The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Editor of Newman’s Letters and Diaries reveals a hidden history: Georgetown, U.S.A., 1953

Categorised as News and published Thursday, November 27th, 2008
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Br Frank McGrath, Editor of the Oxford University Press series The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, has made known new research into the history of the origins of this key publication.

In an interview for the Cause website, Br Frank, an Australian Marist Brother, revealed that the origin of the project in its present form dates from the intervention of Father Eric McDermott, an American Jesuit at Georgetown University in the United States.

Father McDermott, in a correspondence with the Birmingham Oratory that began in 1953, encouraged the community to publish a full edition of all Newman’s letters and diaries, rather than the selective edition which the Oratory was planning. ‘Selective letters are somewhat like a biography’, wrote Father McDermott, ‘they are one man’s view of the evidence’.

This intervention resulted in the edition of Newman’s letters so well known today, of which the final volume, the thirty-second, has just been published in Oxford.

As Br Frank puts it: ‘After fifty years, thirty-two volumes, and seven editors, we have one of the finest collection of letters in the English language.’

In the interview, Br Frank also highlighted the close links between the history of Newman’s Cause and the Letters and Diaries project: Newman’s letters were quoted from extensively in the official Positio composed by Father Vincent Blehl, another American Jesuit who was a central figure in the history of the Cause.

The full interview will soon be published on the Cause website.