by Gianni Valente
Vatican City – The English saint John Henry Newman, proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV on the Solemnity of All Saints, is now the Patron Saint of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, the pontifical university on Rome’s Janiculum Hill, an integral part of the Dicastery for Evangelization .
The Pope himself decreed the proclamation of the Patron Saint of the Urbaniana University community with a Chirograph signed on November 1, the Feast of All Saints.
The papal Chirograph was read this morning in the John Paul II Auditorium of the Pontifical Urbaniana University by Professor Vincenzo Buonomo, Pontifical Delegate and Rector of the University, at the beginning of the academic ceremony for the proclamation of John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church.
The Chirograph of Leo XIV reads: “Having considered the request of Venerable Brother, Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, in his capacity as Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, who has endorsed the proposal of the Papal Delegate and Rector of the same University, I hereby decree that Saint John Henry Newman, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and Doctor of the Church, born on February 21, 1801, in London, died on August 11, 1890, in Edgbaston, and canonized on October 13, 2019, in Saint Peter’s Square, be proclaimed Patron of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, so that he may intercede for this academic institution and be, for those who are formed there in the missionary service of the Church, a shining model of faith and of the sincere search for truth.”
The reading of the Chirograph was greeted with applause by the participants of the academic ceremony. The event was entitled “The Vocation of a Doctor of the Church. Saint John Henry Newman from the College of Propaganda to the Universal Church.”
The links between the history of the Holy Doctor of the Church and that of the missionary Dicastery and its University are numerous and compelling.
In 1845, the great theologian, who came from Anglicanism, began his studies in Rome to become a priest at the College dePropaganda Fide, then located in the Palazzo Ferratini, opposite the Spanish Steps, in the Colonna district, which now houses the missionary Dicastery.
Newman himself described in his letters his stay in the palace designed by Bernini and Borromini and the great attention and care shown to him by the leaders of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide and the Collegio Urbano, who made him feel at home by adapting everything “to English customs.”
He and his companions, who came from the Anglican tradition, were also moved by the fact that their windows in the Palazzo de Propaganda Fide overlooked the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, where the Virgin Mary with the miraculous medal had appeared to Alfonso Ratisbonne three years earlier, on January 20, 1842: “It is so wonderful,” Newman wrote, “to be here in Propaganda—it is like a dream—and yet so calm, so secure, so happy, as if I had always belonged here, as if there had been no violent break or upheaval in my life, indeed, even calmer and happier than before.”
At that time – as Cardinal Ivan Dias , then Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, explained in 2010 – Newman was “among young priests and seminarians, most of whom came from missionary countries. Thirty-two different languages were spoken among the 120 to 150 students.” Newman himself recalled “Indians, Africans, Scots, and Americans,” as well as “Chinese, Egyptians, Albanians, Germans, and Irish.”
John Henry Newman was ordained a Catholic priest on May 30, 1847, in the Chapel of the Three Kings in the Palace de Propaganda Fide and celebrated his first Mass in the Upper chapel now dedicated to him, a work by Borromini, which also houses a relic of the Holy Doctor of the Church.
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