Apologia Pro Vita Sua

He wrote it in a white heat, weeping at the desk.

He called it Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a defense of his life.

England read it a week at a time and changed its mind.

the man who'd been a national byword for slipperiness, turned out to have kept everything.

Yeah, St. John Henry Newman is my confirmation saint.

Uh, I read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua back in 2019, and that's when the, the wheels really started turning for me, when I started thinking about whether the Church was, and its claims were true.

Um, so yeah, I, and I have, I have a more cerebral devotion to him in a way.

Um, I have-

And his influence, when I wrote my book Literary Converts, his influence over the whole host of converts to the Catholic faith from the 1850s, 1840s right through to, you know, well after the Second World War, and indeed today.

I mean, I, I'm, I'm, I'm not worthy to be considered in the same breath as, as these great writers, but reading Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua was an, a major milestone on my own conversion back in the 1980s.

So, you know, his influence just palpitates and resonates down the centuries since, since his own reception into the Church.

The beautiful preface that you had and also The Heart of Newman is very encouraging for us today because sometimes when we think of John Henry Newman, there's a fear to go near him because he seems as though he's operating all out of the head.

When, when I was exploring Catholicism myself, you know, in the days before my conversion, you know, it, it very c- It became clear to me very quickly, of course, that Newman was a giant figure in Catholicism within the context of, of the English Catholic revival.

A giant, indeed the founder, f-father of that.

I wanted to read Newman, and when I picked up his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, it absolutely blew me away because he systematically demolishes the arguments against Catholicism so that, you know, all of my own questions were being answered and all of my own, my, my own sort of doubts and misunderstandings about Catholicism were being swept away just by the majesty of this man's prose and the majesty of his mind and the accessibility of, uh, you know, of his heart and head.

So h-having read that, it, it was very difficult to do anything but, but take the obvious next step, which was reception into the Church.

He then traveled to Rome for further studies, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, and returned to Birmingham, England, to form the Birmingham Oratory of St. Philip Neri in 1848.

In the years that followed, Father Newman helped found the Catholic University of Ireland and published the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a theological defense of his personal conversion.

He also published several other works, including The Idea of a University, in which he especially articulates the purpose of a university.

He argued that a university was not just to teach useful knowledge, but to cultivate the mind in its pursuit of knowledge, ultimately arriving at a great and firm belief in the sovereignty of truth.

He was addressing the foundation of a new university in Ireland.

He was, um, you know, giving an apology for his life, an Apologia Pro Vita, because he'd been attacked by, uh, Charles Kingsley.

Um, he was, uh, preparing for the f- for the First Vatican Council, writing about infallibility.

So everything, everything in his life, he was writing for a purpose.