This seemed like an important work when I was in college, and still a Roman Catholic, but I can't recall it's details now. ( )

This book belongs to that small subset of the memoir genre, spiritual autobiography. How does one make drama of one’s personal faith and change of allegiance? Although Newman writes at length in an orotund, full-blown Victorian style, the book held my interest in all but the driest passages.
The occasion for this book was a gratuitous attack on Newman by Charles Kingsley in an unrelated book review, followed by an unsatisfactory public exchange of letter and pamphlet. Newman felt the misrepresentation of what he believed severe enough to warrant this lengthy defense. However, he avers that his purpose is not to defend himself as much as the Roman church’s priesthood, membership, and teachings.
I write “Roman” church on purpose. Newman, with few exceptions, distinguishes in his book between the terms Catholic and Roman. “Catholic” means for him the universal church, of which Roman Catholicism was a part, as was the Eastern Orthodox tradition. He also long held the belief that the Anglican church (though not continental Protestants) was as well, though he abandoned this conviction.
One hundred and fifty years later, it seems to this reader that Kingsley came off the worse in this exchange. He is blind to the degree to which his anti-Roman bias causes him to misunderstand. Bon mots such as “While [Newman] tried to destroy others’ reason, he was at least fair enough to destroy his own” miss the mark. He doesn’t help his case by being so intemperate.
While he has the better of this controversy, Newman is also a problematic figure to me. His is a profoundly conservative, reticent nature. His turn to Rome came because he lost confidence that the Anglican church could successfully oppose what he calls Liberalism (aka, so Newman, “the spirit of Antichrist”). By this, he not only means the political program that went under that name in the nineteenth century but also developments in theology such as higher criticism. The inevitable result, Newman is convinced, is atheism, and Rome is the only bulwark against it. In his mind, he converted in the interest of Truth (written, as he did, with a capital T). From the perspective of a time when even conservative Bible scholars accept many of the results of higher criticism as true (small “t”), it seems tragic that such a fine mind should adopt, as Newman did, this bunker mentality. ( )

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