'Heart speaks unto heart': A Pilgrimage with Dr Newman

St John Henry Newman was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church on 1st November 2025. He is one of only 38 such Doctors and only the third Englishman. To mark this, and to commemorate his spiritual jouney, I walked a pilgrimage to Littlemore in Oxford, arriving on the day of the proclamation.

Newman was a strong walker as as a young man, and he would walk the eighteen miles from Oxford to Over Worton starting at 4am and arriving ‘punctually at the breakfast table’! His life can be understood as a pilgrimage. One of his biographers writes:

'Newman had moved from evangelicalism through rationalism into a perception of the Church of England as Catholic and from there on to Roman Catholicism. He had been growing; he had been on a pilgrimage.' (Strange, R. [2008] John Henry Newman A Mind Alive. DLT page 143)

I walked from Deddington where John Henry Newman gave his first public address in 1825, via Over Worton, where he preached his first sermon as an Anglican priest. My pilgrimage continued to Oxford where Newman was educated, was ordained as an Anglican minister and led the High Anglican Tracterian Movement. My route ended at Littlemore where Newman founded a High Anglican church and in 1845 converted to the Catholic faith and was received into the Church by Blessed Dominic Barberi. He founded a small college which can be visited today, details here.

This pilgrimage is an adaption of the existing Newman Pilgrimage which is based on the journeys Newman made from Oxford to Over Worton. Details of that pilgrimage can be found here: http://www.newmanpilgrimage.org/. I am grateful to Rev Hugh White and all those who developed this walk in 2013.

Neither pilgrimage route follows Newman's probable path which is now a busy road. This Way follows Newman's spiritual path; from Evangelical, to High Anglican and finally Catholic. He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1847, became a Cardinal in 1879 and died in 1890. He was declared a Saint in 2019 and a Doctor of the Church in 2025. A Doctor of the Church is a person of great holiness and learning whose teaching and wisdom resonated with their contemporaries, and still illuminates, instructs and inspires today.

More about Cardinal Newman and what it means to be a Doctor of the Church can be found here: https://www.cbcew.org.uk/newman-doctor-of-the-church/