ABSTRACT
Throughout his travels to Italy in the early 1830s, John Henry Newman reacted strongly against the foreignness of the saints. Just over a decade later, he had come to embrace the Catholic saints, writing and publishing with 13 of his colleagues a 14-volume set of books titled Lives of the English Saints.1 Newman’s encounters with the saints thus bookend his career as one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Moreover, as we will see in letters that Newman composed at the time of his involvement with this series and later in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, even as late as the early 1840s he continued to have a mixed response to the saints. He felt pulled on the one hand by the call of Anglican orthodoxy, which insisted that the Roman Catholic practice of “saint worship” violated both Scripture and the dictates of conscience; on the other, he was drawn to the Catholic understanding of the saints for the continuity with the past that they offered. Thus in Newman’s life and thought, we see the widening of available ways of believing that characterized the first half of the nineteenth century. From his fear of the foreign saints of Roman Catholicism in 1832 to his embracing of the Catholic saints a decade later, Newman’s career illustrates the spectrum of belief stances that were becoming available to the Victorians.
