Cardinal virtues

According to Cardinal Newman, who is to be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday 19 September, it is a rule of God’s providence that Christians succeed through failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that Newman’s great contemporary Cardinal Manning has never been a candidate for canonisation. He did not care for failure.

That these two titans of Roman Catholicism in Victorian England — Newman, born in 1801, was seven years the senior — were frequently at loggerheads is well known. Indeed, the differences between them appear set in stone: Newman, the subtle, sensitive and (it is now official) saintly religious genius; Manning, the ruthless and wily Machiavellian, bent on crushing his rival beneath the Roman wheel.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make other, equally valid distinctions between the two men. Newman might be presented as a spiky controversialist, touchy even in his friendships, and fanatical and merciless in defence of what he conceived to be Catholic truth. Equally Manning, so stiff, guarded and unalluring in the received version, might be more accurately interpreted as a deeply compassionate prelate, whose unblinking ultramontanism cleared the intellectual decks for his remarkable philanthropic achievements.

In Newman the religious impulse was so instinctive that he sometimes seemed detached from workaday reality. Manning’s faith, by contrast, was essentially a creation of the will. As a brilliant and abundantly self-confident young man at Balliol, he had concentrated his ambitions entirely upon this world. Where Newman had broken down in Schools and scraped a dud degree, Manning carried off a First. He was handsome too. No wonder contemporaries thought of him as a potential Prime Minister.

In the event, the ruin of his father compelled Manning to abandon such dreams. Instead, he submitted to the initially unalluring prospect of becoming an Anglican clergyman. He was never, though, a man for half measures.