The Dickinson Newman Club is a Catholic student organization at Dickinson College. We have many events on campus including weekly meetings, mass, Bible studies, social outings, field trips and retreats. The Club, like many others around the country, is named after Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman.

Newman was a real person who wrote, taught and preached in the 19th century and spent many of his early years at Oxford. He was raised in the Anglican Church, moved through many stages and struggles in his spiritual quest, and finally decided to become a Catholic at the age of 42. He was ordained a priest four years later and matured into one of the keenest thinkers and theologians the church has ever known. Unfortunately, he was often misunderstood in his lifetime: Protestants mistrusted him because he changed denominations, and Catholics were suspicious of him because he started out as a different denomination. But, despite all the pain that his thinking and writing cost him, Newman never ceased to insist that the life of the mind and the life of the spirit should be connected. Newman's perspective was that faith and intellect belonged together, and being a "Fool for Christ" never meant that one should withdraw form learning or questioning.

It is hardly surprising that when Catholics first started to band together on state university campuses they embraced John Henry Newman as their patron. Until about 40 years ago, it was uncommon for Catholics to attend non-Catholic colleges. Priests and parents worried that young women and men who did so would quickly lose their faith in the atmosphere of moral decadence and "secular" thinking they presumed existed at state universities. Daughters and sons who went off to college were urged to join college "Newman Clubs" and seek out friendship with others Catholics who could support and bolster their beliefs. From the very start, the Newman movement throughout the country was committed to freedom of thought and respect for others. The very first Club, established in 1893 at the University of Pennsylvania, insisted that its members not become "clannish or narrow in a religious sense."

"I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other. Religion cannot stifle or restrict the intellect, only enlighten and enlarge it." -John Henry Cardinal Newman