Newman was born in London, the eldest of a family of three sons and three daughters. His father John Newman was a banker, with Ramsbottom, Newman and Company in Lombard Street. His mother Jemima was from a Huguenot background, her maiden name being Fourdrinier. Francis William Newman was a younger brother, and the eldest daughter, Harriet Elizabeth, was to marry Thomas Mozley, prominent in the Oxford Movement.

At the age of seven Newman was sent to Great Ealing School conducted by Dr George Nicholas. There George Huxley, father of Thomas Henry Huxley, taught mathematics, and the classics teacher was Walter Mayers. Newman took no part in the casual school games. He was a great reader of the novels of Walter Scott, then in course of publication, and of Robert Southey. Aged 14, he read sceptical works by Thomas Paine, David Hume and perhaps Voltaire.

At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman was converted, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was "more certain than that I have hands or feet." Almost at the same time (March 1816) the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its creditors, and his father left to manage a brewery. Mayers, who had himself undergone a conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition. It was in the autumn of 1816 that Newman "fell under the influence of a definite creed," and received into his intellect "impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured". He became an evangelical Calvinist, and he held the typical belief that the Pope was Antichrist, under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton, as well as his reading of Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ. Mayers is described as a moderate, Clapham Sect Calvinist, and Newman read William Law as well as William Beveridge in devotional literature. He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott.

In 1816 Newman's name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied widely. Anxiety to do well in the final schools produced the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short, and so graduated with third-class honours in 1821.

Desiring to remain in Oxford, Newman then took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel, then "the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism." He was elected at Oriel on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same college in 1823.

On 13 June 1824, Newman was ordained a deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and ten days later he preached his first sermon in Holy Trinity at Over Worton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire when on a visit to his former teacher, the Reverend Walter Mayers, who had been curate there since 1823. On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825 he was ordained a priest in Christ Church. He became, at Pusey's suggestion, curate of St Clement's Church, Oxford. Here, for two years, he was engaged in parochial work, and wrote articles on Apollonius of Tyana, Cicero and Miracles for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.

Richard Whately and Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel, were leaders in the group of 'Oriel Noetics', a group of independently thinking dons with a strong belief in free debate. In 1825, at Whately's request, Newman became vice-principal of St Alban Hall, but he only held this post for one year. He attributed much of his "mental improvement" and partial conquest of his shyness at this time to Whately. He assisted Whately in his popular work Elements of Logic (1826, initially for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana), and from him he gained a definite idea of the Christian Church as institution: "... a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives and powers of its own".

He broke with Whately in 1827 on the occasion of the re-election of Robert Peel as Member of Parliament for the university: Newman opposed Peel on personal grounds. In 1826 he returned as tutor of Oriel, and the same year Richard Hurrell Froude, described by Newman as "one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men" he ever met, was elected fellow there. The two formed a high ideal of the tutorial office as clerical and pastoral rather than secular, which led to tensions in the college. In 1827 he was a preacher at Whitehall.

In 1828 Newman supported and secured the election of Edward Hawkins as Provost of Oriel over John Keble. This choice, he later commented, produced the Oxford Movement with all its consequences. In the same year he was appointed vicar of St Mary's, to which the living of Littlemore south of the city of Oxford was attached, and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew.

At this date, though Newman was still nominally associated with the Evangelicals, his views were gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone. George Herring considers that the death of his sister Mary in January had a major impact on Newman. In the summer he worked to read the Church Fathers thoroughly.

While local secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Newman circulated an anonymous letter suggesting a method by which churchmen might practically oust Nonconformists from all control of the society. This resulted in his being dismissed from the post, 8 March 1830; and three months later he withdrew from the Bible Society, thus completing his severance from the Low Church Party. In 1831—1832 he was select preacher before the university. In 1832, his difference with Hawkins as to the "substantially religious nature" of a college tutorship became acute and he resigned from that post.

Mediterranean travels

In December 1832, Newman went with Hurrell Froude, on account of the latter's health, for a tour in Southern Europe. On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta and the Ionian Islands, and subsequently Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described Rome as "the most wonderful place on Earth," but the Roman Catholic religion as "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous."

It was during the course of this tour that Newman wrote most of the short poems which a year later were printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April, Newman returned to Sicily alone, and fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever at Leonforte. He recovered, with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England; he saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio, and here he wrote the verses, Lead, Kindly Light, which later became popular as a hymn.

