page_title: The Newman Society
section_title: Previous generations
hierarchical_section_title: The Newman Society / Notable speakers / Previous generations
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Evelyn Waugh
context_page_description: The Newman Society: Oxford University Catholic Society is Oxford University's oldest Roman Catholic organisation, a student society named as a tribute to Cardinal Newman, who agreed to lend his name to a group formed seventeen years before the English hierarchy formally permitted Catholics to attend the university. The society acquired its current form and title following the merger in 2012 of the pre-existing Newman Society and Oxford University's Catholic Society. It exists, according to its constitution, to: 'work in conjunction with the Chaplains to support and encourage Catholic students in their Christian vocation by promoting their personal, intellectual and spiritual development, social interaction, and apostolic witness within the broader context of their university experience', and has served as the model for Catholic student societies throughout the English-speaking world.
context_section_description: The society has been addressed by prominent and influential Catholics – as well as non-Catholics of interest to a Catholic audience – throughout its history. Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a founding member, and in the Newman's early years both he and author Robert Hugh Benson – also a member – gave papers. Maurice Baring's Punch and Judy was written for the occasion of his addressing the society, and it was at a meeting of the Newman that Christopher Dawson heard Newman biographer Wilfrid Ward speak. A biographer has argued that the experience was an influence in Dawson's conversion.
  Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton all spoke to the Newman; it was while attending a talk by Chesterton that Waugh first met Harold Acton, to whom he would later dedicate Decline and Fall. The 17th Duke of Norfolk would later in life speak of his "vivid recollections of meeting G. K. Chesterton when I ... attended some of his lectures to the Newman Society, which I will never forget." When Waugh himself addressed members in 1956, it was with an apocalyptic tone: "Our whole literary world is sinking into black disaster. ...I am sure that those who live for the next thirty years will see the art of literature dying."
  Other distinguished speakers who addressed the society in the course of the 20th century include Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Fr Ronald Knox, Fr Martin d'Arcy, Sir Alec Guinness, Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Princess Royal, Rowan Williams, John Finnis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Lord Longford, Immanuel Jakobovits, Viscount Monckton, Maurice Wiles, Terry Eagleton, William Rees-Mogg, Hans Adolf Krebs, Basil Mitchell, Dorothy Hodgkin, Auberon Waugh, Richard Southern, F. R. Leavis, Ninian Smart, Dan Berrigan, Herbert McCabe and Martin Gilbert.
caption: Evelyn Waugh addressed the Newman as a member
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