“John Henry Newman was installed as rector of the first Catholic university in the British Isles in 1854. The university church that he built in Dublin (1855–6) physically embodied the concept behind the unprecedented university – the provision of an learned Catholic alternative to post-Enlightenment secularism and Protestant hegemony – through a style-based analogy to the Early Church. … I argue here for the importance of features such as the convex leaf-cut capital, the stilted arch, polychrome stone cladding and ‘mosaic’ in our understanding of nineteenth-century Byzantine revival architecture.