AN ANGLICAN delegation was present in St Peter’s Square on Saturday to hear the Pope declare St John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church (News, 8 August, Comment, 29 August).
Pope Leo made the declaration during a mass on the Solemnity of All Saints and at the culmination of the Jubilee of the World of Education.
Anglicans present included the Archbishop of York; the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani; the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner; and Canon William Lamb, the Vicar of University Church, Oxford, where Newman was his predecessor from 1828 to 1843. A delegation of the UK Government was led by the Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, who wrote on social media: “Coming from the Anglo-Catholic tradition, his [Newman’s] insistence on moral reflection calls us back to what matters — leadership in the cause of what is right and just.”
The Pope said in a homily: “On this Solemnity of All Saints, it is a great joy to include St John Henry Newman among the Doctors of the Church, and, at the same time, on the occasion of the Jubilee of the World of Education, to name him, together with St Thomas Aquinas, as co-Patron of the Church’s educational mission.
“Newman’s impressive spiritual and cultural stature will surely serve as an inspiration to new generations whose hearts thirst for the infinite, and who, through research and knowledge, are willing to undertake that journey which, as the ancients said, takes us per aspera ad astra, through difficulties to the stars.”
He drew attention to some of Newman’s “very significant contributions to the theory and practice of education. He wrote, ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next’ [Meditations and Devotions, III, I, 2]. In these words, we find beautifully expressed the mystery of the dignity of every human person, and also the variety of gifts distributed by God.”
In a video recorded after the mass, Archbishop Cottrell said: “This is of huge significance for the Church of England and for Anglicans worldwide, as well as for the Catholic Church; and, indeed, the letter of support for this that Archbishop Justin and I sent to Pope Francis last year was mentioned in the citation to declare John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church.”
The Anglican delegation had been “welcomed and name-checked”, he said, “because this is a sign both of our fraternal belonging to one another as fellow Christians and followers of Jesus, but also of the growing towards that full visible unity of which John Henry Newman, I think, is himself a saint and a sign; because, although he left behind his Anglicanism to become a Roman Catholic, his theological vision was formed in the Church of England, and his writings as an Anglican are held as being equally important by the Catholic Church as his writings as a Roman Catholic.”
Dr Francis-Dehaqni, speaking in the same video, said that the declaration “was another step along the way as we seek to find greater unity”. It was her first time in Rome and in the Vatican, and it had been “an extraordinary experience”, she said.
