Pope Paul VI on Newman

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Categorised as Featured and published Thursday, November 13th, 2008
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‘Guided solely by love of the truth and fidelity to Christ’

St Peter’s Basilica during the Second Vatican Council

We publish below an extract from the address that Pope Paul VI preached at the Beatification of Blessed Dominic Barberi in 1963, during the Second Vatican Council. It was Blessed Dominic who received John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845:

“He had a great love for England”. Thus did Newman write of this new Beatus, Father Dominic of the Mother of God. This phrase would seem to define the figure of this humble but great follower of the Gospel of Christ; it seems to sum up the historical current of the sentiments of the Church of Rome, towards that island of high destiny; it seems to give expression to this present spiritual moment of the Apostolic See, which now raises to the glory of the Blessed this generous missionary, whose arms are open wide towards all that is most venerable and most significant in that blessed country’s present portion of its magnificent Christian heritage; and it seems today to rise up from the heart of the Ecumenical Council, being celebrated in this Basilica, like a sigh of still suffering, but always confident, Catholic brotherhood.

“He had a great love for England”. Newman’s phrase, if properly meditated upon, means that the love of the pious Religious, the Roman missionary, was directed to Newman himself, the promoter and representative of the Oxford movement, which raised so many religious questions, and excited such great spiritual energies; to him who, in full consciousness of his mission – “I have a work to do” – and guided solely by love of the truth and fidelity to Christ, traced an itinerary, the most toilsome, but also the greatest, the most meaningful, the most conclusive, that human thought ever travelled during the last century, indeed one might say during the modern era, to arrive at the fulness of wisdom and of peace.

From Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 55, 1963.

Click here to read the full text (mainly in Italian; leaves site).