A Cardinal Newman Prayer Book: Heart to Heart

Cardinal Newman (now Blessed John Henry Newman) was profoundly influenced by Francis de Sales. The phrase “Heart to Heart” was taken by Newman as his episcopal motto and occurs in a letter of Francis as well as a treatise on preaching and in Book VI of his masterpiece, “The Treatise on the Love of God.” When one enters the private chapel of Newman’s quarters in the Oratory in Birmingham, England (carefully and authentically preserved), one notices a large portrait of the Bishop of Geneva above the altar. Cardinal Newman looked at it each day as he offered Mass. There is a Salesian spirit that permeates the hymns and prose excerpts of Newman’s works quoted throughout “Heart to Heart.” In the first section on the Holy Trinity, we read: “Go back a few years, and I simply did not exist. . . But Thou art from eternity.” This section reads almost as a paraphrase of the meditation on creation in Part I, Chapter 9, of the “Introduction to the Devout Life.” Like Francis, Newman’s spirituality is profoundly Christocentric. His meditations on the Dying and Rising of Jesus and the Sacred Heart are moving. This is not a book to read cover to cover but to return to daily for spiritual food. Only scholars have the energy to go through all of Newman’s prolific writings. These well chosen selections will allow an effortless overview of the literary accomplishment of this remarkable man. It’s almost as if one were reading Francis de Sales seen through the prism of another cleric 250 years later who was, like Francis, a man of genius and of deep, loving spirituality. Fr. Roland Calvert, OSFS, Adrian, Michigan