Tracts for the Times

Newman was at home again in Oxford on 9 July 1833 and, on 14 July, Keble preached at St Mary’s an assize sermon on "National Apostasy," which Newman afterwards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement." Rose met Oxford Movement figures on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergymen was held over 25—26 July (Newman was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval and William Palmer had gone to visit Rose), at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book."

A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian." Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. At the time the state's financial stance towards the Church of Ireland had raised the spectres of disestablishment, or an exit of High Churchmen. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called "Puseyite".

In 1836 the Tractarians appeared as an activist group, in united opposition to the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity. Hampden's 1832 Bampton Lectures, in the preparation of which Joseph Blanco White had assisted him, were suspected of heresy; and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr Hampden's Theological Statements.

At this date Newman became editor of the British Critic. He also gave courses of lectures in a side chapel of St Mary's in defence of the via media ("middle way") of Anglicanism between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism.

Doubts and opposition

Newman's influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839. Just then, however, his study of monophysitism raised a doubt whether the Anglican position was really tenable on the principles of ecclesiastical authority which he had accepted. He then read, in Nicholas Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim," the words of Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists, "securus judicat orbis terrarum" ("the verdict of the world is conclusive"). He later wrote of his reaction,

For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before ..... they were like the 'Tolle, lege, ... Tolle, lege,' of the child, which converted St Augustine himself. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised. (Apologia, part 5)

After a furore in which the eccentric John Brande Morris preached for him in St Mary's in September 1839, Newman began to think of moving away from Oxford. One plan that surfaced was to set up a religious community in Littlemore, outside the city of Oxford. He had had a chapel built there, with foundation stone laid by his mother in 1835, based on a half-acre plot and £100 given by Oriel College. His plans for Littlemore had involved bringing in Charles Pourtales Golightly, an Oriel man, as curate, in 1836; but a sermon of Newman's had changed Golightly's views, and brought him into the camp of aggressive anti-Catholics. Isaac Williams filled in as curate, and then John Rouse Bloxam acted as Littlemore curate from 1837 to 1840. William John Copeland acted as curate from 1840.

Newman continued his work, however, as a High Anglican controversialist until he had published, in 1841, Tract 90, in fact to be the last of the series. It was a detailed examination of the Thirty-Nine Articles, suggesting that their negations were not directed against the authorised creed of Roman Catholics, but only against popular errors and exaggerations. This theory, though not altogether new, aroused indignation in Oxford, and Archibald Campbell Tait, with three other senior tutors, denounced it as "suggesting and opening a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university." The alarm was shared by the heads of houses and by others in authority; and, at the request of Richard Bagot, the Bishop of Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end.

Retreat to Littlemore

Newman also resigned the editorship of the British Critic, and was thenceforth, as he later described it, "on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church." He now considered the position of Anglicans to be similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian controversy. The joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric set up in Jerusalem was to him further evidence that the Church of England was not apostolic.

In 1842 Newman withdrew to Littlemore, and lived under something like monastic conditions with a small band of followers. The first to join him there was John Dobree Dalgairns. Others were William Lockhart on the advice of Henry Manning, Ambrose St John in 1843, and Frederick Oakeley in 1845. Buildings were adapted in what is now College Lane, Littlemore, opposite the inn. Called by Newman "the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore" (now called Newman College) they had comprised stables and granary for stage coaches. The construction work on this "Anglican monastery" attracted publicity, and much curiosity in Oxford, which Newman tried to downplay, but the nickname Newmanooth (from Maynooth College) was given to the development.

Newman assigned the task to some of his disciples of writing of the lives of the English saints, while his time was largely devoted to the completion of an Essay on the development of Christian doctrine. In February 1843, he published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Rome. In September 1843, after Lockhart's conversion to Catholicism, Newman preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore and resigned the living of St Mary's.

An interval of two years then elapsed before Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church (9 October 1845) by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, at the College in Littlemore. The personal consequences for Newman of his conversion were great: he suffered broken relationships with family and friends, attitudes to him within his Oxford circle becoming polarised. The effect on the wider Tractarian movement is still debated, since Newman's leading role is regarded by some scholars as overstated, as is Oxford's domination of the movement as a whole. Tractarian writings had a wide and continuing circulation after 1845, well beyond the range of personal contacts with the main Oxford figures, and Tractarian clergy continued to be recruited into the Church of England in numbers.

Oratorian

In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for Oscott, where Bishop Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of D.D. by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847, Newman returned to England as an Oratorian and resided first at Maryvale (near Old Oscott); then at St Wilfrid’s College, Cheadle; and then at St Ann's, Alcester Street, Birmingham. Finally he settled at Edgbaston, where spacious premises were built for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived a secluded life for nearly forty years.

Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman established the London Oratory, with Father Frederick William Faber as its superior.

Achilli trial

At the London Oratory in 1851 Newman delivered a course of lectures on The Present Position of Catholics in England. Largely ignored by the press at the time, they analysed at length traditional views of Catholicism held by Protestants. In the fifth of them he protested against the anti-Catholic utterances of Giacinto Achilli, an ex-Dominican friar, whom he accused in detail of numerous acts of immorality.

Popular Protestant feeling ran high at the time, partly in consequence of the bull Universalis Ecclesiae and setting up of the Catholic diocesan hierarchy by Pope Pius IX. Criminal proceedings against Newman for libel in the "Achilli trial" in 1852 resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff. Newman was found guilty, and sentenced to pay a fine of £100, while his expenses as defendant amounted to about £14,000. This sum was raised by public subscription; a surplus was spent on the purchase of a small property in Rednal, on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and cemetery, where Newman was eventually buried.

Educator

In 1854, at the request of the Irish Catholic bishops, Newman went to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College, Dublin (U.C.D.). It was during this time that he founded the Literary and Historical Society. After four years, he retired. He published a volume of lectures entitled The Idea of a University, containing some of his most effective writing:

...the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery of experiment and speculation...

In 1858, Newman projected a branch house of the Oratory at Oxford; but this project was opposed by Father Henry Edward Manning and others as likely to induce Catholics to send their sons to that university, and the scheme was abandoned. When Catholics did begin to attend Oxford from the 1860s onwards, a Catholic club was formed and, in 1888, it was renamed the Oxford University Newman Society in recognition of Newman's efforts on behalf of Catholicism in that university city. The Oxford Oratory was eventually founded over 100 years later in 1993.

In 1859, Newman established, in connection with the Birmingham Oratory, a school for the education of the sons of gentlemen along lines similar to those of English public schools. The Oratory School flourished as a boy's boarding school, dubbed as 'The Catholic Eton'.

Relationships with other converts

Newman had a special concern in the publisher Burns & Oates; the owner, James Burns, had published some of the Tractarians, and Burns had himself converted to Roman Catholicism in 1847. Newman published several books with the company, effectively saving it. There is even a story that Newman's novel Loss and Gain was written specifically to assist Burns.

In 1863, in a response to Thomas William Allies, while agreeing that slavery was bad, Newman would not publicly condemn it as "intrinsically evil" on the grounds that it had been tolerated by St Paul - thus asserting that slavery is "a condition of life ordained by God in the same sense that other conditions of life are".

Newman and Henry Edward Manning both became significant figures in the late 19th century Roman Catholic Church in England: both were Anglican converts and both were elevated to the dignity of cardinal. In spite of these similarities, in fact there was a lack of sympathy between the two men, who were different in character and experience, and they clashed on a number of issues, in particular the foundation of an Oratory in Oxford. On theological issues, Newman is seen as the more liberal because of his reservations about the declaration of papal infallibility (Manning favoured the formal declaration of the doctrine).

In 1862 Newman began to prepare autobiographical and other memoranda to vindicate his career. The occasion came when, in January 1864, Charles Kingsley, reviewing James Anthony Froude's History of England in Macmillan’s Magazine, incidentally asserted that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy." Edward Lowth Badeley, who had been a close legal adviser to Newman since the Achilli trial, encouraged him to make a robust rebuttal. After some preliminary sparring between the two, Newman published a pamphlet, Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman: a Correspondence on the Question whether Dr Newman teaches that Truth is no Virtue, (published in 1864 and not reprinted until 1913). The pamphlet has been described as "unsurpassed in the English language for the vigour of its satire". However, the anger displayed was later, in a letter to Sir William Cope, admitted to have been largely feigned.

Subsequently, again encouraged by Badeley, Newman published in bi-monthly parts his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a religious autobiography of abiding interest. Its tone changed the popular estimate of its author, by explaining the convictions which had led him into the Roman Catholic Church. Kingsley's general accusation against the Catholic clergy was not precisely dealt with; a passing sentence, in an appendix on lying and equivocation, maintained that English Catholic priests are as truthful as English Catholic laymen. Newman published a revision of the series of pamphlets in book form in 1865; in 1913 a combined critical edition, edited by Wilfrid Ward, was published.

