Facts about John Newman
John Henry Newman died at 89 years old
Born: February 21, 1801
Best known as: The Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism
John Henry Newman Biography
John Henry Newman was a leading priest in the Church of England whose conversion to Catholicism was a major event of the 1840s. Newman was a popular speaker and a scholar at Oxford, making his conversion all the more welcome to Catholics and shocking to Anglicans. Newman had been ordained as an Anglican priest in 1825; he was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1847, and in 1879 he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) is considered a classic among religious autobiographies.
Extra credit
Newman is sometimes compared with C.S. Lewis, also an Oxford scholar and a famous 20th-century convert to Christianity.