Hillel for whom the Hillel movement was named — the rabbi who, until his death in 10 A.D., was head of the Jerusalem sanhedrin and who was, as such, the chief promoter of King Herod’s “slaughter of the Holy Innocents,” the first of the Jєωιѕн attempts to get rid of Jesus.

The more you read Newman, the less you remember what he says. He is an author whom it is impossible to quote. What you recall, after you have finished reading him, is never what the clarity of his style was revealing, but some small, unwarranted queerness that it was almost concealing.