When the blogmaster (I suppose there is such a word) of Rorate Caeli, who is a personal friend of some years now, wrote to me recently to ask, with some astonishment on his part, why I had not written an article for publication immediately after the announcement by Pope Leo XIV that St. John Henry Newman was declared a Doctor of the Church, I replied that despite my love for Newman, I could not respond at once, for I needed time to think about not merely the declaration itself but also what this means for the Church today, as she (not it) seems to be emerging, Deo gratias, from the dark years after the Second Vatican Council that were marked by iconoclasm, denial of the Catholic Tradition and worst of all--sentimentality, the acid of religion.
I have read, in the weeks following the announcement that Newman had been named a Doctor of the Church, the many positive reactions to this honor bestowed upon this great man of the Church. And that is wonderful and heartening. It is interesting that these positive reactions came even from sources whose love for the Italian word aggiornamento was a mere springboard to a denial of the binding nature of the Tradition of the Church. But the positive nature of their response was less than enthusiastic. It was they as a group who claimed Newman as their patron of making the Church more relevant to the modern and then the post-modern world. The problem is that their reading of Newman was cursory, and they did not read deeply into his works--which is indeed a difficult task. It is a blessing that we no longer hear the mantra that Newman is the “father of Vatican II”, a claim that would perplex Newman himself, given the “bare, ruined choirs” that were the result of the “glory years” of the two decades following the Council.. Somewhere along the line, these once champions of Newman read his Bigletto speech on the occasion of receiving his cardinal’s hat in Rome in which he said:
And I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first
opposed myself for thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the
best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did holy
Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas,
it is an error overspreading as a snare, the whole earth. Liberalism
in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion
but that one creed is as good as another...it is inconsistent with any
recognition of religion as true.
Having read this, those who held him up as a liberal icon, decided that the Newman who wrote this was indeed a disappointment to their cause.
We live at a time when the terms liberal and conservative are applied outside of the political sphere in which those terms have meaning and are generally understood. Thus, we hear these terms to describe Catholics in the media, and also Catholics using these terms to describe themselves with respect to the “kind” of Catholic they are, as if the Catholic faith came in various flavors. This use of the secular terms “liberal” and “conservative” causes much confusion in the Church.
If Newman were asked, “What is the opposite of liberal”?, his answer would certainly not be conservative: it would be Traditional. What is needed at this time in the Church is Newman’s wonderful clarity of thought that shines through his theological writings, which are, it must be said, not an “easy read”. Two of his greatest works, Development of Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Assent require patience and time, but they concern two of most important aspects of the Catholic faith. A good introduction to Newman’s writings is the Apologia pro Vita Sua, an account of his religious journey to the Catholic Church. This book was for me the beginning of my conversion to the Catholic faith. But to know who Newman was as a person, as a priest, and as a follower of Jesus Christ, there is no better way than to read his sermons, both Anglican and Catholic. Matthew Arnold describes Newman preaching at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford to undergraduates:
Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding
in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising
into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful?’
When I was a student at Oxford, many years ago, I used to read Newman’s sermons in St. Mary’s in Oxford, sitting in a pew alone in the church. And I would occasionally look up at the pulpit, imagining him there, preaching these words. In a time in the Catholic Church when those in charge recommend that the homily at Mass should be no longer than five or six minutes at most, and in a time in the Church when priests subscribe to homily services on-line, I return to the mind-full and beautiful sermons of Newman, who knew better about these things than those who see themselves as in charge of the Church.
St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church, pray for us.
