About Newman
May God be Praised: Newman and Hopkins
September 11, 2026
May God be Praised
It is worth reflecting on the lives and words of St. John Henry Newman and his nineteenth-century contemporary, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were both adult Catholic converts from Anglicanism – and especially the high-church Anglicanism each experienced at the University of Oxford. Newman spent years there trying to establish his theory of a Via Media (a third way between evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism). This led him on a path from celebrated Protestant rector at St Mary’s Church in Oxford to obscure Catholic Oratorian parish priest in Birmingham, England. Hopkins would become a Jesuit priest and (a not so good) teacher.
While at Oxford, Hopkins studied Newman’s thought. Later, he was greatly influenced by Newman’s seminal work Apologia Pro Vita Sua – Newman’s defense of his religious thinking. Although Newman had long since moved on to the Oratory in Birmingham, when it came time to convert, Hopkins sought Newman out to receive him into the Catholic Church. It is reminiscent of Newman’s own earlier efforts to seek out Fr. Dominic Barberi, to receive him into the Church. Fr. Barberi, an Italian Passionist priest, was consumed by a vocational calling to be a missionary priest in England. When it was time, Newman sent word to Fr. Barberi that he wished to confess and become a Catholic. Fr Barberi’s laconic response “God be praised” points toward the hidden hand of God
Hopkins and Newman bear other similarities. They were Oxford stars, Newman at Oriel and Hopkins at Balliol College. Although each was a unique genius, their paths were frequently paved with setbacks.
Newman suffered a physical break-down in his Trinity final exam. Hopkins failed his theology exam on the road to ordination. Newman’s Oxford Movement collapsed; the University he helped establish in Ireland failed to get off the ground; and he was sued for libel and found guilty and fined by an anti-Catholic, English judge and jury.
Hopkins would become a Jesuit priest and in the process burn his poetry in a bonfire, for he considered his poetic efforts works of vanity. For seven years, he ceased all poetic writing. His effort upon emerging from this sabbatical “The Wreck of the Deutschland” was, although celebrated today, rejected for publication in his own day.
But God’s ways are not ours. Or as Newman’s biographer, Meriol Trevor, says, “It was what Newman was saying all his life long, in one context or another: the apparent omnipotence of the world [yields to] the real omnipotence of God.” Newman’s efforts at Oxford blazed a trail of intellectual conversions to the Catholic Church, including Hopkins. The speeches Newman prepared in attempting to establish a college in Ireland became “The Idea of a University” probably the most influential primer for Catholic liberal arts education ever written. And his witness of humility and integrity throughout the Achilles trial turned the hearts and minds of Englishmen toward Newman and the Catholic Church. His equivalent of a “Go Fund Me” page resulted in hundreds of donations to his trial defense. Those individual donations, often small in amount, exceeded all his trial costs and fines by two thousand pounds. The excess was applied to the cost to build the University Church in Dublin. Not the result anticipated by the forces who brought the libel suit against Newman.
And Hopkins attempts to burn his “vain” poems did not prevent them from being known posthumously. His Oxford friend Robert Bridges kept, collected and published the poems after Hopkins’ death. He would ultimately be considered one of the greatest and most innovative of all the Victorian poets.
So what is going on? Newman knew that God created him to do some definite service; some work which He had not committed to another:
He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life,
He may shorten it;
He knows what He is about.
He may take away my friends,
He may throw me among strangers,
He may make me feel desolate,
make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—
still He knows what He is about.…
Hopkins seemingly complained about God’s treatment of his friends:
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
But that question was premised on Hopkins’ conclusion that “thou art indeed just Lord;” and followed by his earnest request “O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.” As Newman asserted, ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. Defeat is never failure in the hands of a loving, all-knowing, omnipotent God, who knows what he is about.
Newman and Hopkins’ lives intersect in conversion and their message resounds in trust. “May God be praised.”
