Newman & the Second Vatican Council

This article first appeared in RENEW the Newsletter of Catholics for a Changing Church, September 2010 Renew - Newman & Vatican II

JOHN HENRY NEWAN AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

Paul Paniccia

A highlight of the impending papal visit to the UK will be the beatification of John Henry Newman. The Catholic Bishops Conference of England & Wales has issued a booklet for the papal visit, Heart Speaks Unto Heart, Newman’s cardinational motto, with a question and answer format. A reader of this publication would be hard put to discern any connection between Newman and the Second Vatican Council. Yet, surely, if Newman has any significance for the contemporary Church then it is as invisible Father of the Council whereby this nineteenth century Englishman’s theological concepts are discernible in the teaching of Vatican II, the most significant event of the Church in centuries.

Newman’s influence extends to the role of lay faithful in the Church, the need for an educated laity, the concept of doctrinal development and the role of conscience especially in the context of Church teaching authority. All are significant issues. All these were addressed in the teaching of Vatican II.

The major theme of Vatican II was an understanding of Church and the predominant image emerging from the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) is the People of God. The stress is on the Church consisting of all the baptised ‘from the bishops to the last of the faithful’. One is reminded of the dialogue between Bishop Ullathorne and Newman, when the bishop asked dismissively, ‘who are the laity?’ Newman responded by saying that the Church would look foolish without them. Lumen Gentium reminds us that the whole body of the faithful cannot err in matters of belief. It went on to say that this characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (sensus fidei) of the whole people when they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals. This sensus fidei is close to what Newman described as an illative sense, a combination of the use of reason and a certain instinct of faith. The Constitution vindicated Newman who suffered attacks following publication of his essay On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. Lumen Gentium teaches on the laity that pastors should ‘willingly use their prudent advice’ as well as ‘with paternal love consider attentively in Christ initial moves, suggestions and desires proposed by the laity’ (n.37). The Council firmly establishes a full role for the laity in the life of the Church something which the prophetic voice of Newman had enunciated a century before.

It was while Newman was trying to defend the Anglican Church that he came to appreciate and be convinced of the Catholic Church’s more dynamic approach to doctrine. His work An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine foreshadowed the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, especially when the Constitution states that ‘the Tradition that comes from the apostles makes progress in the Church, with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on’ (n.8). It was while Newman was studying the christological controversies of the 4^th century that he came to appreciate the development of doctrine and the role the laity played in ensuring the Church maintained its orthodox position over and against the Arian heresy which many of the hierarchy of the time had embraced. B.C. Butler speaking in 1966 said:

[Newman] had, it seemed, dared to suggest that when the episcopate failed in its God-given role of guarding the true faith, its work might be done by the laity. A century later, the Second Vatican Council has acknowledged the evidential value of the ‘sense of faith’ of the universal People of God, and has virtually compared it with the infallibility of the Pope. It has also, in its paragraph on charismatic gifts (Lumen Gentium, art. 8), indicated the whole People of God, in the persons of the baptised, irrespective of their hierarchical status or lack of it, as the recipient of those motions or inspirations of the Holy Ghost which constitute, if one may paraphrase the Constitution, the dynamic element in the Church over against the static element which is the hierarchy as such. It is hardly necessary to remark that this Constitution devotes a whole chapter to the laity, and that for the first time in Church history a Council has now published a decree (Apostolicum Actuositatem) wholly concerned with the laity’s part in the Church’s mission. The Council’s teaching on the laity, on the People of God as a whole, on the ministerial character of the hierarchy and the ordained priesthood, and on charismatic gifts should lead to a new burst of initiative from below. The Council does not, of course, forget the guiding role of the bishops, but it is significant that our Fathers in God are reminded that they should not ‘quench the Spirit’. (The Rediscovery of Newman – An Oxford Symposium, 1967, J. Coulson, A.M. Allchin (eds.), SPCK/Sheed & Ward, London)

Over forty years later it is hard to imagine in the current climate of allowing a ‘burst of initiative’ from the laity or the Roman Curia minded to ‘not quench the Spirit’.

Another significant contribution by Newman arose as a consequence of the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I in 1870. In a Letter to the Duke of Norfolk he defended the primacy of conscience. This arose in response to Gladstone’s doubt about the loyalty of Catholics as British subjects against a perceived competing allegiance to the pope following the declaration of the conciliar definition. Essentially, Newman understood the definition of papal infallibility as being exercised in a very narrow manner, certainly in a more restricted fashion than some extreme ultramontanists of Newman’s day were promoting. For Newman papal infallibility is an expression of what the whole Church infallibly believes, the pope is not habitually infallible and is an external gift exercised only when he speaks ex cathedra. Newman would have been critical of any ‘creeping infallibility’ which certain elements in the Church promote. Such a phenomenon of proposing a teaching of the ordinary magisterium to be adhered to without question, regardless of the historical context in which it was promulgated and its level of authority, is essentially a Catholic version of fundamentalism.

Newman talked of conscience as being the aboriginal vicar of Christ. Again, he explained conscience stating that ‘there is a voice within us, which assures us that there is something higher than earth. We cannot analyze, define, contemplate what it is that thus whispers to us. It has no shape or material form. There is that in our hearts which prompts us to religion, and which condemns and chastises sin.’ At Vatican II in the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) alluded to Newman when it stated that ‘conscience is the most secret core and the sanctuary of the human person. There they are alone with God whose voice echoes in their depths. By conscience, in a wonderful way, that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience, Christians are joined to others in the search for truth and for the right solution to so many moral problems which arise both in the life of individuals and from social relationships.’ (n.16)

Hermann Goering was reputed to have said, ‘I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.’ For a young German growing up in this totalitarian environment the writing of Newman and Vatican II’s teaching on conscience was liberating. This person commenting on the Vatican II teaching on conscience wrote:

Since Newman and Kierkegaard, conscience has occupied with new urgency the centre of Christian anthropology. The work of both also represented in an unprecedented way the discovery of the individual who is called directly by God and who, in a world which scarcely makes God

known any more, is able to become directly certain of God through the voice of conscience. At the same time, for Newman, conscience represents the inner complement and limit of the Church principle. Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism.  (Italics added) (Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol. 5, H. Vorgrimler (ed.), 1969, Burns & Oates, London)

This commentary written in 1968 was by none other than Fr Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

In 1966 a symposium was held in Oxford entitled The Rediscovery of Newman with high-powered participants attending and contributing including the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, the Apostolic Delegate to Great Britain (papal representative to this country), Archbishop George Dwyer of Birmingham, the then president-elect of the Methodist Conference and Bishop B.C. Butler, auxiliary in Westminster. This latter figure, the leading English-speaking Council Father at Vatican II and, like Newman, a convert from Anglicanism, presented a paper on Newman and the Second Vatican Council (from which the extract above is taken), a very apt symmetry for these two English theological intellectuals. Butler’s paper can be read on the Vatican II – Voice of the Church website www.vatican2voice.org . This symposium was an important event in the story of promoting Newman’s cause for canonisation.

There cannot but be a feeling of an attempt to airbrush out the Second Vatican Council and its real import from the consciousness of the contemporary Church. This must be resisted and we have two English figures, Newman and Butler, who made significant contributions in their respective ways to the most significant event of the universal Church in the last millenium. Such contributors to the Council from the Catholic Church in these islands, not noted for providing extensive theological resources to the universal Church, need to be continually promoted and celebrated. There is now a significant opportunity with the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman.