It is always exciting when a previously unknown Newman letter comes to light. When Oxford University Press’s Letters and Diaries were being compiled the editors scoured the globe for every piece of correspondence from the Cardinal that could be found. Despite this, letters they missed continue to appear. In January after cataloguing some letters written by the Right Reverend Patrick John Ryan, Archbishop of Philadelphia to Cardinal Newman, I contacted the Catholic Historical Research Centre at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to let them know that these letters were now online and to ask if they knew where Newman’s replies were.

During my internship for NINS, I took great pleasure in reading the letters of Richard Simpson, a former Anglican priest numbered among the prominent Catholic converts of the time. He was most known for his involvement in the Liberal Catholic movement through the Rambler, a periodical which served to allow the prominent lay converts of the time to express their views to the masses. We currently have a total of 64 letters penned by Richard Simpson in the Digital Collections, of which most were directed to St. John Henry Newman. Despite their often-mundane nature (as is often the case with historical letters), they provide a window into the man Richard Simpson, as well as into the unfolding of the Rambler situation in 1859 as it suffered attacks by the English Bishops.

In the nineteenth century, tensions were acutely felt in religious controversies, such as the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura, which often privileged individual interpretation over ecclesial tradition, and emerging Catholic debates over historical-critical methods, as exemplified by figures like Alfred Loisy and the Modernist Crisis. John Henry Newman navigated similar turbulent waters as an Anglican convert to Catholicism, developed an implicit pneumatological hermeneutics that positioned the Holy Spirit as the vital guide for both personal and communal engagement with the biblical text. 

One letter from the Rev. Hussey to Newman is available on the digital collections. In this letter, he discusses Tract 90. Hussey’s main passion lay in astronomy. No sooner had he been granted the living of Hayes, where he served as rector, than in 1831 he began work to build an observatory at the rear of the property.

On October 5, 2025, our own NINS co-founder Catharine Ryan was invited to give a sermon at St. Mary's University Church in Oxford, standing at the same pulpit from which John Henry Newman preached 200 years ago. This sermon was first published on the University Church website and is reposted here with their permission. 

The NINS Digital Collections contain twenty-nine letters from Sir James Marshall. Marshall grew up in Edinburgh, the son of the Rev. James Marshall, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He received his degree at Exeter College, Oxford and was ordained in Anglican Orders in 1852. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1857, but due to the fact he had lost an arm in a childhood accident, was barred from being ordained a Catholic Priest.

There are two letters on the Digital Collections, written to Cardinal Newman from W. T. Stead, in his capacity as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was a prominent nineteenth-century English journalist and a pioneer of the journalistic profession. He first began writing for newspapers in 1870 at1 the age of 21, and the following year was made editor of The Northern Echo, becoming the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

Imagine a candlestick resting on a table in the corner of a dark room, whose flame does not fade, does not flicker, and does not burn out, but perpetually illuminates the corner and draws others towards its light. This everlasting flame is like a teaching of a Doctor of the Universal Church, seeking not to illumine the entirety of the dark room, but keeps the corner of the room illuminated. Similarly, the teachings of the Church Doctors illumine some component(s) of the mysteries of the Catholic faith without trying to plumb the entirety of the mystery of God. 

In 2022, the National Institute for Newman Studies began a second phase of the digitization project at the Birmingham Oratory. The project involved scanning the correspondence archives of the Oratory Fathers who lived and worked with Cardinal Newman, including Fathers William Neville, Frederick Bowles, Edward Caswall, Paul Eaglesim, and Nicholas Darnell.

The NINS Digital Collections contains one letter from Father Basil Maturin to Bishop Amigo discussing his attendance at Father Tyrrell’s funeral. Father Maturin was born February 15, 1847 at All Saints Vicarage, Grangegorman, Co. Dublin, the third of ten children of the Rev. William Maturin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and originally took Anglican Orders in 1870.