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Newman had no text for this short sermon. What we have here is the
report given in a newspaper and written from notes taken at the time of
preaching. It was delivered on Sunday, 5 October 1879. The Cardinal was
then 78 years of age, and was speaking "from his heart" to the
boys at Oscott College, in the north of Birmingham. As it was the Feast
of the Holy Rosary, he preached on the text: "They found Mary and
Joseph, and the Infant lying in a manger" (Lk 2,16).
Five months previously, Newman was in Rome to be created Cardinal by
Pope Leo XIII.
Personal love for the Rosary
Newman himself was very fond of his beads. He said: "to my own
feelings nothing is more delightful" (The Letters and Diaries,
XII, 217). For him it was not a matter of a mechanical repetition, but a
meditation and contemplation of the mysteries of our Lord's life in the
company of his Mother. He has not told us expressly how he said the
Rosary, but the following advice which he gave to a recent convert whom
he directed probably reflects Newman's own procedure: "Try it thus,
if you don't so use it at present, but perhaps you do;—viz.
before each mystery, set before you a picture of it, and fix your mind
upon that picture (e.g. the Annunciation, the Agony, etc.) while you say
the Pater and 10 Aves, not thinking of the words, only saying them
correctly. Let the exercise be hardly more than a meditation. Perhaps
this will overcome any sense of tedium" (The Letters and
Diaries, XII, 263). Needless to say, the material repetition of
Paters and Aves has then reached its scope and becomes genuine prayer
(cf. Philip Boyce, OCD, 'At Prayer with Newman', in In Search of Light.
Life Development Prayer. Three Essays on John Henry Newman.
Rome, International Centre of Newman Friends, 1985, p. 82).
_________
I am not going to make a long address to you, my dear boys, or say
anything that you have not often heard before from your superiors, for I
know well in what good hands you are, and I know that their instructions
come to you with greater force than any you can have from a stranger. If
I speak to you at all, it is because I have lately come from the Holy
Father, and am, in some sort, his representative, and so in the years to
come you may remember that you saw me today and heard me speak in his
name, and remember it to your profit.
You know that today we keep the Feast of the Holy Rosary, and I
propose to say to you what occurs to me on this great subject. You know
how that devotion came about; how, at a time when heresy was very
widespread, and had called in the aid of sophistry, that can so
powerfully aid infidelity against religion, God inspired St Dominic to
institute and spread this devotion. It seems so simple and easy, but you
know God chooses the small things of the world to humble the great (I
Cor. 1,27-28).
Of course it was first of all for the poor and simple, but not for
them only, for everyone who has practised the devotion knows that there
is in it a soothing sweetness that there is in nothing else. It is
difficult to know God by your own power, because He is incomprehensible.
He is invisible to begin with, and therefore incomprehensible. We can in
some way know Him, for even among the heathens there were some who had
learned many truths about Him; but even they found it hard to conform
their lives to their knowledge of Him. And so in His mercy He has given
us a revelation of Himself by coming amongst us, to be one of ourselves,
with all the relations and qualities of humanity, to gain us over. He
came down from Heaven and dwelt amongst us, and died for us. All these
things are in the Creed, which contains the chief things that He has
revealed to us about Himself.
Now the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the
Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and
a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths
of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our
hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life and
His birth in the manger; and so too the mysteries of His suffering and
His glorified life. But even Christians, with all their knowledge of
God, have usually more awe than love of Him, and the special virtue of
the Rosary lies in the special way in which it looks at these mysteries;
for with all our thoughts of Him are mingled thoughts of His Mother, and
in the relations between Mother and Son we have set before us the Holy
Family, the home in which God lived. Now the family is, even humanly
considered, a sacred thing; how much more the family bound together by
supernatural ties, and, above all, that in which God dwelt with His
Blessed Mother.
This is what I should most wish you to remember in future years. For
you will all of you have to go out into the world, and going out into
the world means leaving home; and, my dear boys, you don't know what the
world is now. You look forward to the time when you will go out into the
world, and it seems to you very bright and full of promise. It is not
wrong for you to look forward to that time; but most men who know the
world find it a world of great trouble, and disappointments, and even
misery. If it turns out so to you, seek a home in the Holy Family that
you think about in the mysteries of the Rosary. Schoolboys know the
difference between school and home. You often hear grown-up people say
that the happiest time of their life was that passed at school but when
they were at school you know they had a happier time, which was when
they went home; that shows there is a good in home which cannot be found
elsewhere. So that even if the world should actually prove to be all
that you now fancy it, if it should bring you all that you could wish,
yet you ought to have in the Holy Family a home with a holiness and
sweetness about it that cannot be found elsewhere.
This is, my dear boys, what I most earnestly ask you. I ask you when
you go out into the world, as you soon must, to make the Holy Family
your home, to which you may turn from all the sorrow and care of the
world and find a solace, a compensation, and a refuge. And this I say to
you, not as if I should speak to you again, not as if I had of myself
any claim upon you, but with the claims of the Holy Father, whose
representative I am, and in the hope that in the days to come you will
remember that I came amongst you and said it to you. And when I speak of
the Holy Family I do not mean Our Lord and Our Lady only, but St Joseph
too; for as we cannot separate Our Lord from His Mother, so we cannot
separate St Joseph from them both; for who but he was their protector in
all the scenes of Our Lord's early life? And with Joseph must be
included St Elizabeth and St John, whom we naturally think of as part of
the Holy Family; we read of them together and see them in pictures
together. May you, my dear boys, throughout your life find a home in the
Holy Family; the home of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother, St Joseph, St
Elizabeth, and St John.
(Mary—The Virgin Mary
in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman, chap. 6, Edited by
Philip Boyce).
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