Newman’s spirit alive at Toronto’s Oratory

The Catholic Register, 29 October 2020

On Nov. 1, the solemn feast of All Saints, the Toronto Oratory celebrated its 45th anniversary, a suitable occasion to reflect on how the Oratory of St. Philip Neri makes Newman’s presence come alive in Toronto.

Earlier this year I wrote an appreciation here of the late Fr. Jonathan Robinson, who established the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Montreal in 1975 and transferred it to Toronto in 1979. Last month, I wrote about the 175th anniversary of the conversion of St. John Henry Newman on Oct. 9, 1845, which is now his feast day.

This month I wish to unite the two, Newman and the Oratory. On Nov. 1, the solemn feast of All Saints, the Toronto Oratory celebrates its 45th anniversary, a suitable occasion to reflect on how the Oratory of St. Philip Neri makes Newman’s presence come alive in Toronto.

In North America we tend to think about Newman in relation to university chaplaincies, given the number that are named after him. Indeed, it is not unusual to hear some ask for the “Newman Centre” instead of the “Catholic chaplaincy.”

Newman had been given the mission of founding a Catholic university in Ireland. That did not meet with the success hoped for, but it did produce the magnificent book The Idea of a University, still read today, a repository of wisdom about the formation of young minds — and characters.

Newman himself did not live an academic life after his conversion 175 years ago, but chose instead to bring the Oratorian way of life, founded by St. Philip Neri in 16th-century Rome, to England. He established the first English Oratory in Birmingham, which later gave rise to the more famous Brompton Oratory in London.

St. Philip — called the “second apostle of Rome” after Peter and Paul — initiated a new approach to evangelizing the corrupted Catholic culture of Rome. He gathered a small group around himself and evangelized on that personal scale, inviting youth to picnics that became pilgrimages, to fellowship that became formation, and to a life together that expressed itself in liturgical beauty.

Newman brought that spirit and method of St. Philip to England. Fr. Robinson would bring that to Canada, building his Oratory on the English model. He began in Montreal with a small group of young men who would gather for dinner, read a Newman sermon and then have a spiritual discussion inspired by it. This would eventually develop into the “Little Oratory” gatherings which St. Philip had pioneered four centuries earlier.

“St. Philip preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt,” Newman wrote of Philip’s evangelical approach in The Idea of a University.

For that reason, my friend Fr. Roger Landry proposes that St. Philip Neri be designated the “patron saint of the new evangelization.” We have much to learn from his methods. Those methods have been put into good effect by the Toronto Oratory in Parkdale.

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