page_title: John Henry Newman
section_title: Achilli trial
hierarchical_section_title: John Henry Newman / Conversion to Catholicism / Achilli trial
caption_attribution_description: English: A chromolithograph, published in Vanity Fair 20 January 1877. Men of the Day. No. 145. “Tracts for the times.” Caricature by Sir Leslie Ward.
context_page_description: John Henry Newman was an English theologian and poet, first an Anglican priest and later a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
  Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success. After publishing his controversial Tract 90 in 1841, Newman later wrote, "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church". In 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, officially left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church.
context_section_description: One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-Catholics, including former priests, denounced their prior beliefs and gave detailed accounts of the horrors of Catholic life. Giacinto Achilli (1803–1860), an ex-Dominican friar, was one such speaker.
  In 1833 Achilli, author of Dealings with the inquisition: or, Papal Rome, her priests, and her Jesuits... (1851), had been made Master of Sacred Theology at the College of St. Thomas, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.
  
  Nash describes Achilli's journey to England thus: 
  [Achilli] had been imprisoned (in a monastery) by the Inquisition for heresy, he claimed, but actually for a series of sexual offences against under-age young women. He had been "rescued" from the Inquisition by a group of English ultra-Protestants as a hero six months before the Papal Aggression crisis broke. He was received by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, greeted at a public meeting at Exeter Hall with a specially written hymn, "Hail Roman prisoner, Hail" and given a chapel in London. His Dealings with the Inquisition was a best seller. In his public lectures, sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance, he professed to the errors of Catholicism and to be a sincere Protestant, and his exciting account of the cruelties of the Inquisition made him a credible and popular anti-Catholic speaker.
  In July 1850, Wiseman wrote a detailed exposé of him in The Dublin Review which listed all of his offences. Newman therefore assumed, after seeking legal advice, that he would be able to repeat the facts in his fifth lecture in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England.
  
  In these lectures, Newman denounced various anti-Catholic utterances. These included those of the Maria Monk, the allegation of cells under his own Oratory on Hagley Road, Birmingham and those of Giacinto Achilli. Newman emphasises the importance of responding to Achilli: 
  For how, Brothers of the Oratory, can we possibly believe a man like this [Achilli], in what he says about persons and facts, and conversations, and events, when he is of the stamp of Maria Monk, of Jeffreys, and of Teodore, and of others who have had their hour, and then been dropped by the indignation or the shame of mankind.
  The section of the lecture that was decided by jury to constitute a libel was:
  I have been a Catholic and an infidel; I have been a Roman priest and a hypocrite; I have been a profligate under a cowl. I am that Father Achilli, who as early as 1826, was deprived of my faculty to lecture, for an offence which my superiors did their best to conceal; and who in 1827 had already earned the reputation of a scandalous friar. I am that Achilli, who in the diocese of Viterbo in February, 1831, robbed of her honour a young woman of eighteen; who in September 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime, in the case of a person of twenty-eight; and who perpetrated a third in July, 1834, in the case of another aged twenty-four.   I am he, who afterwards was found guilty of sins, similar or worse, in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am that son of St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at Capua, in 1834 or 1835; and at Naples again, in 1840, in the case of a child of fi[f]teen. I am he who chose the sacristy of the church for one of these crimes, and Good Friday for another. Look on me, ye mothers of England, a confessor against Popery, for ye 'ne'er may look upon my like again.' I am that veritable priest, who, after all this, began to speak against, not only the Catholic faith, but the moral law, and perverted others by my teaching. I am the Cavaliere Achilli, who then went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about with the wife of a chorus-singer. I am that Professor of the Protestant College at Malta, who with two others was dismissed from my post for offences which the authorities cannot get themselves to describe. And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see what you shall see abou
caption: Caricature of Newman by "Spy", published in Vanity Fair in 1877
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