In 1870, Newman put forth his Grammar of Assent, a closely reasoned work in which the case for religious belief is maintained by arguments somewhat different from those commonly used by Roman Catholic theologians of the time; and in 1877, in the republication of his Anglican works, he added to the two volumes containing his defence of the via media, a long preface in which he criticised and replied to anti-Catholic arguments of his own which were contained in the original issues.

At the time of the First Vatican Council (1869—1870), Newman was hesitant about formally defining the doctrine of papal infallibility, believing that the time was 'inopportune'. In a private letter to his bishop (William Bernard Ullathorne), surreptitiously published, he denounced the "insolent and aggressive faction" that had pushed the matter forward. Newman made no sign of disapproval when the doctrine was finally defined, but was an advocate of the "principle of minimising", that included very few papal declarations within the scope of infallibility. Subsequently, in a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk when Gladstone accused the Roman Church of having "equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history," Newman affirmed that he had always believed in the doctrine, and had only feared the deterrent effect of its definition on conversions on account of acknowledged historical difficulties. In this letter, and especially in the postscript to the second edition, Newman answered the case on his not being at ease within the Catholic Church.

In 1878, Newman's old college elected him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford after an interval of thirty-two years, on the same date Pope Pius IX died. Pius IX had mistrusted Newman, but Pope Leo XIII was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other laymen to make Newman a cardinal, though he was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome. The offer was made in February 1879. Newman's elevation to cardinal took place on 12 May, making him Cardinal-Deacon of San Giorgio al Velabro. Newman while in Rome insisted on the lifelong consistency of his opposition to "liberalism in religion."

Death

After an illness, Newman returned to England and thenceforward resided at the Oratory until his death, making occasional visits to London and chiefly to his old friend, R. W. Church, Dean of St Paul's, who as proctor had vetoed the condemnation of Tract 90 in 1841. As a cardinal, Newman published nothing beyond a preface to a work by Arthur Wollaston Hutton on the Anglican Ministry (1879) and an article "On the Inspiration of Scripture" in The Nineteenth Century (February 1884).

From the latter half of 1886, Newman's health began to fail and he celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day in 1889. On 11 August 1890, he died of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. Eight days later, his body was buried in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, at the country house of the Oratory. At the time of his death, he had been Protodeacon of the Holy Roman Church.

In accordance with his expressed wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John. Previously, they had shared a house. The pall over the coffin bore his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"). Inseparable in death as in life, a joint memorial stone was erected for the two men; the inscription bore words Newman had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

On 27 February 1891, Newman's estate was probated at £4,206.

Newman's grave was opened on 2 October 2008, with the intention of moving any remains to a tomb inside Birmingham Oratory (contrary to Newman's express wishes) during Newman's consideration for sainthood; however, his wooden coffin was found to have disintegated and no human remains were found. Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory claimed this was because the coffin was wooden and the burial took place at a damp site. Contemporary sources show that the coffin was covered with a softer type of soil than the clay marl of the grave site. Forensic expert Professor John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, tested soil samples from near the grave and said that total disappearance of a body was most unlikely over that timescale. He said that extreme conditions which could remove bone would also have removed the coffin handles which were found.

Some of Newman's short and earlier poems are described by R. H. Hutton as "unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect"; while his latest and longest, The Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same lines as Dante. His prose style, especially in his Catholic days, is fresh and vigorous, and is attractive to many who do not sympathise with his conclusions, from the apparent candour with which difficulties are admitted and grappled; while in his private correspondence there is charm. James Joyce had a lifelong admiration for Newman's writing, and in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver humorously remarked about Newman that "nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church".

Around 1830, Newman developed a distinction between natural religion and revealed religion. Revealed religion is the Judeo-Christian revelation which finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Natural religion refers to the knowledge of God and divine things that has been acquired outside the Judeo-Christian revelation. For Newman, this knowledge of God is not the result of unaided reason but of reason aided by grace, and so he speaks of natural religion as containing a revelation, even though it is an incomplete revelation.

Newman's view of natural religion gives rise to a few passages in his writings in which he appears to sympathise with a broader theology. Both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, he put forward the notion of a universal revelation. As an Anglican, Newman subscribed to this notion in the 1830 University Sermon entitled "The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively" and in his 1833 book The Arians of the Fourth Century. In the latter work, he admits that there was "something true and divinely revealed in every religion". As a Catholic, he included the idea in A Grammar of Assent: "As far as we know, there never was a time when...revelation was not a revelation continuous and systematic, with distinct representatives and an orderly succession."

