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The Cardinal Newman Society’s soon-to-be canonized patron

Zoey Maraist | Catholic Herald Staff Writer

Patrick Reilly sits in the office of the Manassas-based Cardinal Newman Society, which he founded in 1993. COURTESY

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Patrick Reilly was excited to study at a
Catholic university — to spend four years learning philosophy, theology and
ethics, and to meet and grow in the faith with fellow Catholics. But the
experience didn’t match his expectations. There were a lot of good things about
the college, he said, but a lot of disappointments, too. He was taught by a
theology professor who disagreed openly with the church. Many of the students
were more into partying than attending Sunday Mass. There was a pro-choice club
that was approved by the administration. 

“I’m by nature quiet and introverted and
wasn’t inclined to speaking out, but I started asking why these things were
being promoted at a Catholic university?” said Reilly, a parishioner of St.
Andrew the Apostle Church in Clifton. 

After college, he attended graduate
school in Washington. There, he met alumni from other Catholic colleges who had
the same experience as he did. So, in 1993, he started the Cardinal Newman
Society
, an organization dedicated to promoting and defending faithful Catholic
education. 

The society’s patron, Cardinal John
Henry Newman, was a British scholar, philosopher, writer and Anglican priest
before he became Catholic. He spent much of his life at Oxford University as
both a student and a fellow. As an Anglican priest, he was the vicar at a
university church. After he became Catholic, he founded the Oratory of St.
Philip Neri in Birmingham, England, and a Catholic university in Dublin. Many
of his ideas on higher education are in his book, “The Idea of a
University,” based on lectures he gave in the 1850s.

“Newman, perhaps more than anybody,
studied the essence of Catholic education as focused on truth,” said Reilly.
“(He) made the argument that because a university is focused on teaching truth
in all the various disciplines, the only complete, authentic university would
be one that teaches theology because once you exclude one branch of knowledge,
you’re limiting the university.”

The work of the Cardinal Newman Society,
based in Manassas, has evolved over time, according to Reilly. Throughout the
years, the society has called to task Catholic universities that invited
speakers or sponsored events at odds with Catholic teaching. 

Around the time the Cardinal Newman
Society began, Pope John Paul II issued “Ex Corde
Ecclesiae,” an apostolic constitution on the role and mission of
Catholic universities. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops invited the
society to consult on the guidelines for the national implementation of the
document, said Reilly. 

In 2007, they released the first Newman
Guide to Choosing a Catholic College, highlighting several colleges with strong
Catholic identities. They now also have a Catholic Education Honor Roll that
recognizes elementary and high schools, including Bishop O’Connell High School
in Arlington, St. Rita School in Alexandria and Seton School in Manassas. 

Currently, they’re working on the
Catholic Identity Standards Project — a guide to what the church teaches about
every aspect of Catholic education, including admissions, athletics, curriculum
and personnel.  Reilly said as the
culture continues to secularize, schools are facing public criticism and even
legal action for certain policies, especially those related to human sexuality.

“It’s a service to Catholic education to
help navigate these very difficult issues, to be able to demonstrate to the
courts and to the general public, which may not agree with Catholic teaching,
that this is necessary in order for us to be Catholic,” said Reilly. “We have
to do it compassionately and pastorally, in a way that is sensitive to
everyone’s circumstances without giving up our Catholic beliefs.”

Reilly will go on a pilgrimage to Rome
with other staffers and society supporters for the canonization of Cardinal
Newman Oct. 13. While there, they plan to see some of the places that the
future saint visited during his four trips to the Eternal City, including the
chapel where he was ordained to the priesthood. Cardinal Newman’s work in
education, within the church and the larger culture, makes him the perfect
saint for our day, said Reilly.

“At his time in England in the 19th
century was just when the whole technological revolution was getting underway.
There was a great emphasis on science and moving away from religion; relativism
was becoming very big,” he said. “What he was battling in those days was the
beginning of what we have today, this very secular society. That’s why he was
so committed to education.

“He was decidedly against a blind faith —
he wanted Catholics, as much as possible, to use our reason to understand what
it is that we believe,” said Reilly. “I would think he would want the laity to
really be asking God to open our minds and open our hearts to a full
understanding of what God wants for us.”

Catholics News Service contributed to this article.

John Henry Newman

Cardinal John Henry Newman was born Feb.
21, 1801, in London, the eldest of six children. His parents John and Jemima
Newman were members of the Church of England. At the age of 16, Newman became
an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. After his undergraduate studies,
he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, at the time the leading
college of the university. He was ordained a priest in Christ Church Cathedral
by the Bishop of Oxford May 29, 1825, and became curate of St. Clement’s
Church, Oxford. Newman and associates embarked on what would be known as the
Oxford Movement, a challenge to the status quo of the Christian establishment
in England. 

When studying the history of the early
Church Fathers, Newman was perturbed to discover that the doctrinal position of
the Anglican Church in his own day bore a close resemblance to some of the
heretical currents that had emerged in early centuries. Newman moved with a few
companions to modest lodgings in the village of Littlemore, where he lived a
quasi-monastic life, praying for guidance. He converted to Catholicism in 1845
and was later ordained to the priesthood. 

With the approval of Pope Pius IX, Father
Newman established the first Oratory of St. Philip Neri in the English-speaking
world at Maryvale near Birmingham, Feb. 1, 1848. In 1854, the bishops of
Ireland appointed Father Newman as rector of the new Catholic University of
Ireland, now University College Dublin, where he stayed for four years. Pope
Leo XIII, admiring Father Newman’s fierce religious orthodoxy, created him a
cardinal in 1879. He died at the age of 89 Aug. 11, 1890.

—    biography
from the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, Birmingham 

 

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