OXFORD – “When we know how many good souls would gladly be Catholics if they could,” the wispy white haired Oratorian priest spoke softly into the microphone, “if we are able to put before them one suggestion or another which may not at the moment convince them, which they may think weak even, but which in God’s mercy may be blest to do them good,” he paused, then almost sang, “we really do a good work.”
Seventy-five pilgrims stood outside the Oxford Oratory, listening. It was a quarter past seven on Sunday 8 October, a strangely balmy night for the start of Michaelmas Term. The priest smiled, folded his booklet, and handed the microphone back to one of the two sisters who stood nearby in elegant black skirts and neon reflective vests. We prayed. Then we set out on the four-mile pilgrimage from Oxford to Littlemore, the place where 178 years ago, St John Henry Newman knelt before a Passionist priest, Bl Dominic Barberi, and asked to be received into the Catholic Church.
Newman’s conversion is a long story. The trek that took us three hours took the great theologian forty-four years—decades wrestling through Evangelical and Anglican doctrine and centuries-worth of reading in the Church Fathers. The only one who could summarize the journey is Newman himself, most clearly in the six words he had engraved on his tombstone: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem. Out of shadows and images into truth.
It’s a fitting description of our pilgrimage. The sisters, two members of the small community who steward Newman’s College in Littlemore, led us in retracing his steps up the four-mile, fifty-foot ascent. We were a motley procession—students schlepping backpacks, schoolmasters wearing tweed suits, Franciscans in grey habits and Oratorians in black, parishioners walking bikes, pious old ladies clacking their hiking poles over the cobblestones. We wound our way, silent, through the sleeping spires.
Past the wrought-iron gates of Trinity College, where Newman was an undergraduate, beside the dimpled archways of the Old Bodleian library, skirting around the triumphant turquoise dome of the Radcliffe Camera, to the ancient vaults of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, where Newman served as vicar from 1828 to 1843 – where he delivered his famous sermons in a musical voice that left Matthew Arnold aghast, singing that “silver, cloistered veined prose” that James Joyce envied.
The same wispy-haired Oratorian read excerpts from Newman’s sermons and letters at every stop. He shared something of Newman’s singsong intonation, even more of his holy stoop, caricatured so memorably by Vanity Fair in the 1870s. Maybe it was the romance of the evening, charged as it was by the intoxicating start of term, but for a moment, I felt like we were walking through Newman’s Oxford.
Our pilgrimage dissolved into his. Our feet walked across the same stones; our eyes soared heavenward along the same storied spires, reaching lovingly for the stars. Tipsy undergraduates stumbled into the same streets from the same college halls, “drink, drink, drink”, as Newman wrote wryly when at Trinity. Oxford embraced us with her time-sunken, stone-wrought reality that seemed to resist the corrosion of years.
Then we crossed the High Street. Deliveroo motorcyclists careened through our procession, strung out across the crosswalk by traffic lights. Club music pounded from bars, digital timetables flashed apoplectically, neon signs blared, buses roared, plastered with movie posters and insurance adverts and Well-Woman vitamin models with bleached blonde hair and perfect teeth. Newman’s Oxford retreated under the noisy assault, the new reality pulling us out of the old one.
We stood outside Oriel College, where Newman was elected a fellow in 1822, and strained to hear the priest. The now-famous statue of Cecil Rhodes loomed overhead. We shuffled a few hundred yards down the High and gathered at the old site of the Angel Inn, razed and replaced by the Examination Schools in the late 1870s, where Bl Dominic boarded his coach to Littlemore in the pouring rain. Reading his own account of that night, we tried to imagine ourselves two centuries older and dripping wet. We succeeded, at least insofar as we attracted some strange looks from midriff-bare passerby.
“Hey!! Are you happy?! You look like a happy procession!!” A man in tight black jeans and a worn fedora shouted across Iffley Road twenty minutes later. We were halfway through the walk, pushing nine o’clock, plodding silently and steadily toward Rose Hill. “Are you happy with the state of society?!” He kept yelling. We kept walking. “You all look… You all look—” (his friend tried to tug him away from the curb) “—strangely normal…” He trailed off, then trailed behind, then disappeared. We marched on. Eyes down, some fingering rosaries, we followed the sisters’ sure strides.
Just how strangely normal our procession was—this attempt to lay our pilgrimage under Newman’s, to climb fifty-feet and two centuries from one reality into another—stood out in sharper relief as we neared Littlemore. We made the last ascent up Rose Hill, passing the houses where Newman’s sister and mother lived. We carried candles past the neon-lit Papa John’s pizza parlour, singing “Lead, Kindly Light.” We processed with a wooden crucifix through the Eastern By-Pass tunnel, between walls shouting at us in seedy graffiti.
When we finally reached the parish church across from Newman’s College, and knelt in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, I felt like we had broken the surface after three hours of swimming through oil-and-water tides. Like a piercing rush of air, the one permanent Presence swept over and into us, cor ad cor.
“In the Catholic Church,” Newman wrote in his Apologia nine years after his conversion, “I recognised at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought… my mind fell back upon itself and relaxation and in peace. And I gaze at her almost passively as a great objective fact.” Ex umbris et imaginibus—from Oxford to Littlemore.
After adoration, all seventy-five of us squeezed into Newman’s library at the College, where he met Barberi and began the long general confession that lasted a night and a morning. We sang a final hymn, kissed one Newman’s relics, and adjourned to the courtyard for biscuits and tea. We caught cars and buses back to Oxford, whipping downhill on the same route we had walked. We were back in the city centre in ten minutes.
It was strangely normal, plunging back into that emulsion of silent castles and noisy crowds after breaking through to heavenly realities at Littlemore. I was reluctant to leave. But I suppose if Newman’s life teaches one thing, it’s that it’s precisely the shadows that make the light lead so kindly, the noise that makes the quiet voice, and the still silent centre, sing.
The destination of the annual Newman walk, after all, is conversion. For reasons clear only to the Providence that determines all steps, shadows are our way to truth. And if our procession attracts strange looks en route, then at least, God willing, it will make a good suggestion.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.