Immaculate Conception

Imagine that you woke up this morning to the news that Bishop Robert Barron was becoming an Anglican.

That surprise and shock over the conversion of such a great intellectual was what the people of nineteenth-century England experienced as St. John Henry Newman became Catholic. Newman had been a brilliant mind, working hard within the Anglican Communion, pioneering a foundation for their religious beliefs. Newman turned to the writings of the earliest Christians, the early Church Fathers, in order to discover the true Anglican faith. What he found surprised him so much that he had no choice but to become a Catholic. He lost his job, his friends, and his community along the way. To make matters worse, soon after his conversion, Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, loathsome to Protestants of all stripes for a couple hundred years. Now Newman was tasked with defending that dogma, along with everything else.