Newman, John Henry 21, 1801, to a conventional Anglican family, neither too high church nor too low church Although it was a religious household, there was little to suggest the extraordinary career Newman would have in his later years In 1816 Newman entered Trinity College, Oxford Thus began what would become almost three decades of educational, pastoral, and intellectual work in that celebrated university In 1822 Newman won a fellowship to Oriel, at that time Oxford’s most prestigious college Becoming vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in 1828, he began to attract a large following who came to listen to his sermons Preached in a soft, melodious voice, Newman’s sermons appealed to Oxford students and High Street shopkeepers, to intellectuals and common folk These would be collected in later years in the multivolume Plain and Parochial Sermons In Oriel’s senior common room, Newman came into contact with some of the men who would become the most important leaders of the Oxford Tractarian Movement, which was launched in 1833 The immediate catalyst for this religious movement (more commonly known as the Oxford Movement) was the coming to power of a new parliament in 1831 With the threat of government interference in ecclesiastical affairs, coupled with a poorly educated clergy and lukewarm congregations, some Oxford intellectuals began to speak out in pulpit and on the printed page The movement’s chief weapon was the published tract, hence the name for its proponents, Tractarians Meanwhile, Newman was touring Europe Falling ill at sea in the summer of 1833, he penned the verses for which he is famous: Lead, Kindly Light He hastened back to Oxford in time to hear John Keble preach a sermon On the National Apostasy, which for Newman was to signal the beginning of the Oxford Movement, a movement forever associated with the name of Newman In all, 90 Tracts for the Times were published from 1833 to 1841, of which he wrote 29 It was his Tract 90 that provoked a storm of controversy and ended the series Newman’s association with such high church Anglicans as Keble and Edward Pusey was to shape his theological orientation In his own words, it checked his drifting toward the liberalism of the day Newman was against liberalism in religion, not in politics Liberalism was, to him, “the anti-dogmatic principle,” the principle that “there is no positive truth in religion, but one creed is as good as another, and all are to be tolerated since all are matters of opinion.” Newman’s first book, The 307 Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), is notable for his insistence on the necessity of dogma Indeed, it was his study of early church history that provoked his own intellectual and spiritual crisis What began as a study of the early church fathers, with a view toward justifying the Anglican via media (middle way) between Catholicism and Protestantism, was turning into, first, unease over the Anglican position, and then a positive doubt In the spring of 1839 the Oxford Movement was at its height, but Newman himself was on the verge of a change of heart He penned the tract The State of Religious Parties, which would be (in his own words) “the last words which I ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans.” This article ended with the rhetorical question: “Would you rather have your sons and daughters members of the Church of England or of the Church of Rome?” But from then on, until 1843, he “wished to benefit the Church of England, without prejudice to the Church of Rome.” The year 1841 saw the publication of Tract 90, which argued that the Anglican 39 Articles could be interpreted in a Roman Catholic sense The storm of indignation from many quarters that this tract produced eventually led to Newman’s resignation as head of the Oxford Movement Preferring silence and withdrawal, Newman retired to the village of Littlemore, just outside Oxford, where he continued his reading and study By 1843 he made a formal retraction of his verbal polemics against the Roman Catholic Church and resigned the vicarship of St Mary’s For two more years, he quietly lived as an Anglican layman He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in October 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian passionist He left Oxford for good the following year; it would be many years before he would see the old university again In 1846 Newman was in Rome to study, before his ordination to the Catholic priesthood the following year Returning to England, he would spend most of the remainder of his life in the house of the Oratorians in Birmingham If Newman was a controversialist and outspoken theological adversary in his Anglican period, he was no less so as a Catholic priest In 1850, for example, England was in a no popery period, which was a reaction to the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy by Rome Awarded a papal doctorate of divinity for his Lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church, he was henceforth to be called Dr Newman until the time he was made cardinal