WHEN the Pope approved plans to declare the English St John Henry Newman 38th Doctor of the Universal Church, the news was welcomed across the Roman Catholic world (News, 8 August). Knowing that one of their number, active within recent memory, is considered comparable to St Augustine and St Aquinas is, indeed, providential for this country’s once excluded Roman Catholic minority.
What will it mean, however, for Anglicans, and for the Church that Newman left behind?
“From time to time, the Church recognises a great Christian theologian whose teaching not only resonated for their own contemporaries, but whose wisdom and insight as an interpreter of the Gospel can still illuminate, instruct and inspire,” the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales explains on its website.
“Newman is especially remarkable for the breadth of his teaching across many aspects of the faith, his influence upon various branches of doctrine and theology, and his engagement with problems of faith which remain burning issues in our own time.”
Newman was already noted as an Oxford preacher when the 1829 Relief Act lifted harsh penal exclusions on Britain’s Roman Catholics. He had already been a Cardinal for nine years when the notorious Recusancy Laws were repealed, in 1888.
None of these inherited restrictions had impeded his vast output of poetry, hymns, essays, and novels, nor of classic works such as his Meditations and Devotions and Apologia Pro Vita Sua — which continue to make him the subject of more doctoral studies at Rome’s pontifical universities than any other modern figure.
It took Oxford University Press half a century to publish 32 large volumes of his letters and diaries, while 250,000 extra folios of his notes and reflections are still being digitised today.
Newman’s work on doctrinal development is said to have influenced Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation adopted by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), while his notion of “change in continuity” can be retraced in Dignitatis Humanae, its Declaration on Religious Freedom, and his argument that religious ideas gain clarity over time in the ecclesial vision set out in its Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium.
His 1870 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, defending the reasonableness of faith against narrow empiricism, is acknowledged in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, together with his writings on Christian beatitude and the sense of the sacred.
His defence of the primacy of conscience, set out in an 1875 Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, has also entered the Roman Catholic mainstream; so has his work on education and the lay mission, on freedom versus self-will, and on humanity’s temporal and eternal identities.
HOW much do these great achievements owe to his Anglican origins?
Newman ultimately rejected the Anglican via media, citing St Augustine’s dictum “securus judicat orbis terrarum” — the verdict of the whole world is conclusive — as a prompt to his secession to Roman Catholicism.
Yet he was a complex and subtle thinker, radical and conservative in equal measure, who rejected fixed mindsets and loyalties, and brought insights nurtured as an Anglican into his later work as a philosopher and theologian.
While he believed in objective truth, he saw how this truth could be perceived differently, in ways that remain relevant to current debates on atheism, scientific reductionism, post-modernism, and the part played by the State in defining values.
That Newman is now being immortalised as an architect of contemporary Catholic teaching is a normative signpost for Leo XIV’s pontificate, and confirmation that the synodality pioneered by his predecessor will continue.
Leo’s Church will remain open to change and development, to re-examining and re-evaluating the past, while theologians and philosophers will be free to continue debating how best to interpret and apply aspects of its doctrine, in full respect for personal freedom, the rights of conscience, and the dignity of laypeople.
Having remained close, despite bitter controversies, to former Church of England colleagues, Newman would have been happy to know that his exhaustive pursuit of truth still interests Anglicans. He would have been gratified that it continues to highlight the possibilities of theology in confronting faith challenges in the modern world, and that it still inspires daily commitment to holiness and pastoral care for the poor and downtrodden.
IN A final letter, Newman insisted he had “no tendency to be a saint”. The Roman Catholic Church decided otherwise, and has now gone a significant step further — an act of acknowledgement that all Christians should celebrate, recalling the famous words of the Liberal Party statesman Lord Rosebery, who travelled to the Birmingham Oratory to see Newman’s “saintly remains” laid out at his death in August 1890.
“This was the end of the young Calvinist, the Oxford don, the austere vicar of St Mary’s,” Rosebery recorded. “It seemed as if a whole cycle of human thought and life were concentrated in that august repose. . . Kindly light has led a guided Newman to this strange, brilliant, incomparable end.”
Jonathan Luxmoore is a freelance journalist.
