Works of Cardinal Newman: Birmingham Oratory Millennium Edition – serie

Newman was told that Catholic priests do not read sermons, but this does not mean that he made them up as he went along. He planned his Catholic sermons as meticulously as he did his famous Parochial and Plain, but he committed them to memory and then he made notes afterwards. His sermons, delivered over a period of thirty years, provide some fascinating insights into his active mind and the range of subjects he covered within the framework of the Church's liturgical year. James Mozley, writing in 1946, said, "A sermon of Mr. Newman's enters into our feelings, ideas, and modes of viewing things. Persons look into Mr. Newman's sermons and see their own thoughts in them." Unpublished for ninety years, Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman shows Newman's brilliant mind at work.

John Henry Newman's The Church of the Fathers contains some of his earliest writings on fourth-century Christianity. Composed at about the same time as The Arians of the Fourth Century and the first Tracts of the Oxford Movement, this polemical book was aimed at the general reader and is filled with extracts from Patristic writings.In 1833 British Parliament enacted the controversial Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which proposed abolishing ten of the twenty-two sees of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Newman accused the State of violating the ancient doctrine of Apostolic Succession. In The Church of the Fathers, Newman draws parallels between the situation facing the Church in the fourth century and the Anglican Church in his day.Published here for the first time in more than a century, this edition of The Church of the Fathers reunites material that had become separated in ongoing republications of Newman's works. The text and appendices also contain original Newman material that has never before been published.

Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, volume VII in the Birmingham Oratory Millenium Edition, is a collection of six articles, which were written between 1835, after the publication of The Arians of the Fourth Century, and 1866, when, as a Roman Catholic, Newman contributed a review to the Jesuit periodical The Month. Two of these articles appeared as Tracts for the Times; two are a series of letters to a newspaper. The letters discuss the nature of scientific knowledge as a quasi-substitute for faith, and the nature of the balance between executive power and democratic constraints. The opening essay, in the imaginary setting of the Roman forum, is a discussion between three friends of the nature of the via media, its shortcomings, and how it can be made to work. This book has been unavailable for many years and contains some of Newman's best and most amusing writing, scattered throughout with historical and literary references, which have been extensively researched for the modern reader in this edition.

For the first time, the majority of John Henry Cardinal Newman's contributions to the ground-breaking series Tracts for the Times have been collected in one volume, with an introduction and notes supplied by James Tolhurst. The Tracts for the Times will always be connected with the Oxford Movement. John Henry Newman and other leaders of the movement sought a renewal of "catholic," or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church of England. They published their ideas on the theological, pastoral, and devotional problems that they perceived within the church in ninety "Tracts for the Times" (1833-1841). Newman, who edited the series, either wrote or compiled a third of the tracts. Increasingly, the tracts were expanded into treatises—especially after Tract 36—and were often composed of quotations from patristic writers and the English Divines. Tracts 83 and 85 are included in Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, volume VII of the Birmingham Oratory Millennium Edition of his works. Tracts 74, 76, and 88 have been omitted here. In Tract 75, the introductory explanation of the breviary has been included.

It may seem surprising to discover that a Catholic cardinal was a novelist, and Newman advanced this as an obstacle to his own canonization: "Saints are not literary men," he wrote, "they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales." He was only fit "to black the saints' shoes—if Saint Philip uses blacking, in heaven." The background to Loss and Gain was a controversial one. Newman wrote the book in part to provide a title for publication by James Burns, of the later celebrated firm of Burns and Oates, who had lost his stable of Anglican authors by converting in 1847 to Catholicism. An understanding of the novel requires some knowledge of its Oxford background, of the university setting, which was compared in the fierceness of its loyalties by Newman's friend Richard Church to a Renaissance Italian city, implying an assassin with a stiletto round every corner. In short, there is a sense in which, in spite of its fictional character, Loss and Gain is a work of controversy, full of echoes of old battles over whether the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer should be interpreted in a "Catholic" or a "Protestant" sense. It is a response, like Newman's other works, to a challenge, and so its hero, Charles Reding, as a student in Oxford, passes through the hands of the representatives of a number of Anglican parties and schools of theology before resolving his doubts in Rome.

In November 1851, John Henry Newman was appointed President of the new Catholic University of Ireland, with a vague brief as to structure and personnel. He commented, "I mean to be Chancellor, Rector, Provost, Professor, Tutor all at once, and no one else anything." He had to wait until June 1854 for the bishops to approve the university's statutes before he was installed as Rector. The first eight sermons collected in this volume were preached during Mass in the University Church on St Stephen's Green between May 4, 1856, and February 22, 1857. By the time the first edition of Sermons Preached on Various Occasions was published, Newman had already written to the Irish bishops that he intended to resign in November 1857—he was finally convinced that his seven-year commitment to Ireland was sufficient. He was to leave behind not only the nascent new Catholic University, but also the University Church, designed by his friend John Hungerford Pollen, and which he had paid for himself. The remaining sermons were written for the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, the Risorgimento in Italy and its repercussions on the papacy, and the death of two friends, Dr. Weedall and James Hope Scott. The sermons on the situation of the church in England and Wales, and then of the papacy itself in Italy, reflect a redefinition of the role of Catholicism in the development of the modern world.