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Nicholas Wiseman

His Eminence
Nicholas Wiseman
Cardinal, Archbishop of Westminster
Nicholas Wiseman NPG.jpg
Cardinal Wiseman
Province Westminster
Diocese Westminster
Appointed 29 August 1847 (Coadjutor Vicar Apostolic)
Installed 29 September 1850
Term ended 15 February 1865
Predecessor Thomas Walsh (as Vicar Apostolic)
Successor Henry Edward Manning
Other posts Cardinal-Priest of Santa Pudenziana
Orders
Ordination 19 March 1825
Consecration 8 June 1840
by Giacomo Filippo Fransoni
Created Cardinal 30 September 1850
Rank Cardinal-Priest
Personal details
Birth name Nicolás Patricio Esteban Wiseman
Born (1802-08-02)2 August 1802
Seville, Spain
Died 15 February 1865(1865-02-15) (aged 62)
York Place, Portman Square, London, England
Buried Westminster Cathedral
Denomination Roman Catholic
Parents James Wiseman and Xaviera Wiseman (née Strange)
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Styles of
Nicholas Wiseman
External Ornaments of a Cardinal Bishop.svg
Reference style His Eminence
Spoken style Your Eminence
Informal style Cardinal

Nicholas Wiseman (2 August 1802 – 15 February 1865) was a Spanish-born Irish Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.

Wiseman was born in Seville on 2 February 1802, the younger son of James and Xaviera Strange Wiseman, of Waterford, Ireland, who had settled in Spain for business. On his father's death in 1805, he was brought to his parents' home in Waterford. In 1810, he was sent to Ushaw College, near Durham, where he was educated until the age of sixteen, when he proceeded to the English College in Rome, which had reopened in 1818 after being closed by the Napoleonic Wars for twenty years. He graduated with a doctorate of theology with distinction in 1825, and was ordained to the priesthood the following year.

He was appointed vice-rector of the English College in 1827, and rector in 1828, although he was not yet twenty-six years of age. He held this office until 1840. From the first a devoted student and scholar of antiquity, he devoted much time to the examination of Oriental manuscripts in the Vatican library, and a first volume, entitled Horae Syriacae, published in 1827, showed promise as a great scholar.

Pope Leo XII appointed him curator of the Arabic manuscripts in the Vatican, and professor of Oriental languages in the Roman University. His academic life was, however, broken by the pope's command to preach to English residents of Rome. A course of his lectures, On the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion, attracted much attention. His general thesis was that whereas scientific teaching had repeatedly been thought to disprove Christian doctrine, further investigation has shown that a reconciliation is possible. It is much to Wiseman's credit that his lectures on the relationship between religion and science received the stamp of approval from a critic as stern as Andrew Dickson White. In his extremely influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, whose primary contention was the conflict thesis, White wrote that "it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honour to religion and to himself by quietly accepting the claims of science and making the best of them.... That man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations."


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