My Campaign in Ireland Part II

My Campaign in Ireland Part II: My Connection with the Catholic University. EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY PAUL SHRIMPTON. Newman Millennium Edition Volume XVII. London: Gracewing Press, 2022. cxv + 544 pages. Hardback: £35. ISBN 978 085244 966 0.

My Campaign in Ireland Part I documents Newman’s educational principles and his practical plans and structures for his Irish project. In this second volume is analysis of Newman’s attempt to establish a Catholic university in Ireland, Paul Shrimpton demonstrates scholarship of a very high order. Analysis, even forensic analysis, is the right term. In his long Editor’s Introduction to the two hitherto unpublished documents (“Memorandum about my Connection with the Catholic University” and “Extracts from Letters”) Shrimpton notes that Newman left a record of his plans, aspirations, frustrations, and disappointments in respect of this failed project, and patiently explains their origin and contextualizes them historically. This allows a balancing voice to those unsympathetic to Newman’s side of the story. Newman’s critics of the time called him, among other things, incompetent, touchy and stubborn. Shrimpton pays particular attention to Colin Barr’s counterpoint account in Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman and the Catholic University of Ireland 1845 – 1865 (2003).

The drama of this book involves these two central characters, Newman and the Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen. They were very different personalities with fundamentally different aims in respect to the proposed university – Cullen came to regret his invitation to Newman of undertaking the project. The conflict grounded in their different ambitions is set as the foreground to a conflict on bigger issues: English vs. Irish, Irish national outlook vs. European outlook, seminary vs. university, utilitarians vs. ecclesiastics, Rome vs. Louvain, ultramontane vs. cisalpine, and above all, clerical vs. lay. One validation of this analysis is that some of these conflicts remain unresolved today. Shrimpton’s assemblage of a wide critical perspective and his exhaustive and learned notes to the “Memorandum” and the “Extracts” elucidate new evidence and offer a fresh intimacy on Newman’s character.

Shrimpton acknowledges that Cullen, whose first loyalty was to Rome, was managing a complex situation: an Ireland still ruled from Westminster, the social consequences of Catholic Emancipation, the social disruption of the potato famine, Roman opposition to the new non-denominational Queen’s Colleges in Ireland and, division among the Irish bishops on the right educational program for the Irish church. Cullen conceived of the university as more of a seminary, whereas Newman took as his model the Catholic University at Louvain, which offered an intellectual, cultural and moral education for the laity based in universal knowledge. Newman wanted to avoid Irish national and ecclesiastical politics; Cullen thought there was too much Oxford in Newman’s plans, that Newman espoused too liberal a discipline scheme for Irish students, and among other things, he complained that Newman was too heavy on expenses. Cullen appointed a vice-rector of a stripe different from Newman’s without even consulting him, having concluded that Irish affairs should be managed by Irishmen. The strain under which he worked caused Cullen to have a nervous breakdown in 1855.

Cullen, Shrimpton recognizes, achieved many positive things for the Irish church, but his wily manipulation of committees and their resolutions (“adept at obstruction” as Shrimpton puts it) and his implacable distrust of any lay involvement in the governance of church affairs (including the university project) struck at one of Newman’s fundamental principles. Shrimpton suggests that, ultimately, the failure of the project probably lies less in an apportionment of blame to either Cullen or Newman, than in the apathy of the educated Irish laity, they who had capacity to support Newman’s plans more forcefully.

Nevertheless, Newman, as Shrimpton tells us in his introduction, was frankly scathing of Cullen’s conduct and mindset in the “Memorandum” (Newman’s scrap summary of 1872 is set out on page xcvii of the Introduction). On page xcviii we find quoted the full force of Newman’s frustration:

“Dr Cullen has no notion at all of treating me with any confidence. He grants me nothing; and I am resolute that I will have all I want, and more than I have yet asked for. . . he has never done anything but take my letters, crumple them up, put them into the fire and write no answer. And so with everything else. . . He is perfectly impracticable.”

Cullen from the first treated him as a “scrub”, he writes; “. . . my Superiors, though they may claim my obedience, have no claim on my admiration, and offer nothing for my inward trust” (quoted on page cix). Cullen’s frustration of the pope’s intention (communicated in congratulatory letters sent by Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop Manning, and Bishop Ullathorne) to make Newman a bishop at the inauguration of the project, is recorded in the “Memorandum” as a particular wound.

The table of contents to this volume sets out a clear organization of the disparate material out of which the story is told, and there is a comprehensive index at the end, locating the place of individuals and themes in the text. While the book is aimed at the reader with a serious academic interest in the significance of the Dublin University episode in Newman’s life, it offers for the general reader with an interest in mid-nineteenth-century Catholic affairs and their place in the political activities of the Vatican and of the British government of the time access to original and hitherto unpublished biographical detail on its two principal protagonists. While its scholarly apparatus and footnotes are necessarily detailed and extensive, its base material (both the editor’s and Newman’s) is readable and stylish. This book is a valuable contribution to Newman studies.