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The life of John Henry Newman
The volume "John Henry Newman. A Biography" has recently
been republished (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
pp.
784, €30). The 1988 edition has been
expanded to include an afterword that refutes the recent insinuations
about his burial. The author of the volume, a well-known expert on the
character and work of Newman, traced a brief outline of the life of
Newman for L'Osservatore Romano.
The Venerable John Henry
Newman will be the first Englishman to be raised to the altars of the
Church since the Reformation who was not also a martyr. He did, however,
endure much suffering in his life: having been vilified as an Anglican,
when through the Oxford Movement he attempted to recover the Church of
England's Catholic heritage, subsequently as a Catholic his work for the
Church was undermined by the extreme Ultramontanes who suspected him of
liberalism, while he was attacked by liberal Catholics for his obedience
to authority.
Although never martyred
like St Thomas More, the author of Utopia and friend of Erasmus,
Newman too was a great humanist. The altar of his private chapel at the
Birmingham Oratory is surmounted by pictures not of St Philip Neri (the
founder of the Oratory) but of the great humanist saint of the
Counter-reformation, St Francis de Sales, whose saying "cor ad cor
loquitur" Newman took for his cardinalatial motto. He had already
quoted the words in The Idea of a University (1873), a classic of
English prose as well as the most influential work ever written on
university education. Indeed, Newman once wrote, "Now from first to
last, education... has been my line". As a young man, he had pioneered
the tutorial system at Oxford; later he was the founder of the Catholic
University of Ireland and of the Oratory School in Birmingham. As a
writer, he ranks among the foremost of English prose writers, while his
poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865) was set to music by Edward
Elgar in his famous oratorio.
During the Oxford Movement
Newman preached in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, of which
he was vicar, not only his academic Oxford University Sermons
(1843), but also many pastoral sermons, which were eventually collected
together as Parochial and Plain Sermons (1868). These sermons,
which are steeped in Scripture and the Fathers, have become a classic of
Christian spirituality. His Oxford University Sermons, his most
seminal work, explored the relationship between faith and reason, an
exploration that would be completed in his Grammar of Assent
(1870). The originality and penetration of his philosophy of religion
has only been fully appreciated in recent years.
When Newman became a
Catholic in 1845, he was the most important convert to the Church since
the Reformation. His Scriptural and Patristic theology was alien to a
Church that was then dominated by a scholastic theology and untouched by
the later Scriptural, Patristic, and Thomist revivals. It was the Second
Vatican Council, of which he is often called "the Father", that finally
vindicated his theology. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles called him the
most seminal Catholic theologian of the 19th century. His classic
Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (1845), which fell
under the suspicion of the two leading Roman theologians of the day, is
the starting-point for modern Catholic theology of development. His
On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859), which was
denounced to Rome by one of the English and Welsh hierarchy, predated by
more than a hundred years the Second Vatican Council's Decree on the
Apostolate of the Laity and the chapter on the laity in the Constitution
on the Church. The final chapter of the latter on the Blessed Virgin
Mary was the result of the Council's decision not to have a separate
document on Our Lady; its Scriptural and Patristic theology is in accord
with Newman's own Mariology in his A Letter to Pusey (1866).
Newman's interpretation of the First Vatican Council's definition of
papal infallibility in his Letter
to the Duke of Norfolk (1875)
was unwelcome to the extreme Ultramontanes but was vindicated in his own
time in True and False
Infallibility by Bishop Fessler,
who had been Secretary-General of the Council, a book that received the
official approval of Pope Pius IX. Newman's famous "toast" to conscience
in the same work referred to the possibility of conscientiously refusing
to obey a papal order, not to the possibility of so-called conscientious
dissent from papal teachings, as is often falsely alleged.
But if Newman is "the
Father of the Second Vatican Council", he will, in the event of his
canonisation, surely be declared a Doctor of the Church. And if so, he
will be seen, I am convinced, as the Doctor of the post-conciliar
Church. For his theology, that seemed so radical, even dangerous in his
own time, was always deeply historical and sensitive to the Tradition,
as well as respectful of the teaching authority of the Church. He once
famously wrote, "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant".
The idea that Vatican II represented a complete break in the history of
the Church, a new dawn analogous to the Reformation as viewed by
Protestants, would have seemed to him not only to show an extraordinary
ignorance of history and indifference to Tradition, but also a contempt
for the Church's ongoing Magisterium. Like Pope Benedict XVI, he
believed in "the hermeneutic of continuity". He wrote at the time of
Vatican I, "We do not move at railroad pace in theological matters, even
in the 19th century".
The mini-theology of
Councils that Newman sketched out in private letters at the time of the
First Vatican Council provides an invaluable hermeneutic for both
Vatican II and for subsequent developments and corruptions of the
Council's teachings. The chaos and dissension that followed the Council
Newman would have seen as the inevitable fall-out from a Council,
especially one so far-reaching in its agenda. The result of Vatican I
was the triumphalism of the extreme Ultramontanes on the one hand, and
on the other hand the excommunication of Döllinger
and the Old Catholic schism. Vatican II also saw the emergence of two
extreme but opposed reactions to the Council, both of which were in
close agreement as to its revolutionary nature.
Deep in history, Newman
understood very clearly that Councils move "in contrary declarations...
perfecting, completing, supplying each other". Vatican I's definition of
papal infallibility needed to be complemented, modified by a much larger
teaching on the Church, so, Newman correctly predicted, there would be
another Council which would do just that. But equally Vatican II needs
complementing and modifying. Newman keenly appreciated that Councils
have unintended consequences by virtue both of what they say and what
they do not say. The tendency is for the former to be exaggerated, as
happened in the wake of Vatican II, when one might have supposed that
the Church had no other business except justice and peace, ecumenism,
interreligious dialogue, and so on. But what Councils do not deal with,
and therefore neglect, is also of great significance: thus Vatican II
was deafeningly silent about what was to become the main preoccupation
of the pontificate of John Paul II
—
evangelisation.
In the decades that
preceded Vatican II, Newman was a source of encouragement and
inspiration to those seeking the renewal of the Church. The return to
the Patristic sources that characterised the Oxford Movement, of which
Newman was the leader as well as its leading theologian, anticipated the
great twentieth-century French ressourcement of Jean Danielou,
Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar, without which the renewal of the Second
Vatican Council would hardly have been possible. In the post-conciliar
time in which we are living, I believe that John Henry Newman is an
invaluable guide to a true understanding of the Council, free from
distortions and exaggerations, an understanding that is informed by a
sense of history and the development of doctrine, as well as by an
appreciation of the limitations of Councils and their relationship to
each other.
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