Newman's View of America

Newman's View of America Benjamin J. King (bio) Delivered as the Keynote Lecture for the 2019 Fall Newman Symposium at the National Institute for Newman Studies Newman never set foot on american soil, but in 1846 he received a series of letters from America written by Thomas Francis Knox, a twenty-four-yearold Englishman,1 who like Newman had been received into the Catholic Church the previous year. Thanks to the Digital Collections of the National Institute for Newman Studies, anyone can now read Knox's letters. I begin with them because they gave Newman an account of life on the ground for American Catholics in the mid nineteenth century, and I argue that Newman wanted to know what American life was like because he long considered sending missionaries to the United States of America. Knox had explained that his mother and father were worried that their son would lose all status in Protestant society if he entered holy orders in the Catholic Church, so they wanted him before making his decision to "spend the next year or two travelling in Canada & the United States."2 Newman considered Knox such "a great accession to our party"3 that he hoped during "2 years in America … he will convert all" the young men disaffected with the Episcopal Church of the USA to Catholicism.4 Knox's American letters are full of fascinating stories of his travels and the people he encountered. Living as I do in Tennessee, I was struck by Knox's journeying before the railroad: he went from Columbia, South Carolina to Nashville, Tennessee at the average speed of 3 ¼ miles an hour (Knox himself recognized it was painfully slow!). I was also struck that, although he spent time on a plantation, he never gave a commentary on the slavery that he saw throughout the South.5 Those from Pittsburgh might like to know that "Bp. O'Connor received [Knox] most cordially … He has a large cathedral capable of holding [End Page 145] many people. It has the universal fault of the Church in America, viz. a meagre sanctuary."6 Like many Cambridge University graduates at the time, Knox thought of English church architecture as superior to American and commented that "the Americans want a Catholic Camden Society not a little."7 He was equally opinionated against the Episcopal Church and regretted the Protestant influence that being a former British colony had wrought on America. In a letter to Newman on the Fourth of July the following year from a seminary outside Paris, Knox explained that he had decided to enter holy orders when he was saved through his prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary from a shipwreck off Mexico in which most of those traveling in his part of the steamship had been lost.8 He would join Newman in Rome to present the brief for the English Oratorians in December 1847, becoming one of its founding members at Maryvale in 1848, before moving to London to help establish the Oratory there in 1849—the year he was ordained a priest. We do not know what Newman thought of any of these American opinions because his replies focused almost entirely on the news Knox gave him about reactions to An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, writing from Boston of Orestes Brownson's criticism, which Knox tried to counter, and from Philadelphia of Bishop Francis Kenrick's view that "Brownson had not given a wholly true representation of your book & … that the theory (in the sense of course in which he understood it) might be substantially Catholic."9 However, one letter in which Newman commented on Knox's news about Brownson provides an insight into our subject's view of America: Newman imagined the Essay "may be too ultramontane for our American friends—and too much representing the Church etc against the Governments."10 Newman thought that Americans, even Catholic ones, prized their democratic system too much to appreciate his ecclesiastical theory (although Francis Kenrick's words to Knox and then in a Pastoral Letter show this was not the case).11 So let us begin with Newman's view about American democracy. [End Page...

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