On this day in 1801 was born the future John Henry Cardinal Newman. There is a small chance that, years later, Father Newman may have heard of Mother Mary Maddalena, since Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha was a friend of Newman. (They had studied together in Rome, after Newman became a Catholic.)   Bishop O’Connor, when in Europe on his Ad limina to Rome, always stopped by the Oratory to visit the elderly prelate. Father Neville published posthumously a devotional work of Newman’s:
One more name there is to mention – and it belongs to America, where though our Cardinal had so many friends, one pre-eminently such – that of Bishop James O’Connor, Bishop of Omaha, whose unaffected kindness was most grateful to our Cardinal, lasting as it did through all but the whole of his Catholic lifetime. For Bishop James O’Connor the Cardinal had a great affection, remembering always, with something of gratitude, the modesty and simplicity with which, the future Bishop [of Omaha] attached himself to him and to Father St. John when the three were at the Propaganda together, thus forming a friendship which distance and years did not lessen, and which later was enlivened by personal intercourse when the visits ad limina Apostolorum brought Bishop O’Connor to England.