The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Avvenire on John Henry Newman, the ‘man of conscience’

Categorised as News and published Sunday, July 5th, 2009
POPE BENEDICT XVI APPROVES NEWMAN’S BEATIFICATION
Solemn Te Deum at the Birmingham Oratory

Yesterday the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference Avvenire marked Friday’s annnouncement of Newman’s beatification with an article on Newman and Conscience. We publish a translation:

Miracle attributed to Newman approved: for the Pope, an old friend

It’s no small link that exists between Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Anglican who joined the Catholic minority in nineteenth century Victorian England, and founder of the Oratory of St Philip Neri [in England]. The papal authorisation – announced yesterday – that allowed the promulgation of a decree recognising a miracle attributed to Newman’s intercession by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and opens the road to his Beatification, throws into new relief not only Newman as leader of the ‘Oxford Movement’ – the convert received into the Church of Rome in 1845, ordained priest and created Cardinal by Leo XIII in 1879, and the man who affirmed ‘holiness first’ – but also very particularly Newman the ‘man of conscience’, to use the definition of the then Cardinal Ratzinger during the centenary of Newman’s death in 1890.

If Paul VI had identified in this great theologian a guide for “all who are seeking an informed orientation and sure guidance amid the uncertainties of the modern world’, if John Paul II had listed among Newman’s qualities a “deep intellectual honesty” and “fidelity to conscience and grace”, Benedict XVI with this new decision has raised Newman’s importance to a new level. And he invites us to hear in the experience and life of Newman the echo of a voice that does more than coincide with our own desires, or with what appears useful or likely to create a consensus: we find, in fact, the voice of conscience.

To speak of Newman means – and it can be challenging and leave some people mystified – demolishing the perspective still predominant which opposes the concepts of authority and subjectivity: the first being generally thought of as negating the liberty that is better protected by the second. It means speaking of a path of conscience which is – far from being caught up in itself – a path of obedience to the goal of objective truth, yet always faithful to the dogmas we have received (necessitating a ‘Grammar of Assent’). In fact it’s equivalent to affirming that ascent to God that Kant regarded as impossible, and it speaks of a conscience that can’t simply be determined by compromise with subjective expectations or with social norms. It recognises as a true conscience the place where in the meeting between the intimacy of man and truth that comes from God – the secret heart of human experience, the subtle boundary of sanctity and heresy, as Don Giuseppe De Luca has written – subjectivity humbles and even abases itself.

As well as recalling the story of Newman in order to understand the spiritual drama of his century, it’s important to reflect on that of the young Ratzinger who discovered Newman in 1946 in the newly reopened seminary of Freising, after Nazism and the war.

Ratzinger caught the Newman bug from his friend Alfred Läpple, who was writing his thesis on Newman. The future Pope wrote later: “Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure.”

Shattering the totalitarianism that had substituted Hitler in the place of conscience, true liberation – with the pages of Newman open before him in seminary – was knowing “that the ‘we’ of the Church does not rest on a cancellation of conscience, but that, exactly the opposite, it can only develop from conscience”, Ratzinger continued. He added: “Precisely because Newman interpreted the existence of the human being from conscience, that is, from the relationship between God and the soul, it was clear that this personalism is not individualism, and that being bound by conscience does not mean being free to make random choices – the exact opposite is the case.” This then is the true point of departure. But without ever forgetting that in a journey in Sicily, already in May 1833, the future beatus had written: “I loved to choose and see my path; but now, Lead thou me on.” For in that moment, as Newman himself bears witness, we’re reminded that the voice of conscience is like a reflection in a mirror, a “messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil.”