Originally an Anglican minister, John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism and became a cardinal at the age of 78. The founder of UCD will be beatified during the pope’s visit to the UK next week. ‘There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may be fairly done, and things which may not be done.” The man who wrote this measured observation about the nature of conflict died 130 years ago. Next weekend, Pope Benedict XVI, at the end of his four-day visit to Britain, will beatify him.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was born in 1801 in London, the son of a wealthy banker, spent four years in Dublin in the 1850s. He came to Ireland at the invitation of the Irish clergy to act as rector of the newly-established Catholic University of Ireland, now known as University College Dublin (UCD). He is recognised as being the founder of UCD. Writing in the London Review of Books this month, the academic Terry Eagleton states crisply: “Newman was everything your average Irish cleric was not: erudite, ascetic, patrician, cultivated, liberal-minded.”

Newman founded the university’s Literary and Historical Society, a debating society that still endures, usually known informally as the LH. The flagship building, Newman House on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, carries his name.

A striking element of his pending beatification is that Newman was one of the Catholic Church’s most high-profile converts. He had been ordained as an Anglican priest in 1825 at Oxford, where he was based for many years, first as student and then as intellectual. A prominent scholar, theologian, writer, tutor and thinker, Newman converted to Catholicism in 1847, and was made a cardinal in 1879. He founded the Oratory school in Birmingham, the city where his beatification will take place.

While in Ireland, he wrote his famous collection of essays, The Idea of a University . Among his many other publications were his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua ; the long poem The Dream of Gerontius ; and An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent . James Joyce was a prominent and vocal admirer of his prose style, noting: “nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church”.

Among Newman’s most famous quotes are these: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”; “A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature”; and, “We should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.”