Dear John (Henry Newman)

Newman University Church, 87a St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

Dear John,

For five years, you and I had a morning ritual.  By virtue of living next door to the church built with your own funds, I would quietly enter by way of the sacristy, grab the church keys, and head out to the vestibule to open the front doors.  Sometimes I was surprised by what I encountered on the front stoop: homeless Dubliners, occasional sleeping bags, trash from the previous evening's revelers.  And then, after tidying up the entryway, I would head back into the nave of the church.

Often I would take a few minutes to simply sit in a pew, wrapped in solitude, and study your face, carved in marble and quietly presiding from your alcove about halfway down the aisle.  And equally as often, as I looked upon you, I always thought that you were carrying some great burden; your face appeared stoic, grimacing at the task you had been appointed to do.

You had reason for such a countenance.  You were sent over to Ireland as a converted Brit (that, in and of itself, would be a recipe for disaster amongst such a tribe).  You were commissioned to start an Irish Catholic University in a country that was still under the heel of the British Empire, and still coping with a population exodus, the result of widespread famine.  You were advocating higher education in a country that had been deprived of both letters and her own language.  No wonder for the look on your face, as noble as it was, and that it bore the shadow scars of torment and disappointment.

You left Ireland a failure as well, at least in terms of the judgments of your contemporaries.  The Catholic University of Ireland never came to fruition the way you had hoped.  In the end, you had to retreat back to England, where even there, you were shunned by some because of your conversion to the Catholic faith.

But John – the seeds you planted!  What you began on St. Stephen's Green is now commonly acknowledged to be start of Ireland's largest university, University College Dublin (UCD).  The lectures you delivered, which came to be known as "The Idea of a University," have only increased in their amplitude since you first gave them.  Your poetry has found its way into prayer books throughout the world.  (Indeed, it was one of those poem/prayers, "Lead, Kindly Light" that urged me to get to know you more than forty years ago).

So after five years of our little morning meditations together, it came as a total surprise to me that, when attending a wedding last weekend and looking up at that familiar marble bust, I saw the wee hint of a smile.  Not overt, mind you.  But undeniably there.  

Was it because I was sitting in a spot where I usually didn't perch, catching you from a different angle?  Was it the lighting of the day?  I think not for either of these excuses.  Rather, I believe, that after many long years, the fruits of your labour were finally becoming manifest, and that from your eternal reward you could, at last, utter your Nunc Dimitis.

There was no doubt in my mind that I caught the slightest, and yet perceptible, smile upon your face.  And how could you not?  Over the past month, the church was throbbing with life and promise and energy from the weddings of two committed, faith-filled couples.  And those were only the ones I knew of.  

There is reason here to rejoice.

So John, keep this little church of yours blessed with your continued advocacy.  We of the University of Notre Dame, along with parishioners and many other people, have thrown ourselves into the vision of what you created more than one hundred and fifty years ago.  Keep leading us, John.... leading us toward the kindly Light.