NEWMAN'S ROAD TO ROME
SIR,-It was a pleasure to see Newman's stature as a thinker so warmly recognised by Mr. Bernard Bergonzi in a recent Spectator. But may I say something in an unusual cause—the Irish bishops.
I don't think it is true to say plainly and bluntly that it was the Irish bishops who wrecked Newman's attempt to found a Catholic university in Dublin. The attitude of some of these bishops and particularly Cardinal Cullen was clearly a major obstacle to the university as conceived by Newman. Yet it was hardly more decisive than the refusal of the government (British? of the time to recognise the degrees of the institution.
The university was supported by 'the pennies of the Catholic poor' encouraged by their bishops. It was, the children of these poor, by and large, who were expected in time to form the student body. The prospect of spending expensive years at a university and then returning to queue for a job as a railwaY clerk was scarcely an inducement either to parents or students.
Nor should one, I feel, overlook the date of the project. Newman came to Ireland in the wake of the great famines in which hundreds of thousands of Catholics had died or emigrated. It was a ticklish position for an Englishman and perhaps especially for one who had campaigned some years earlier against the disestablishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland to whose finances the peasantry were forced to contribute. Some suspicion of an English- man, even a great one and an illustrious convert, is not hard to understand.
The failure of Newman's schemes was not com- plete. A series of institutions succeeded the Catholic University and the present University College, if not exactly the sort of thing that Newman had intended, looks back to him as a founder. And it is something, now that Newman's quality both as a man and a thinker appears to overshadow that of most of his contemporaries, that this is recognised in Ireland where he once had such a rough passage.
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