Newman held that "freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion", but was "the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church." In 1877 he allowed that "in a religion that embraces large and separate classes of adherents there always is of necessity to a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine." (Prophetical Office, preface to third edition)

Newman was highly sensitive, self-conscious and impetuous. The motto that he adopted for use as a cardinal was Cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks to heart), and the one he directed to be engraved on his memorial tablet at Edgbaston was Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (Out of shadows and phantasms into truth). William Barry writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) traces the first of these mottoes to Francis de Sales and links it to Newman's eloquence as "unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating", the second back to Plato's allegory of the cave.

Newman embraced celibacy at the age of 15. Although he had many affectionate friendships with women, his deepest relationships were with men. The first of these intense male friendships was with Richard Hurrell Froude (1803—1836), the longest with Ambrose St John (1815—1875), who shared communitarian life with Newman for 32 years from 1843 (when St John was 28).

Newman wrote after St John's death: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." Newman directed that he be buried in the same grave as St John.: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John's grave ... and I give this as my last, my imperative will."

Controversy concerning sexuality

Widely varying views have been expressed about Newman's sexuality. John Campbell Shairp, who knew him at Oxford, described him as "a woman's soul in a man's body", which according to Roden was "the late Victorian definition of a male invert or homosexual". Lytton Strachey, who probably never met Newman and was only ten when he died, wrote of his "soft spectacled Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence". According to Geoffrey Faber, the Oxford Movement contained a significant stream of homoeroticism. As David Hilliard observes, Faber offered a "portrait of Newman as a sublimated homosexual (though the word itself was not used)". In a chapter on virginity and friendship, he wrote of Newman's relations with Hurrell Froude: "Of all his (Newman's) friends Froude filled the deepest place in his heart, and I'm not the first to point out that his occasional notions of marrying definitely ceased with the beginning of his real intimacy with Froude."

In a September 2010 television documentary, "The Trouble with the Pope", Peter Tatchell discussed Newman's underlying sexuality, citing his close friendship with St John and entries in Newman's diaries describing their intense love for each other. The historian Alan Bray, however, in his 2003 book The Friend, saw the bond between the two men as "entirely spiritual". He notes that shortly after St John's death, Newman recorded "a conversation between them before St John lost his speech in those final days. He expressed his hope, Newman wrote, that during his whole priestly life he had not committed one mortal sin. For men of their time and culture that statement is definitive.... Newman's burial with Ambrose St John cannot be detached from his understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history." Bray cites numerous examples of friends being buried together. Newman's burial with St John was not unusual and did not draw contemporary comment.

David Hilliard writes that relationships like Newman's with Froude and St John "were not regarded by contemporaries as unnatural.... Nor is it possible, on the basis of passionate words uttered by mid-Victorians, to make a clear distinction between male affection and homosexual feeling. Theirs was a generation prepared to accept romantic friendships between men simply as friendships without sexual significance. Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff-upper-lip, and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable."

Hilliard further observes that the charge of effeminacy was used by controversialists to smear the Anglo-Catholic party. Newman himself was well aware that his high standard of chastity laid him open to what he called "slurs". To exponents of Muscular Christianity like Charles Kingsley, celibacy signified unmanliness. Other polemicists portrayed it as "the suppression or perversion of natural love", leading inevitably to sexual aberration. The attacks on the "effeminacy" of Anglo-Catholics, writes Ellis Hanson, "were a smear that was typical of the homophobia and gender panic of the time". Newman and Froude clearly "presented a challenge to Victorian gender norms", but "Faber's reading of Newman's sexlessness and Hurrell Froude's guilt as evidence of homosexuality" seems "strained".

When Ian Ker reissued his biography of Newman in 2009, he added an Afterword in which he put forward evidence that Newman was a heterosexual. Ker cited diary entries from December 1816 in which the 15-year-old Newman wrote about the temptations awaiting him when he returned home from boarding school and met girls at Christmas parties. As an adult, Newman wrote about the deep pain of the "sacrifice" of the life of celibacy. Ker comments: "The only 'sacrifice' that he could possibly be referring to was that of marriage. And he readily acknowledges that from time to time he continued to feel the natural attraction for marriage that any heterosexual man would." In 1833, Newman wrote that, despite having "willingly" accepted the call to celibacy, he felt "not the less...the need" of "the sort of interest [sympathy] which a wife takes and none but she ... it is a woman's interest".

