This essay is a preview from the forthcoming Christ the King issue of The Lamp.

Before I went to Oxford, I remember receiving a stern warning: “Watch out for the ghost of John Henry Newman!”

This good advice—the best I’ve ever received, though I completely ignored it—came in an email from a Rhodes Scholar alumnus. A decade or so before me, he had come up to Oxford as a Presbyterian; two years later he was a Roman Catholic. The weekend after my election to the Rhodes Class of 2020, he had learned from a press release that I was an evangelical. At least I was warned.

Oxford, of course, is haunted by many ghosts. An X marks the spot on the Broad Street where Cranmer and Ridley were burned, now ten feet from the Harry Potter souvenir shop. Civil War ramparts—now a vine-covered mound of dirt—form the eastern boundary of the Rhodes House Garden. A wrought-iron statue of Atlas, rusted turquoise and bent over with no world in his hands to shrug, now stands atop an office building on Folly Bridge where Roger Bacon used to ponder the stars.

Newman’s ghost is different from all of these—gentler, more diffuse, but also more persistent. It’s a quiet presence. It waits in the hushed reverence in the University Church of St. Mary’s, where Newman preached, and in the stained-glass portrait at the back of the antechapel of Oriel College, where he used to pray in a small alcove tucked behind the organ, his candle flickering through the window deep into the night. The windows are filled with images—books, cherubs playing the violin, and scenes from his time at Oxford. Across the neighboring panels run words from The Dream of Gerontius: “Praise to the holiest in the height, and in the depths be praise! / In all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways.” Crossing First Quad, you almost walk on the words.

Newman’s presence felt less like encountering the remains of a legendary figure than entering the flat of an absent friend. Even if he’s gone for a week, or forever, he still dwells in every detail. And after enough details begin to speak to you personally–the space heater left by the reading chair, the desk moved over to the window, the mug you gave him set on the counter by your favorite blend of coffee–you begin to wonder if he left the place expecting your arrival. In Oriel’s antechapel, the room seemed pre-arranged for a conversation I hadn’t yet learned how to have.

*

“Now you know what it’s like to be a friend of Newman!” Sister Mary said, beaming, as she welcomed me and five Oxford friends to Littlemore early one morning this past summer, the week after I defended my dissertation on the Grammar of Assent. We had set out from Folly Bridge at seven-thirty that morning, winding our way along the Thames and up Rose Hill. We were a motley bunch of Oxfordians: a philosopher of law, an early modern historian, a Syriac scholar, a poet, an architect, a priest studying patristics, all friends of Newman. In my case the Littlemore sisters—from the Spiritual Family of the Work—had prayed for my viva examination. We came to give thanks.

“It is the same as when he was here,” Sister Mary said as she drew back from a hug at the iron-wrought gate. “He is always so faithful.”

I had first visited Littlemore in the early summer of my first year at Oxford. I had just finished the one-year master’s in Intellectual History, still Protestant, though less so than when I arrived. A friend, a Newman scholar close to the sisters, led two of us along the same pilgrimage route: over the locks, past the Norman church in Iffley, across the Eastern Bypass Bridge. The way felt enchantingly strange then—strange in the way a place feels when it recognizes you before you recognize it.

Newman’s “college,” as he referred to it, sits unassumingly atop Rose Hill, across from the Golden Ball pub and the Blessed Dominic Barberi Catholic Church. The building began as a row of stables. Newman bought it in the late 1830s with the intention of turning it into a house of study, prayer, and silence. He converted the barn into a library, the stalls into cells. We walked into the library, stepped into his bare little room, knelt in his private chapel. I didn’t yet know what the small red flame meant. But something about the room struck me. I felt a presence I couldn’t name.

Four years later, as we sat sipping tea and eating cake, one of my friends, the Syriac scholar, asked where to begin with Newman. Sister Mary’s eyes crinkled behind the little gold frames of her glasses: “Start with his life.”

It was something the room itself seemed to demand. Where the old fireplace once stood there’s now a white door into the kitchen. An artificial hearth faces the library, and above it hangs a photograph of the memorial in the nearby church: Newman kneeling, hands clenched, Father Dominic Barberi standing, leaning down to receive him. The story is condensed into objects: the library where Newman struggled through conscience and Church history; the cells where he and friends kept the rule; the chapel with the red candle, silently announcing the Lord’s Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. How many people had Newman led before the same tabernacle? How many souls did Father Barberi receive into the Church that night on October 9, 1845?

The sisters never tire of telling the story. They lead pilgrims around walls papered with photographs of Newman and his friends, laying out third-class relics: letters, academic robes, the desk where Newman wrote the Essay on Development. After that first visit to Littlemore, I read the Essay and I found, as Newman did, that “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” In a gap year I read the Grammar. Back at Oxford, I made the Littlemore pilgrimage each feast day. I drifted from my D.Phil. topic in History into Theology. On an Easter retreat at Littlemore, I wrote an essay about my conversion in Newman’s library. Then doors opened.

