Quote of the Day (R.W. Church, on Cardinal Newman)

“Cardinal Newman is dead, and we lose in him not only one of the very greatest masters of English style, not only an eminent example of personal sanctity, but the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it. What the Church of England would have become without the Tractarian movement we can faintly guess, and of the Tractarian movement Newman was the living soul and the inspiring genius. Great as his services have been to the communion in which he died, they are as nothing by the side of those he rendered to the communion in which the most eventful years of his life were spent….He will be mourned by many in the Roman Church, but their sorrow will be less than ours, because they have not the same paramount reason to be grateful to him.”—R.W. Church, in The Guardian, August 13, 1890, quoted in Nicholas Lash, “Waiting for Dr. Newman,” America, February 1-8, 2010

John Henry Cardinal Newman died of pneumonia at age 89 on this date in 1890, having resoundingly responded to aspersions on his character and that of Roman Catholicism with his autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua. His influence was also powerfully felt in his own day—and continues to be—with The Idea of a University.