For the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, Newman's conversion secured prestige, while within it, his influence was mainly in the direction of a broader spirit and of a recognition of the important part played by development both in doctrine and in church government. In his judgment, spiritual truth is apprehended by direct intuition, as an antecedent to the professedly purely rational basis of Catholic belief. Within both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, Newman's influence was great, in dogma and the graver side of the Christian religion. If his teaching on the Church was less widely followed, it was because of doubts as to the thoroughness of his knowledge of history and as to his freedom from bias as a critic. Some hundreds of clergymen influenced by the Oxford Movement, made submission to the Holy See; but a larger number, who also came under its influence, did not accept that belief in the Church necessitated acceptance of the Pope.

Tertiary education

The university which Newman founded, the Catholic University of Ireland, evolved into University College, Dublin, a college of Ireland's largest university, the National University of Ireland, which has contributed significantly to the intellectual and social development of that country.

A number of Newman Societies (or Newman Centers in the United States) in Newman's honour have been established throughout the world, in the mould of the Oxford University Newman Society. They provide pastoral services and ministries to Catholics at non-Catholic universities; at various times this type of "campus ministry" (the distinction and definition being flexible) has been known to Catholics as the Newman Apostolate or "Newman movement".

Cause for his canonisation

In 1991, Newman was proclaimed venerable after a thorough examination of his life and work by the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints. One miracle was investigated and confirmed by the Vatican, so he was beatified on 19 September 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI. A second miracle is necessary for his canonisation.

Anglican period

• The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833)
• Tracts for the Times (1833—1841)
• British Critic (1836—1842)
• On the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837)
• Lectures on Justification (1838)
• Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834—1843)
• Select Treatises of St. Athanasius (1842, 1844)
• Lives of the English Saints (1843—44)
• Essays on Miracles (1826, 1843)
• Oxford University Sermons (1843)
• Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1843)

Catholic period

• Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)
• Retractation of Anti-Catholic Statements (1845)
• Loss and Gain (novel — 1848)
• Faith and Prejudice and Other Unpublished Sermons (1848-1873; collected 1956)
• Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849)
• Difficulties of Anglicans (1850)
• The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)
• The Idea of a University (1852 and 1858)
• Cathedra Sempiterna (1852)
• Callista (novel — 1855)
• The Rambler (editor) (1859—1860)
• Apologia Pro Vita Sua (autobiography — 1864; revised edition, 1865)
• Letter to Dr. Pusey (1865)
• The Dream of Gerontius (1865)
• An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870)
• Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (various/1874)
• Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875)
• Five Letters (1875)
• Sermon Notes (1849—1878)
• Select Treatises of St. Athanasius (1881)
• On the Inspiration of Scripture (1884)
• Development of Religious Error (1885)

Other miscellaneous works

• Historical Tracts of St. Athanasius (1843)
• Essays Critical and Historical (various/1871)
• Tracts Theological and Ecclesiastical (various/1871)
• Discussions and Arguments (various/1872)
• Historical Sketches (various/1872)
• Addresses to Cardinal Newman and His Replies, with Biglietto Speech (1879)

Anthologies

• Realizations: Newman's Own Selection of His Sermons (edited by Vincent Ferrer Blehl, S.J., 1964). Liturgical Press, 2009. ISBN 9780814632901
• Mary the Second Eve (compiled by Sister Eileen Breen, F.M.A., 1969). TAN Books, 2009. ISBN 9780895551818

• Bellasis, Edward (1892). .
• Chadwick, Owen (1987). The Victorian Church: Part One 1829–1859
• Connolly, John R. (2005). John Henry Newman: A View of Catholic Faith for the New Millennium. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0742532229
• Faught, C. Brad (2003). The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-02710-224-99.
• Herring, George (2002). What Was the Oxford Movement?
• Strachey, Lytton (1918). Eminent Victorians
• Trevor, Meriol (1962). Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud and Newman: Light in Winter (two-volume biography)

Cause

• The Cause for the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman
• 1996 article on the canonisation process
• Promulgation of Newman as venerable (in Latin)

Newman Societies

• Oxford University Newman Society
• University College Dublin Newman Society
• Newman University College, Birmingham, England

Life and writings

• Newman Reader - Works of John Henry Newman
• Presentation by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
• John Henry Newman: Portraits
• Newman & The Second Vatican Council, by Christopher Butler
• Christina Rossetti's Cardinal Newman
• National Institute for Newman Studies, Pittsburgh, PA
• (Transcription of 1892 text by Edward Bellasis)
• "Un uomo finito": website for the theater play about John Henry Newman and Giovanni Papini (in Italian)
• Statement on the failure of exhumation
• John Henry Newman: Becoming Rome’s First Ecumenical Saint by Richard Bennett and Michael De Semlyen

Attribution

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