So before I dwell into the meat of my talk with you this evening, I would like to take a few minutes to tell you something about John Henry Newman, whose work I will be using in the argument I will soon make.

He is recently in the news because Pope Francis is soon to declare him a saint of the church that will

happen in October of this year. He will thus become the first Englishman who is not a martyr

to be canonized since the Reformation of the 16th century. But beyond this current fact of interest, he is probably the most influential religious

thinker between the Council of Trent of the 16th century and the Second Vatican Council of

1965, the most influential thinker, in other words, in 350 years, years that have shaped the world we inhabit today.

Pope John the 23rd, who summoned the Second Vatican Council, has in fact called Newman its father.

This is because his great work on the development of Christian doctrine made the teachings of Vatican II possible.

So it surely follows that if Vatican II is the most important religious event in three and a half centuries,

and if Newman is its father, then no one has exerted greater impact than he in modern religious history.

His life began in Regency England under the reign of King George III,

and his life lasted almost to the end of Queen Victoria's reign.

The years of his life are 1801 to 1890.

And as my own grandfather was born in 1880,

I feel that Newman is certainly not all that distant from us.

His father was a banker who went bankrupt, and his mother was of Huguenot ancestry.

It speculated that from her a certain stern and d'ur Calvinism colored his early religious upbringing.

This is certainly true, at least until he was about 21 or 22. And well, I suppose

that's not too bad a thing when we consider how averse our present time is to any notion

of personal sin. It might be a good thing for somebody to err on the other side.

He went up as an adolescent to Trinity College, which is one of the

constitutive colleges of Oxford University.

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