On the recent beatification of John Henry Newman

Pamela Wearing, December

Having witnessed the recent events leading up to the beatification of Cardinal Newman, I wonder how those who went to see it were aware of just who he was and what he stood for. He is undoubtedly the theologian whose work led to the Second Vatican Council and above all its acknowledgement of the role of the laity in the Church.

Part of his vision for the future of the Church was to foster the education of the laity. He became a Catholic during decades which saw the restoration of the hierarchy and a rise in ultra- montanism. He was no revolutionary but he saw no conflict between the necessity for authority and the necessity for academic freedom, together with the best possible education for the laity. He saw the plain historical fact that in the church as a whole, even on occasions without the episcopate, there was a fundamental sense of the faith. He had learned as a young clergyman in a poor parish in Oxford to understand, care for and respect the souls in his charge. Likewise among the poor in Birmingham:

The humblest and meanest among Christians may defend the faith against the whole church if the need arises. He has as much stake in it and as much right to it as Bishop or Archbishop and has nothing to limit him in his protest but his intellectual capacity for making it.

He had noted in his work on the Arians of the 4^th century, St Hilary’s charge that as heresy raged, ‘the ears of the laity were holier than the hearts of the priests’. (deleted in the 1871edition!) That sense of a necessity for order, what Shakespeare called degree, the ‘tuned string of society’, with a responsible hierarchy fending off chaos, is always balanced in Newman’s work by a realisation that humanity has a sense of faith and morality which must not be under-estimated.

The tradition of the Church had two strands: the Episcopal - preserving and handing on the deposit of faith; and the prophetic which was the living pulse of that faith, powered by the Holy Spirit. In 1859, prompted by a contretemps between the bishops an some prominent Catholic laymen over the question of the government inspection of Catholic schools, Newman published ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’. It launched the question of the laity’s role in the Church into deep theological water. The recently restored hierarchy were not however ready to see responsible laymen as co-workers in the Church. Feeling his efforts thwarted, Newman hoped that a hundred years later he would be vindicated. In Rome however, he was supported by Giovanni Perrone, who had written on the Immaculate Conception. He cited in evidence of tradition, Gregory of Valencia, and St Paulinus who both wrote about the Holy Spirit breathing through the faithful.

Newman explained five ways in which the consent of the faithful played a part in the tradition of the Church:

1. As a testimony to the fact of apostolical dogma.

2. As a sort of instinct* deep in the bosom of the mystical body of Christ.

3. As a direction of the Holy Spirit

4. As an answer to its prayer

5. As a jealousy of error, which it at once feels as a scandal.

*phronesis = the illative sense which is the power to arrive at real assent in matters of faith and conscience.

The Papal Bull declaring the Immaculate Conception provided a an example of the faithful being consulted prior to a definition which had waited for centuries. In Newman’s greatest contribution to theology, the theory of the development of doctrine, his ecclesiology and the laity’s role therein are fundamentally important. In his researches as a young don into the early Church, he drew lessons about the role of the laity and the charisms they were capable of exercising. To illustrate his fifth point:

“We know that it is the property of life to be impatient of any foreign substance in the body to which it belongs.”

Naming the great doctors of the 4^th century, all but one of whom were bishops, Newman insists that, ‘in that day, the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the episcopate. The dogmas in question being the divinity of our Lord, the significance could not have been greater. The Arian heresy was resisted in the face of persecution for nearly 60 years. Things were different in the nineteenth century, but even so, he wrote, ‘each part of the Church has its proper function, and no portion can be safely neglected, there is something in the pastorum ac fidelium conspiratio which is not in the pastors alone’. He called for collaboration - “…requiring from the faithful a fides implicita in her word … in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition”.

That the elements in the Church should exist in unity was central to Newman’s vision: in the Apostles and the early Fathers such as Athanasius he saw a readiness to die for the faith and the writings of the early Fathers strongly influenced his concept of ecclesial community. It was the claim of the Church to be a real community and not the claims of the Pope which was responsible for his conversion. The ecclesial community had to be capable of producing religious communities which were microcosms of the whole. In any group which Newman established it was always his policy to give people freedom that they might learn to use it and to see every member’s contribution as valid. Today, we might ask whether the voice of the laity, as expressed on rare occasions such as the Liverpool Pastoral Congress, or in numerous polls on subjects such as clerical celibacy, general absolution, women’s leadership in the church, intercommunion, is given any respect outside academic circles.

If Newman’s ideas, which seemed to flourish at Vatican II, are to be taken seriously, it will not be enough to canonise him as a pious saint, but to listen to his analysis of the church, to implement it and to recognise him as one of its Doctors.