A visit to Newman's Littlemore
About a month ago I found myself being offered tea and biscuits in the library of a saint.
Memories of being warned and threatened as an undergraduate about suitable library snacks resurfaced as I eyed the crumbly M&S chocolate biscuits rather hesitantly.
“Newman would have certainly entertained his friends here when they came to visit him at Littlemore”, smiled Sister Anna, passing me the plate rather emphatically.
We are sitting round a table in the library where St John Henry Newman, Britain’s first saint since the Reformation and theological giant, was received into the Catholic Church. Kneeling beside the fireplace on the wintry night of 9 October 1845, Newman was received into the Church by his close friend, the Italian Passionist missionary Blessed Dominic Barberi.
Today there is only a model in place of the original fireplace, attached to a door which now swings through to a small kitchenette, where I gather the biscuits are kept. The layout of Littlemore and its library are rather helpfully detailed by Newman’s sister in a letter from one of her visits, which I find framed and hanging on the library wall. Alongside it hang an assortment of portraits, sketches, and other scrawled correspondence - Newman is believed to have written more than twenty thousand letters over his lifetime.
The unlabelled collection appears rather eclectic at first glance, yet as Sister Anna points at the frames and tells us about Newman’s life, a remarkable story begins to emerge.
There are prints of Newman’s childhood home in Ham, Grey Court House, and of Oriel College, Oxford, where Newman was a Fellow. There are also photographs of his beloved friends who visited him at Littlemore, and too of his family, some of whom would no longer speak to him following his conversion to Catholicism. The frames on the wall give the pilgrim a glimpse into the extraordinary man who found such peace in this unassuming abode on the outskirts of Oxford.
Nicknamed ‘The College’, Newman and a small group of friends adapted stable buildings and a granary for stage coaches into cottages in 1842, and came here regularly in the following years. Just down the road from ‘The College’ is the Anglican Church of St Mary and St Nicholas, where Newman once ministered. It was in this Anglican Parish where Newman would preach his famous farewell homily ‘The Parting of Friends’ on 25 September 1843, laying down his altar robes as he came down from the pulpit.
One is also obliged to mention that directly across the road from ‘The College’ is the Catholic Church of Blessed Dominic Barberi. It is built in what might be considered the rather unfortunate architectural style of the 1960s, when liturgical concrete spaceships were en vogue.
Today ‘The College’ is looked after by a handful of religious sisters from the Spiritual Family The Work, an order founded by Mother Julia Verhaeghe (1910-1997) in Belgium in 1938. The Spiritual Family The Work is formed of a core community of consecrated religious (Priests and Sisters) and seeks to combine a contemplative life with their apostolic work.
I encountered ‘Das Werk’, as the community is familiarly known in German, while studying abroad at the University of Vienna, where the Chaplaincy is headed by spritely Priests and Sisters belonging to the order. An unintentional but apt link, given that university Catholic chaplaincies across the world are often referred to as ‘Newman Centres’, and the lasting influence of his reflections on the nature of Higher Education. Newman was sent to be the Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, where he delivered a series of lectures which would form the basis of his seminal text, ‘The Idea of a University’.
Leaving the library and walking down the covered path (Newman wished the roof to be extended, so one could wander without stepping into the rain - as in Oxford colleges), one finds a door to what was Newman’s bedroom. It has been left bare but for a bed and a desk the Sisters have placed there to aid the pilgrim’s imagination. A door next to Newman’s bedroom leads to the Chapel with the Blessed Sacrament.
It is a small Chapel, and with all four walls draped with red embroidered curtains, feels rather intimate. Kneeling down with Newman’s prayer on a little card in front of me, I reflected on his words – familiar to many from the hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’ – and the profound testimony of his life.
There was a quiet intensity to the Chapel, as if the unceasing prayers of Newman and the countless pilgrims to Littlemore have somehow left their mark upon the place. Newman’s influence is enormous – not only theologically (many hope he will become a Doctor of the Church), but also through the personal lives he has touched throughout the years and across the world.
One of the final frames in the library holds a photo of a smiling family from Chicago, taken in 2019. It is the Villalobos family, and it is the mother of the family – Melissa – who was granted a miracle, after crying out for Newman’s intercession during her pregnancy.Following the canonisation of Newman in Rome, the Villalobos family visited Littlemore, met the Sisters, and posed for this photo. It now takes its place among the frames telling the story of Newman’s life.
As we finished off our tea and said goodbye to Sister Anna, promising to visit again soon, and waved to another sister who was doing a spot of gardening, I thought of the final paragraph of “The Parting of Friends”, which I’d reread on our journey to Littlemore that morning.
“And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it.”[1]
Through a pilgrimage to Littlemore, a peaceful afternoon spent walking in the footsteps of this great saint, I had been reminded by Newman’s life and words that there is indeed
‘a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that [we] see’.
St John Henry Newman, ora pro nobis.
[1] Newman Reader - Sermons on Subjects of the Day - Sermon 26
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