Given that St. John Henry Newman was made a Doctor of the Church on November 1, I am sharing with you the materials I provided students in grades 6 through 9 whom I tutored on 50 great speeches of the Western world in 2020-21. Newman’s “Second Spring” sermon is an excellent example of his style, and its content is powerfully moving.   

Introduction to Newman

St. John Henry Newman lived a long life, from 1801 to 1890. He was born in London, the eldest of seven children. At age 15 he became a Christian, an evangelical Calvinist. He was drawn by the notion of “dogma.” He went to college at Oxford University and became an Anglican priest and was assigned to St. Mary’s University Church, Oxford, in 1828, at age 27. In 1833 he preached a sermon that was regarded as the start of the “Oxford Movement.” Only in his thirties, he was known throughout Great Britain.

When he resigned his position in 1842 because of his difficulties with remaining Anglican, he was resigning from a prestigious position. When he became a Catholic in 1845, he brought thousands of Anglicans with him. Two years later, he became a Catholic priest.

He had a stellar reputation among Anglicans and Catholics for his speaking and writing. His sermons as an Anglican and Catholic were published by him. (Consider: one sermon per week for 20 years yields 1,000 sermons! And he preached for over 40 years.) These sermons are available today online and in print, including collections for liturgical seasons of the year.

After he became Catholic, he was attacked by a man named Charles Kinsley who accused him of being dishonest and dishonorable for misleading his Anglican supporters, letting them think he was Anglican when he was really a Catholic, even if not formally a Catholic. Newman responded in a book published in 1864 and revised in 1865 called Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Latin for “A Defense of My Life.” It’s a famous book.

When Pope Leo XIII named him a Cardinal in 1879, at age 78, it was a rare move in two ways. He was a priest, not a bishop, and he was not consecrated a bishop before being made a Cardinal.

He was beatified in 2010, canonized in 2019, and made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV on November 1 of this year.

Introduction to the “Second Spring” Sermon

For an excellent introduction to the sermon, kindly click here: Stephanie Mann, “July 13, 1852–Newman’s ‘Second Spring’,” National Catholic Register, July 13, 2018. Stephanie A. Mann is the author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation (2018). As she relates, Newman’s sermon was addressed to the bishops convening for the first synod on British soil in 300 years. It was held at St. Mary’s College, a seminary, in Oscott, in a chapel designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, the great Gothic Revivalist. Newman spoke of the death and rebirth of Catholicism in Great Britain. When the Pope restored the hierarchy two years earlier in 1850, there had been anti-Catholic riots.

Text of the “Second Spring” Sermon

“Preached July 13, 1852, in St. Mary’s, Oscott, in the first Provincial Synod of Westminster.

“Dedication in the first Edition:—To the Fathers of the Synod at Oscott, to the Clergy who assisted at it, who, in the strength of the Most High, have begun a work which is to live after them, the following Sermon, preached under the illumination of their presence, is humbly and affectionately inscribed, by their devoted servant in Christ, the Author.”

For the text of the sermon, please click here. The numbers in the text refer to page numbers. The sermon is 6,000 words.