The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Cardinal George Pell’s Full Text: Newman, Conscience, and the primacy of the Truth

Categorised as Featured and published Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
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Cardinal George Pell under Newman's Memorial Plaque at the Birmingham Oratory: 'Out of shadows and images into the truth'

Today we publish the full text of Cardinal George Pell on Newman’s beatification: ‘a powerful spiritual help as we strive to respond to some of the most important and damaging intellectual errors of our age’ (if you’d rather read a summary of the text click here)

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the healing of Deacon Jack Sullivan as a miracle brought about by the intercession of Cardinal Newman. This is very happy news for everyone who admires Newman’s example and loves his writings. His beatification is very happy news for the Church,  providing a powerful spiritual help as we strive to respond to some of the most important and damaging intellectual errors of our age.

Pope Benedict has identified ‘the dictatorship of relativism’ as one of the major maladies afflicting the Western world today. Unfortunately, the Christian community is not immune to this condition, although it is usually described in different language. Among Catholics the dictatorship of relativism marches surreptitiously under the banner of primacy of conscience. Its major claim is that the judgements of each individual about what is and is not true have supremacy over the teachings of the gospels and the magisterium.

The Dictatorship of Relativism: ‘We do not create truth’

On the face of it, the argument about the primacy of conscience has nothing to do with relativism because it is an argument about truth. On the one side there are those who stand with the mainline of the Christian tradition and uphold the view that we do not create truth but stand underneath it. On the other side are those who argue that conscience is the final guide to truth for each individual. But once the primacy of conscience is accepted a situation where everyone has his own personal truth is not too long in following. This logic inevitably works itself out by rejecting the very idea of a truth, accessible to reason, which transcends individual experience and human history and culture. We are left with each person having his own perspective, and every perspective being equally valid. The usual descriptor for this situation is relativism. The vacuum left by the absence of transcendent truth is quickly filled by the dictatorship of numbers, power and manipulation, which then determine which perspectives are more equally valid than others.

Confronted with this situation, I hope Newman’s beatification will serve both as a further prompt to clear thinking about conscience and truth, and as an encouragement to Catholics to rediscover Newman’s own very specifically Christocentric and God-centred understanding of conscience within the Catholic tradition. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk Newman carefully distinguishes this proper understanding of Christian conscience from its secular alternative, which is ‘in one way or another a creation of man’. Conscience in the modern age ‘has been superseded by a counterfeit’ which earlier times would never mistake for conscience because in fact it is merely ‘the right of self will’;  the ‘very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience’.

‘All our actions and decisions are judged by conformity to the truth and the Word of God’

Newman condemned a conscience which rejected God and natural law. But even when open to these lights, conscience is not enough. He describes it as ‘the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous’. This is because ‘the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion is . . . so easily, puzzled, obscured, perverted . . . so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course’. He was completely correct. He was also typically precise and limited in his claims, pointing out that conscience is ‘not a judgement about any speculative truth’, but ‘bears immediately on conduct, something to be done or not done’. He outlined a number of incidents from St. Peter to Pope Urban VIII, who persecuted Galileo, when popes erred (teaching outside Faith or Morals, and therefore not infallibly), and acknowledges that ‘conscience truly so called’ does on such occasions have ‘the right of opposing the supreme, though not infallible Authority of the Pope’.

A person should always act in accordance with her personal conscientious judgement. However such a judgement is not the last word. All our actions and decisions are judged by conformity to the truth, or even to the Word of God. Truth and truth specified as the word of God have primacy.

In the age of postmodernism, with its corrosive doubts even about the nature of reality, the beatification of Cardinal Newman should also help Western culture recover a deeper and better understanding of knowledge. Newman’s claim in The Idea of the University that the conclusions of theology ‘are more certain on account of the Giver than those of mathematics’ would be greeted by many today, including some theologians, with embarrassment. But Christianity has never considered itself as only a form of religious myth, sometimes competing with other offerings. As Pope Benedict (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) has argued, in the classical world myth and religion were treated as matters of poetry and presentiment. They served an important function in justifying political and social arrangements—as today they are said to perform an important therapeutic function—but did not belong to the order of reality as such. Christianity, however, appealed from the beginning not to myth but to philosophical rationality. It was not content to rely on a social, political or therapeutic justification and to worship in the absence of truth. It appealed instead to knowledge and to the rational analysis of reality.

Faith and Reason: ‘Knowledge which excludes transcendence has blinded itself’

Newman would not have expressed the matter quite in this way, but this basic historical fact underlies his conviction that religion and knowledge are not opposed to each other but indivisibly connected. For this reason ‘Knowledge and Reason are sure ministers to Faith’. ‘The Church fears no knowledge’, although secularized knowledge often fears the Church. This is not because the Church’s claims are intrinsically ridiculous or unreasonable but because they emphasize truths about given questions (the humanity of the unborn child, the humanity of the old, disabled and sick, the wrongness of unjust working conditions) which many in our society would prefer to disregard for a wide range of reasons. Knowledge which radically excludes the transcendent dimension of life has partly blinded itself. The diminishment of knowledge without faith is one reason why Newman insisted that although the value of knowledge is absolute, knowledge itself is ‘emphatically not the highest good’.

There are numerous other ways in which the beatification of John Henry Newman will help to strengthen and renew the Church. His understanding of the priesthood (Christ’s priests, Newman insisted, have no priesthood but his; they are merely Christ’s shadows and instruments); and his devotion to Mary (who ‘like a tower’, stood by the cross and stood upright to receive the blows which the long passion of her Son inflicted upon her), are timeless and timely for all Catholics.

The beatification of the Venerable Servant of God John Henry Newman comes at a good time for the Church. May we thank God for this blessing, and ask, through the intercession of Cardinal Newman, for the strength and the faith to meet the challenges of our day.

+ George Cardinal Pell
ARCHBISHOP OF SYDNEY

Want to read more about the significance of Newman’s beatification? Click here to read our recent Editorial, in discussion with The Tablet.

Click here to read about Cardinal Pell’s visit to the Birmingham Oratory in March.