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

This piece of advice—the best I ever received, though I ignored it—came in an email from a Rhodes Scholar alumnus a decade older than me. He had come up to Oxford a Presbyterian; two years later he was a Roman Catholic. Newman played a decisive role in his conversion. 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 defenses 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 under, now stands atop a building on Folly Bridge, near the place 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 is 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 images from his time at Oxford—and across them 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.

The 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—you recognize his intentions from 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. In Oriel’s antechapel, the room seemed pre-arranged for a conversation I hadn’t yet learned how to have.

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The ghost lived on Rose Hill.

“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 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 Oxfordians. In my case the Littlemore sisters—from the Spiritual Family of the Work—had prayed for my viva examination.

“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; in the late 1830s he bought it with the intention that it would be a quiet place: study, prayer, silence. He turned the barn into a library, the stalls into cells. We walked the library; we stepped into his bare little room; we knelt in the private chapel. I didn’t yet know what the small red flame meant. But something about the room struck me like a tolling bell.

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: “Start with his life.”

This 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: Newman kneeling, hands clenched; Father Dominic Barberi leaning to receive him. The story is condensed into objects: the library where he struggled with conscience and history; the cells where he and friends kept the rule; the chapel where the red candle taught me, belatedly, what it signifies.

The sisters never tire of telling the story. They lead pilgrims around walls papered with photographs of Newman and his friends; they lay out third-class relics: letters, academic robes, the desk where the Essay on Development was composed. And they invite you to draw a folded sermon line from a bowl, fortune-cookie style. “Let Newman speak to you!” says the tag.

After that first visit I read the Essay on Development and found, as he 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 the library. Then doors opened. A place near-miraculously opened at Oriel; I switched colleges. My housing fell through; a week before term, a room opened on-site: an old tutor’s studio, top floor, bookshelves; a long east window framing Oriel Tower to Shotover, Merton Tower to St Mary’s spire. 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 of the wall, one of patronage’s ironies.) A year later, I defended my thesis beneath that wall. “That’s creepy,” one friend said when I told him I was writing about Newman in Newman’s 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.” Friendship is often faithful; here it felt punctilious.

The help was perhaps most tangible during a visit to the Birmingham Oratory during my second year. Newman was the first to bring the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri to England. He established the Oratory in Birmingham in 1848 shortly after returning from his studies and ordination in Rome. 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 my friend and me 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 Saint Francis de Sales above the altar, from whom Newman borrowed the motto of his Cardinalate, Cor ad cor loquitur. Images of Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil, and Saint 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, used to hang a portrait of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome.

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“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 the 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 their move to Lynton like a ghost.

The private haunting kept becoming public. On my last weekend in Britain, I traveled with two readers 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 after our visit, 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 spell. I think of the 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, “till the day break, and the shadows flee away.”

This essay appears in the Christ the King 2025 issue of The Lamp.