Cardinal John Henry Newman - his influence in Sri Lanka

By Professor S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole

(March 14, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Three Sundays ago (February. 21), a kindly retired priest next to me at church gently reminded me that it is Cardinal John Newman
Day, in celebration of Newman’s birth in 1801. In September Newman will be beatified - that is, “the official act of the pope whereby a deceased person is declared to be enjoying the happiness of heaven, and therefore a proper subject of religious honour and public cult in certain places.”

Ordained an Anglican priest in 1825, Newman’s influence across the ecclesiastical spectrum is so wide that it is said that it would be presumptuous if any single communion claims him entirely for its own. For Rome’s Second Vatican Council, Newman is said to have been its ecumenical guide and moral preceptor. At the same time, it is said that the average evangelical services are conducted today, as Newman would have liked. There is hardly a university without a Newman Centre.

Newman’s emphasis on the conscience made him take his Church of England towards Rome. The watch-phrase was that the Protestant Reformation had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Their Oxford Movement, so named because many of its members were from Oxford University, was also known as The Tractarians because of their extensive use of tracts and as Newmanites showing Newman’s influence in its formation.

The Oxford Movement in 1833 began a Catholic Revival in Anglicanism because since the rift with Rome early in the sixteenth century, the Puritans (hardline Protestants) had rid Anglicanism of many Catholic articles of religion, influenced by continental reformers. The Newmanites argued for the re-inclusion of traditional catholic faith erroneously jettisoned in the heat of the Reformation. They saw Anglicanism as a third branch of the Catholic Church along with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. In this view, the Anglican Communion never rejected its Catholic roots because Britain parted from Rome for political reasons unlike the Germans (Luther), French (Calvin) and Swiss (Zwingli) who parted for theological reasons.

Arguing for the reinstatement of Roman Catholic practices in the Anglican Church at some point made it impossible for Newman to reconcile Episcopal authority with Anglicanism. In 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and admitted to Roman holy orders in 1846. He was made Cardinal in Rome in 1879. Many in the Oxford movement had preceded him into the Roman Church and many followed him. The Oxford Movement itself was continued by other leaders like Edward Pusey. Newman lived a celibate life even as an Anglican, practising a monastic life. Many Anglican traditionalists felt betrayed by Newman’s defection to Rome.

Given up things of value

Newman’s great mind was felt everywhere, even in Sri Lanka. The idea that the English Reformation had given up things of value now gripped every Protestant mind. Sri Lankan missionaries had generally been protestant Methodists or from the Anglicans’ Church Missionary Society (CMS) characterized by Protestant (i.e. Low Church) practices. The great mission schools were by them. As Church of Ceylon records show, the bishops of this low-Church persuasion, soon gave way after Newman to High Church bishops who advanced Catholic teachings. I have seen an old prayer book connected to Pusey (with rubrics on when to cross ourselves and quietly say Hail Mary three times). It was promoted by one of these bishops and is still privately used by some Anglicans.

The Rev. Robert Pargiter who came as a Methodist Missionary to Sri Lanka joined the Anglican Church and was principal of St. John’s College, Jaffna (1846-66). My own ancestor, the Rev. Elijah Hoole (not to be confused with the great Methodist missionary working in Madras by that name after whom he was named) had been converted at the Methodist’s Hartley College, Point Pedro.

He was switched to Anglicanism around 1850 and worked as Tamil Pandit at St. John’s College (named after St. John the Evangelist) and later as native Pastor of the Church of St. John the Baptist, Chundicully. Even as Methodists were influenced by the Oxford Movement to see the Anglican Church as a half-way house between Methodism and Rome, others became outright Roman Catholics. We read of J. Rowley Smythe of the Ceylon Civil Service in Jaffna being received into the Roman Catholic Church with fanfare on December 8, 1869 by Rev. Fr. G. Salaun, OMI.

The greatest catch of all was the Rev. Peter Percival. He had gone to Bengal as a Methodist missionary in 1826 and was sent to Jaffna where he set up the Methodists’ premier Jaffna Central School (now Central College). Here he chaired the Tamil Bible Translation project revising the Tamil Bible, having received the authority to do so from the British Bible Society, chairing the committee of six missionaries assisted by Tamil Pandits Elijah Hoole and Arumuka Navalar. At the end of the project in 1850, Percival returned to England and, now a high-church Anglican priest, was sent to Madras by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (or SPG) in 1852 where he worked at Madras University.

The SPG was founded in 1701 by the Bishop of London for work in the Americas. The founders were on the Catholic rather than protestant side of Anglicanism and gave the society its own distinctive high-church understanding of its missionary vocation.

According to Daniel O’Connor, this understanding was of an episcopally governed church working in close collaboration with the state, and a parochial system with an ordered liturgical and sacramental life and systematic education and catechesis.

O’Conner says the society’s name consciously echoed the Roman Catholic “Propaganda Fide” of 1622. Despite its stress on “pastoral care, social action and supporting training programmes,” the SPG had a blemished record of owning slaves into the early nineteenth century where the death rate of slaves on SPG plantations - 4 out of 10 slaves within 3 years of arrival - was higher than on southern US plantations. As the US was shut to Anglican missionary activity after independence, the SPG was in decline.

Slavery

The Evangelicals led by William Wilberforce’s group in the British Parliament rid the British Empire of slavery. Under the influence of the Oxford movement, the SPG was a new vibrant movement, reliving its principles of service by converting drunken British dockworkers to Anglo-Catholic Christianity. Although Newman was gone, his movement within Anglicanism was afire. The SPG would in 1851 found St. Thomas’ College, perhaps the most socially sought after school in Sri Lanka. The Church of England and Henry VIII hanged Sir Thomas More as a traitor and after Rome canonized him in 1935, it took 45 years for Anglicans to add him to the Anglican Calendar of Saints and Heroes of the Christian Church. Admirers of Newman hope not to wait that long to see Newman recognized for his contributions to Anglican thought and life.