St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was the most famous convert of the nineteenth century: an Anglican priest and Oxford scholar who became a Catholic, a cardinal, a saint, and in 2025 a Doctor of the Church. He was also a master of prayer in English, and his words are still prayed around the world: “God has created me to do Him some definite service,” “Lead, Kindly Light,” and “May He support us all the day long.” Below are his best-loved prayers, taken from the editions published in his lifetime and just after, along with a prayer to St. John Henry Newman, his feast day on October 9, and what he is the patron saint of.
A short prayer to St. John Henry Newman, written for this page:
St. John Henry Newman, you followed the kindly Light of truth wherever it led you,
even when it cost you your friends, your position and your reputation.
Pray for me, that I may seek the truth with an honest heart,
serve God faithfully in the place He has given me,
and come at last out of shadows and images into the truth. Amen.
“God has created me to do Him some definite service”
Newman’s most famous meditation, written on March 7, 1848, is often called “The Mission of My Life.” It reminds each person that God has a unique purpose for them, even when they cannot see it:
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, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his — if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion 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.
O Adonai, O Ruler of Israel, Thou that guidest Joseph like a flock, O Emmanuel, O Sapientia, I give myself to Thee. I trust Thee wholly. Thou art wiser than I—more loving to me than I myself. Deign to fulfil Thy high purposes in me whatever they be — work in and through me. I am born to serve Thee, to be Thine, to be Thy instrument. Let me be Thy blind instrument. I ask not to see — I ask not to know — I ask simply to be used.
Lead, Kindly Light
Newman wrote this poem on June 16, 1833, on an orange boat becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio, as he sailed home from Sicily after a near-fatal fever. He called it “The Pillar of the Cloud,” after the cloud that led Israel through the desert. Set to music, it became one of the best-loved hymns in the English language:
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene, one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
“May He support us all the day long”
The closing words of a sermon Newman preached in 1843, still his best-known prayer for evening and for the end of life:
May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!
A version of it, “O Lord, support us all the day long,” is printed in many prayer books.
“Radiate Christ”: a prayer to shine with His light
Newman wrote these lines in a meditation on Jesus, the Light of the Soul. St. Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity pray an adapted form of them every day after Holy Communion:
Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shinest: so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be Thou who shinest through me upon others. O let me thus praise Thee, in the way which Thou dost love best, by shining on all those around me. Give light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth Thy praise, Thy truth, Thy will. Make me preach Thee without preaching — not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the sympathetic influence, of what I do — by my visible resemblance to Thy saints, and the evident fulness of the love which my heart bears to Thee.
Firmly I believe and truly
In The Dream of Gerontius (1865), Newman’s poem about a soul’s journey through death to judgment, the dying man makes this profession of faith. It is sung today as a hymn:
Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three, and God is One;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son.
And I trust and hope most fully
In that manhood crucified;
And each thought and deed unruly
Do to death, as He has died.
Simply to His grace and wholly
Light, and life, and strength belong,
And I love, supremely, solely,
Him the holy, Him the strong.
And I hold in veneration,
For the love of Him alone,
Holy Church, as His creation,
And her teachings, as His own.
And I take with joy whatever
Now besets me, pain or fear,
And with a strong will I sever
All the ties which bind me here.
Adoration aye be given,
With and through the angelic host,
To the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The same poem gives us the hymn “Praise to the Holiest in the height.”
Who was St. John Henry Newman?
- Born in London, February 21, 1801, the eldest of six children of a banker. He had a deep conversion to Christ at fifteen.
- Oxford. He became a fellow of Oriel College and, in 1828, vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, where his sermons drew crowds.
- The Oxford Movement. From 1833 he led a movement to renew the Church of England by recovering the teaching of the early Church Fathers. His studies slowly convinced him that the Catholic Church was the Church the Fathers knew.
- Conversion. On October 9, 1845, at Littlemore near Oxford, he was received into the Catholic Church by Bl. Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist. He lost many friends, his Oxford position and his income.
- Priest and Oratorian. Ordained in Rome in 1847, he brought the Oratory of St. Philip Neri to England and lived the rest of his life in the Birmingham Oratory, serving the poor of the city as well as writing. See St. Philip Neri.
- Writer. His works include The Idea of a University, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), the story of his conversion, and An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).
- Cardinal. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal. He chose the motto Cor ad cor loquitur, “Heart speaks to heart.”
- Death. He died at the Birmingham Oratory on August 11, 1890. His memorial tablet reads Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, “Out of shadows and images into the truth.”
Beatification, canonization and Doctor of the Church
Pope Benedict XVI beatified Newman in Birmingham on September 19, 2010, after the healing of Deacon Jack Sullivan of Boston from a severe spinal disorder. Pope Francis canonized him in Rome on October 13, 2019, after the healing of Melissa Villalobos of Chicago, a young mother who suffered a life-threatening hemorrhage during pregnancy. On November 1, 2025, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church and named him co-patron of Catholic education, with St. Thomas Aquinas.
What is St. John Henry Newman the patron saint of?
St. John Henry Newman is the co-patron of Catholic education. Catholic chaplaincies at secular universities, the Newman Centers, are named after him, and he is the patron of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which welcomes former Anglicans into the Catholic Church. Converts and those searching for the truth also take him as their patron.
Feast day
The feast of St. John Henry Newman is October 9, the anniversary of his reception into the Catholic Church. It is an optional memorial in the universal Roman calendar, kept with special joy in England and Wales, in the Personal Ordinariates and by Newman Centers. To make a novena to St. John Henry Newman, pray the prayer above with the “definite service” meditation each day from September 30 to October 8.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous prayer of St. John Henry Newman?
The meditation that begins “God has created me to do Him some definite service” and the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light” are his best known.
When is St. John Henry Newman’s feast day?
October 9.
Why did Newman become Catholic?
His study of the early Church Fathers convinced him that the Catholic Church was the same Church they knew, and he followed his conscience into it in 1845, at great personal cost.
What did Newman say about change?
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often,” from his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845).
More saints and prayers
- St. Bede the Venerable
- St. Philip Neri
- St. Teresa of Calcutta
- Prayer for vocations
- Catholic night prayers
- OCIA: becoming Catholic
- Saint of the day
Texts and sources
- John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), “Hope in God—Creator” (March 7, 1848) and “Jesus the Light of the Soul,” public domain (archive.org).
- John Henry Newman, Verses on Various Occasions (London: Burns, Oates, 1868), “The Pillar of the Cloud” and The Dream of Gerontius, public domain (archive.org).
- John Henry Newman, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Rivington, 1843), Sermon XX, “Wisdom and Innocence,” public domain (archive.org).