By Bishop James Conley
About a year and a half after he was Confirmed and received into the Catholic Church, Newman was ordained a priest in Rome on May 30, 1847. In God’s providence, I was ordained a bishop on May 30, 2008, after being named auxiliary bishop of Denver.
Newman had expected to pursue priesthood from the moment of his conversion. Newman had made a promise of celibacy when he was a teenager, knowing that the Lord had called him to serve him in the celibate state.
Newman joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. The Oratorians are secular priests—they do not vow the evangelical counsels—but they are bound together in common life, and common apostolic purpose.
Newman came to the priesthood with an outsider’s perspective. He hadn’t grown up in the presence of priests, nor had he ever formally studied in a seminary. He had been engaged in ministry for decades as an Anglican, but his sense of the Catholic priesthood is drawn from his own Anglican experience, and from his voracious study, especially of the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church.
Newman’s time was quite like our own—England had become very secular, morality had gone out of fashion, and evangelization seemed critical. He was a priest of his time, but in his priesthood, there are lessons for our own time, and, indeed, for priests of every age.
As a young Anglican priest, Newman wrote that “they who enter Holy Orders promise they know not what, engage themselves they know not how deeply, debar themselves of the world’s ways they know not how intimately, find perchance they must cut off from them the right hand, sacrifice the desire of their eyes and the stirrings of their hearts at the foot of the Cross, while they thought, in their simplicity, they were but choosing the quiet easy life of ‘plain men dwelling in tents.’”
A priest has not been chosen for a quiet, easy life. The life of the priest is a life of selfless sacrifice. Newman knew this from the beginning. His own priesthood was a kind of quiet martyrdom. He knew that priests must lay down their lives at the foot of the Cross.
Newman reflected on the fact that Christ willfully chose sinful men to stand in persona Christi in the mediation of his mercy. He wrote that Christ could have chosen otherwise. He said that just as the Blessed Virgin was immaculately conceived, Christ could have made priests who were conceived without sin, who mediated mercy without ever having need of it.
But Christ chose otherwise. Newman said that Christ chose “men, not angels” to be his priests. He wrote that Christ chose priests “in the midst of infirmity and temptation.” Christ chose priests, who “have no hope, except from the unmerited grace of God, of persevering unto the end.”
Christ chose sinners as priests in order to witness to the redemption from sin. Christ chose that our own sinfulness might make us brothers to all men—and he chose that the evidence of grace in the lives of obvious sinners might convert hearts to Jesus Christ.
Long before he was a Catholic, Newman had a great love for liturgy. He was a founding member of the Anglican Oxford Movement—an association of Anglicans who promoted beautiful liturgy in the Anglican Church. In fact, they came to be known as “high” Anglicans because of their emphasis on liturgical worship. Newman knew, from an early age, the profound formation that comes from liturgy rich in symbolism, beauty, and steeped in the Sacred Scriptures.
Newman was among the greatest preachers in Christian history. And he preached beautifully, long before he converted to the faith. However, Newman was not known as a dramatic preacher like, for instance, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. And yet, when he would preach on Sunday evenings at Solemn Vespers, the various colleges were forced to delay the dinner hour because all of the undergraduates were crammed into St. Mary the Virgin to hear Dr. Newman preach.
The common remark among the students was that when Dr. Newman would preach, “it was like he was speaking to me personally. He spoke directly to my heart.”
Even as an Anglican, Newman understood the importance of confessing sins ritually and asking for forgiveness. He advocated for an increased use of confession in Anglican Churches.
But at Newman’s conversion, and especially after his ordination, his love for sacred liturgy was transformed. He wrote to a friend that he looked fondly on celebrating Anglican liturgy. But he also said that nothing in those rituals compared to the experience of making the Eucharist—the real presence of Jesus Christ—present in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
He wrote to a friend that, “nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overwhelming as the Mass. I could attend Masses forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words — it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom the angels bow and devils tremble.”
The presence of Christ on the altar captivated and overwhelmed him. His colleagues recalled that he would elevate the sacred Host, and remain in prayer far longer than any might have expected.
And, once he was ordained, he spent hours, each day, in the confessional. It was one thing, he observed, to listen to sins as an Anglican cleric. It was another to absolve them, with the power of Christ’s Church. He called confession the “piercing, subduing tranquility” of his priestly life.
The sacramental life nourished Newman because he prayed daily for the grace to celebrate the sacraments with joy, and with newfound enthusiasm. He fought the temptation to take the sacred mysteries for granted. He asked the Blessed Virgin to give him the sight of God, who saw in penance and Eucharist the rejoicing of heaven at the salvation of sinners.
Newman knew the power of the sacramental life. And he cultivated a sense of profound reverence for the mystery, which he called the “life of our religion.”
Newman’s priesthood was profound because it was authentic—he experienced priestly life and ministry without preconceptions, or falsehood, or pretense. He understood his sinfulness, and he sought holiness with vigor. And he relied on the grace of celebrating the sacramental life in full awareness of the profound reality of the mystery.
