John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801 – 1890)
Conversion: God and dogma
Cardinal Newman was born in London on 21 February 1801. He
was brought up in the Anglican tradition, and as a young man
had a strong religious inclination that was mainly expressed
in reading the Bible. From his earliest years, Sacred
Scripture endowed him with high moral standards, but his
intellectual potential demanded something more precise and
more clearly defined.
Very soon, when he was only 14 years old, he was tempted by
disbelief and self-sufficiency. He wanted to be a gentleman,
but not to believe in God. "I remember", he wrote about
this, "that I wanted to be virtuous but not to be religious;
I had not understood what loving God means". As the young
student struggled with this temptation, God knocked at his
heart.
During his holidays in 1816, he read Force of Truth by
Thomas Scott and its content made a profound impression on
him. He subsequently experienced his "first conversion",
which he himself considered one of the most significant
graces of his life. It involved acute awareness of the
existence and presence of God and of the invisible world.
In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, he confessed that this
experience did have a great influence on his personality,
"isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in
confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material
phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two
only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and
my Creator". He also chose from Scott's book two phrases
that were to mark his whole life: "holiness rather than
peace" and "growth, the only evidence of life".
After this first conversion, Newman sought to love God above
all things and to follow the Truth without compromise. "When
I was 15 (in the Fall of 1816), a great change of thought
took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite
Creed and received into my intellect impressions of dogma,
which through God's mercy have never been effaced or
obscured". He thus began to realize the importance of the
great Christian dogmas: the Incarnation of the Son of God,
the work of Christ's redemption, the gift of the Spirit who
dwells in the baptized person's soul, the faith that cannot
remain a simple theory but must be expressed in a programme
of life.
The Oxford Movement
After his studies at Trinity College, Oxford, Newman was
elected a fellow of Oriel College. He became an Anglican
minister, and later, vicar of St Mary's, the church of
Oxford University. At Oriel College he met certain
representatives of High Church Anglicanism and began to be
interested in the Fathers of the Church. In them he
discovered the freshness and honesty of the early Church,
which had to put down roots in a pagan world.
At the same time, he was more and more dissatisfied with the
spiritual situation of his confession and concerned about
the increasing influence of liberalism in Oxford and
throughout England. To combat these trends, Newman, together
with some friends, founded the Oxford Movement in 1833. Its
supporters denounced the Nation's detachment from the
practice of the faith and fought for a return to primitive
Christianity by means of a sound dogmatic, spiritual and
liturgical reform.
By publishing tracts that were easy to disseminate, the
Oxford Movement endeavoured to penetrate the consciences of
ecclesiastics as well as of the simple faithful, caught
between the two extremes of sentimentalism and of
rationalism.
Newman realized that the polemic against religious
liberalism needed a sound fundamental doctrine. He was
convinced that he had found the basis for it in the writings
of the Fathers, whom he admired as the true heralds and
doctors of the Christian faith, representatives of that
ancient religion "which had virtually disappeared from this
earth and should be revived".
While the Oxford Movement was spreading, Newman developed
the theory of the Via Media. With this he intended to
demonstrate that the Anglican Communion was the legitimate
heir to primitive Christianity and the true Church in Christ
since it showed no sign of either the doctrinal errors of
the Protestants or the corruption and abuses that he thought
he saw in the Church of Rome.
Towards the Catholic Church
His Via Media was hinged on dogma, the sacramental system
and anti-Romanism. However, in studying the history of the
Church in the fourth century, Newman made a great discovery:
he found that the Christianity of his own century was
reflected in the three religious groups of that period: in
the Arians, the Protestants; in the Romans, the Church of
Rome; and in the semi-Arians, the Anglicans. This experience
stirred up in his heart his first doubts about the Anglican
Communion.
Shortly afterwards, he read an article in which the position
of the African Donatists of Augustine's time was compared
with that of the Anglicans. Newman could not forget the
phrase "Securus judicat orbis terrarum" quoted by St
Augustine, that is, in Newman's own translation: "The
universal Church, in her judgments, is sure of the Truth".