A place near-miraculously opened at Oriel. I switched colleges. My housing fell through. A week before term, a room was available: an old tutor’s studio, top floor, bookshelves; a long east window framing Oriel Tower to Shotover, Merton Tower to St. Mary’s spire. For someone who loves views and heights, it was the perfect gift, down to the slant in the roof that made the room feel like a treehouse.

Most mornings I wrote early enough to watch the sun rise. I prayed most afternoons in Newman’s antechapel behind the organ. In summer, I worked in the theology section of the Oriel library, a converted choir loft of the old chapel of St. Mary’s Hall. From my favorite window, statues of Newman and Bishop Butler stood under the Virgin while St. Mary’s spire rose behind. The statue of Cecil Rhodes glowered on the other side. A year later, I defended my thesis beneath that wall, sitting the viva exam in the presence of all my Oxford patrons.

“That’s creepy,” one friend said when I told him I was writing about Newman in Newman’s old college. “Isn’t that strange?” another asked. It’s usually non-Catholics who find the coincidences hair-raising. “Not really,” I said. “To finish this D.Phil., I need all the help I can get.” Newman’s friendship was not just faithful. It was punctilious, even from beyond the grave.

The help was perhaps most tangible during a visit to the Birmingham Oratory in my second year. Newman was the first to bring the Oratory of St Philip Neri to England. He established the Oratory in Birmingham shortly after returning from his studies and ordination in Rome in 1848. He lived there for the rest of his life. My friend, the same leader of the Newman reading group, brought me along one day in Trinity Term for a trip to the archives. Shifting through the endless draft papers of the Grammar, with all the boxes spread out on the wooden table, thinking of all the footnotes, struggling to read Newman’s cursive, I felt my head start to spin. I asked for help. A half-hour later, I stumbled upon a typescript that ended up being a crucial source for my dissertation.

After the morning’s work, the Oratory’s archivist kindly took me and my friend for a tour of Newman’s rooms. His apartment had been left undisturbed since he died in 1890 (with the exception of one dusting before Benedict XVI’s visit). The space was ingeniously divided into thirds, almost like a maze: one compartment between the desk and the wall for study; one corridor for prayer between the back of the desk and a wall-divider; his private chapel between the back of the divider and the far wall of the rooms. Bookshelves surrounded the perimeter, and hung all around the walls were photographs of Newman’s friends. They covered the back wall behind his desk and occupied every spare inch of blank space around the chapel. Faces, lay and clerical, old and young, women and men, all constellations around the portrait of St. Francis de Sales above the altar, from whom Newman borrowed the motto of his Cardinalate, Cor ad cor loquitur. Images of St. Athanasius, St. Basil, and St. John the Evangelist comforting the Blessed Virgin Mary adorned the small kneeler where he prayed for several hours every morning. Like his twenty-first century disciples in Oxford, Newman seemed to live in the presence of invisible friends. He even carried with him those he left behind. Over the door to the office hung a portrait of the University Church of St. Mary’s, the same spire I saw from my eastward facing window. Next to that, the archivist told us, there had once been a portrait of St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

*

“Newman was like the Anglican pope,” Sister Mary said, smiling, during our tour of the Littlemore library. “It’s difficult to understand today just how much he was giving up when he converted.”

“I can’t imagine how much he must have suffered,” my friend, the philosopher of law, reflected. “Yes,” Sister Mary replied, “But look at the fruit of his suffering.”

We only had to look across the coffee table. But we could have looked further—to the thousands of Newman Centers at universities across the United States, to the Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford. A friend of mine, a professor at Georgetown, runs a summer seminar almost every year for university students interested in studying Newman’s life and writings. He told me once that of all the classes he teaches, that seminar leads the most students to become Catholic.

The time has certainly continued to be Newmanian, even after my friends and I walked back to Oxford along the Thames. Later that week, I met a priest in London who recommended I visit a community of contemplative nuns in Lynton, North Devon, before I left the United Kingdom. I went. Newman’s portrait was the first picture I saw in the foyer of the convent. The sisters said that Newman had interceded for them when they moved to Devon ten years ago. They had named it in his honor. I started a weekly Newman reading group with parishioners. One reader in the group was a former Anglican priest. He looked uncannily like Newman. His name was John. The saint, he said, had presided over his and his wife’s move to Lynton like a ghost.

The private haunting kept becoming public. Newman, after all, has many friends. During my last weekend in Britain, I travelled with two readers from the Lynton Newman group to Birmingham for the WeBelieve Festival of Catholic Life. We stopped at Rednal to pray at Newman’s grave, then went on to St. Mary’s Oscott, where he lived briefly before studying for ordination in Rome, and where he returned a decade later to preach “The Second Spring.” A week later, Pope Leo XIV gave his approval for Newman to be named a Universal Doctor of the Church.

We have all, it seems, fallen under his influence. Now an ocean away, I still think often of the Oriel antechapel, where a pane sings “Praise to the holiest,” and of Littlemore’s kitchen door opening through the old fireplace. I think of the Oratory desk ringed with faces, the motto over the altar. To be haunted by Newman is to be taught to read again: not just pages but rooms, roads, objects, buildings, hearts, perhaps especially one’s own—to awaken to the presence of an abiding friend, who as yet remains invisible, “till the day break, and the shadows flee away.”