England’s most dangerous Catholic

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 04, 2026

St. John Henry Newman was once called “the most dangerous man in England” by the papal chamberlain, Fr. George Talbot, primarily because of the way Newman engaged the laity in supporting and even managing Catholic schools. Indeed Newman had to struggle in many of his educational projects because of a constant tension between lay involvement (which of course, is where the money was to come from) and the traditional desire of the English clergy to control any and all schools that claimed to have Catholic purposes or to serve Catholics. “The Most Dangerous Man in England” is also both the title and the major theme of a new book by Paul Shrimpton, published by Word on Fire Academic, which has already been ably discussed here last November when the author joined Thomas Mirus on the Catholic Culture Podcast.

In fact the book was my birthday gift from Thomas a couple of weeks ago, and I have just finished reading it myself. But rather than repeat its contents or its praise here, what I want to consider is what I think we can call the seismic shift in the role of the laity in the Church since Newman’s day in England, with some observations on why that shift occurred when it did.

Apostolate of the Laity

A lopsided relationship between clergy and laity emerged over hundreds of years in the Middle Ages when conditions more or less required that priests and monks would be the primary conservers of culture and education in the long centuries which followed the barbarian invasions in Europe and the fall of Rome. During these centuries of an overwhelmingly rural society, the poorer laity worked the land with little education, and the nobility found its way to influence the Church by turning its younger sons into bishops. With the gradual re-urbanization of Europe and the rise of commerce along with middle class wealth, untitled lay people grew gradually in education, financial power and influence, but for a very long time it was presumed that the clergy should still be in charge of education beyond the primary grades. And it mostly went without saying that specifically Christian initiatives would be led by clergy.

The Second Vatican Council correctively addressed the position of the laity, reminding the Church of our universal baptism as priests, prophets and kings, and therefore of the vital importance of what we now call the lay apostolate. Before the Council, it was very unusual for lay people to take the lead in any sort of spiritual revival or renewal. But what the Council had not clearly foreseen in the early 1960s was that its emphasis on the spiritual importance and commitment of the laity was Divinely timed. For the rot of neo-Modernism, Western post-war prosperity, and cultural complacency had deeply weakened the clergy by the early 1960s, and it turned out that if the Church’s apostolic energy was not to disappear in the West almost overnight, the laity were going to have to mount up, gather their apostolic reins, and ride into new forms of mission without delay.

Indeed, while the “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity” was well-timed by the Holy Spirit, the underlying reality was that if the Church were to recommit herself to broad-based apostolic initiatives, she was going to have to turn to the laity for new energy and a revived sense of purpose. The late 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s saw precisely this lay explosion of apostolic initiative.

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To read the overview of the Decree in my series on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, see Vatican II on the Lay Apostolate: Mission and Vatican II on the Lay Apostolate: Implementation. Here is the text of the Decree itself: Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem).

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A remarkable shift

Thinking back on the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, I recall clearly now how rare it was to have strong priestly leadership for faithful teaching and authentic apostolic action in the Church in both North America and Europe. Especially in the United States, which still had such a strong element of “do-it-yourself”, the explosion of initiatives to defend and advance the Catholic faith in a secular culture were nearly all lay-driven. This was, perhaps, the fulfillment of the slur that Newman was “the most dangerous man in England” in that the clergy were constantly challenged by lay people and lay organizations to adhere to the teachings of the Church and to exercise their ministries with genuine apostolic fervor.

I don’t mean the the laity had no clerical guidance. Uniformly, the new lay apostolates latched onto forgotten and downgraded priests who often had too little to do because they were out of favor with their bishops (or their Jesuit superiors). But the point was that these new lay organizations thirsted for sound spiritual direction and even legitimate Catholic encouragement to try to make up the cultural and spiritual deficit imposed by rotten Church institutions. In these years, the lay apostolate expanded generally, particularly in education and publishing of every kind. By the late 1990s, lay initiatives clearly supplemented and often even replaced many older, listless and failing ecclesiastical efforts in the realm of cultural conversion.

Even the greatness of EWTN is not quite an exception to the new rule. Though Mother Angelica was firmly in charge, lay executives predominated there. In the last third of the twentieth century, in terms of instrumental causes, it is not too much to say that the laity saved the Church in the West. This was especially obvious in the United States.

Newman’s legacy

Any serious Catholic who lived through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was in some measure involved in a battle to save the Church from bishops, secular clergy, and religious men and women who had lost their way. A century earlier, in Newman’s England, the situation was different but also very grave, for after the apostasy of Henry VIII, the Catholic hierarchy was not restored in England and Wales until 1850, five years after Newman’s conversion. This does not mean there was no ecclesiastical governance, but what governance there was tended to distrust the spiritual and administrative involvement of the laity.

In his own time, St. John Henry Newman was in some respects very like the out-of-favor priests who gave spiritual support to the growing lay Catholic movements of the latter part of the twentieth century. But Newman was a century ahead of the efforts of the Second Vatican Council to reverse the spiritual collapse of the Church in the West. The problem in his day was a certain clericalism which regarded the Church and its apostolic work as a hierarchical preserve—a clericalism which too often really did regard the role of the laity as being “to pray, pay and obey”. Or a clericalism which, to put the matter even more simply, did not fully understand what the rite of baptism meant when it spoke of priests, prophets and kings.

We strive now to have a wider and deeper and decidedly more spiritual collaboration among priests and lay people, without either the confusion of roles which has accompanied the modern rejection of the sacramental foundations of the Church or the partial rejection of the role of the laity in nineteenth-century England. For the English ecclesiastical leaders then generally did want lay people to be kept firmly in their subordinate and decidedly non-intellectual and non-managerial place. While we have plenty of ecclesiastical and spiritual obstacles of our own, we are more likely now to consider Newman dangerous only to those who are wary of Jesus Christ—and not to those who are seeking to do His will.

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SOME DEFINITE SERVICE
One version of Newman’s famous meditation, reflection, or poem

God knows me and calls me by my name.…
God has created me to do Him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
  which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission—I never may know it in this life,
  but I shall be told it in the next.

Somehow I am necessary for His purposes…
  I have a part in this great work;
I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection
  between persons.
He has not created me for naught. I shall do good,
  I shall do His work;
I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth
  in my own place, while not intending it,
  if I do but keep His commandments
  and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him.
  Whatever, wherever I am,
  I can never be thrown away.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him;
In perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him;
If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.
My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be
  necessary causes of some great end,
  which is quite beyond us.
He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life,
  He may shorten it;
  He knows what He is about.
  He may take away my friends,
  He may throw me among strangers,
  He may make me feel desolate,
  make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—
  still He knows what He is about.…
Let me be Thy blind instrument. I ask not to see—
  I ask not to know—I ask simply to be used.