He realized that not only were doctrinal conflicts in the
ancient Church resolved on the basis of the principle of
antiquity, but also of catholicity: the opinion of the
Church as a whole is an infallible decree. Consequently,
"the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized".
Faithful to the principle of respecting the Truth, Newman
decided to retire to Littlemore, a small village near
Oxford, for a few years of prayer and study. He began to
pull together the threads of a reflection that had been in
his mind for years: if the Roman Catholic Church is in the
apostolic succession, how would it be possible to justify
those doctrines that did not seem to be part of the
patrimony of faith bequeathed by early Christianity?
The principle of authentic development that he worked out
enabled him to justify various new teachings in the life of
the Church: the later dogmas were authentic developments of
the original Revelation. He illustrated this argument,
crucial for his future, in An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine. In this theological masterpiece …
Newman, [rejected] the idea that truth and error in
religious matters were supposed to be a question of opinion
and that salvation did not depend on the right profession of
faith, [he] reaffirmed what he was in the habit of calling
the dogmatic principle….. “that truth and falsehood are set
before us to try our hearts; that our choice is an awful
drawing of lots on which our salvation or rejection is
inscribed; that 'before all things it is necessary to hold
the Catholic faith'; that 'he that would be saved must thus
think', and not otherwise…”
While Newman was thus proceeding with his studies on the
development of Christian doctrine, he realized that the
Church of Rome was the Church of the Fathers, the true
Church of Christ….. On 9 October 1845, he embraced the
Catholic faith and was received by Bl. Dominic Barberi, an
Italian Passionist, into the Catholic Church which he
described as "the One Fold of Christ".
"Tests" for the Truth
After being ordained a Catholic priest, Newman founded the
Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham. In his many
pastoral and theological activities he worked above all for
the intellectual and spiritual formation of the Catholic
faithful, of his confreres and of new converts. Indeed, he
was convinced that comparison with the cultural and social
developments of the time demanded a faith that could
demonstrate the reasons for hope.
Amid infinite difficulties and misunderstandings on many
sides, he worked tirelessly to train cultured lay people,
"persons of the world for the world", but who were guided by
an illuminating faith that they would also be capable of
defending.
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent came out in 1870. In
this book, another classic, Newman analyzes philosophically
the act of the assent of the human mind to revealed truths,
seeking to defend the right of ordinary people to certainty,
though unable to justify and formulate the faith for himself
or herself. In this essay, the author shows in a convincing
and timely way how the mind may reach certainty, both in
general and in the area of faith….
Against religious liberalism
To conclude we [turn] to the Biglietto Speech Newman
delivered on being raised to the College of Cardinals [15
May 1879]. On that occasion he renewed his protest against
religious liberalism. He gave a precise description of this,
a description whose prophetic character is obvious in our
time.
"Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no
positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as
another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance
and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of
any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be
tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion
is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an
objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each
individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.
Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to
Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both
and belong to neither.
They may fraternize together in spiritual thoughts and
feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in
common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is
so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we
must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with
man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is
that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's
religion as about his sources of income or his management of
his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society".
Today we are witnesses of a mentality, widespread in many
milieus, which sustains precisely these ideas, denounced by
Newman, with very grave consequences for the cause of the
Truth, for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, for the
liturgy and spirituality and for the social and cultural
dimension of the faith.
Venerable Cardinal Newman can remind everyone, Pastors and
lay people alike, that the Truth is a very precious treasure
to be accepted with faith, proclaimed with honesty and
defended with force. "Commonly the Church", as Cardinal
Newman ends his discourse, "has nothing more to do than to
go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to
stand still and see the salvation of God".
[On 11 August 1890, at the age of 89, Cardinal Newman died
at the Oratory House in Edgbaston. At his death The Times of
London wrote: "whether Rome canonizes him or not he will be
canonized in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in
England". On 22 January 1991, he was declared Venerable by
Pope John Paul II.]
Edited from “On the 125th Anniversary of John Henry Newman's
Becoming a Cardinal,” Hermann Geissler, L’Osservatore
Romano, 11/18 August 2004
