The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Cardinal George Pell: Newman against the ‘errors of the age’

Categorised as News and published Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
Editorial: Newman’s significance, a response to The Tablet
New CTS Pamphlet: Newman’s Miracle

St Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva, and Patron of Catholic Journalists. This portrait hangs above the altar in Newman's private chapel at the Birmingham Oratory

On the anniversary of Newman’s death, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney has commented incisively on Newman’s significance and impending beatification. Tomorrow we will publish Cardinal Pell’s full text [now published, click here to read]. Today we offer a summary of his key arguments.

Dictatorship of Relativism

Aligning Newman with Pope Benedict XVI’s analysis of ‘the dictatorship of relativism’, Pell emphasises that Newman’s understanding of conscience is in ‘the mainline of the Christian tradition, which upholds the view that we do not create truth but stand underneath it.’ Even conscience, therefore, must be ‘judged by conformity to the truth, and to the Word of God.’ As Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk declares, conscience is in fact fulfilled and completed only when it embraces the Faith and Morals taught by the Catholic Church.

Detached from this vocation to objective truth, Newman knows that conscience degenerates from discerning what is right into ‘the right of self will’. From this flows ‘the dictatorship of relativism’, according to which truth is sacrificed to human passions and opinion.

Contemporary emphasis on the primacy of conscience, which often appeals to Newman’s inspiration, systematically overlooks this aspect of his teaching, according to Pell. For Newman it is in fact ‘truth, specified as the word of God, that has primacy.’ Without this, what people call ‘conscience’ becomes in Newman’s account a ‘counterfeit’. Pell suggests that the relativism promoted by ‘counterfeit’ conscience leads inexorably to ‘the dictatorship of numbers, power and manipulation’. When everyone’s ‘conscience’ is supposed to be ‘equally valid’, it is unavoidably those most determined and best-placed to assert themselves whose opinions hold sway.

Truth and Politics

Drawing on another connection between Newman’s thought and Pope Benedict’s, Cardinal Pell argues that Christian Faith has from the beginning presented itself above all as true. In this it crucially separates itself from what Pell calls ‘mythical’ conceptions of religion. Such conceptions of religion are ‘used to justify political and social arrangements—as today religion is said to perform an important therapeutic function—but do not claim that religion belongs to the order of reality as such.’ For Newman, however, Christianity cannot be aligned with other religions and reduced to an instrument of social cohesion. Its claim to truth makes it permanently resistant to the State’s recurring efforts to subdue and control it.

In his ‘very specifically Christocentric and God-centred understanding of conscience’, so also in his insistence on Christianity’s claim to truth, Pell argues that Newman can refresh the Church’s opposition to the tyranny exercised by secular ’science’ and power. ‘Knowledge which radically excludes the transcendent dimension of life’, writes Pell, ‘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”’. Pell reminds us that Newman’s witness to this truth has the most urgent significance for our own time, when ‘the humanity of the unborn child, the humanity of the old, disabled and sick, and the wrongness of unjust working conditions’ are threatened by the dictatorship of professional expertise divorced from the light of Faith.

For all these reasons, writes Cardinal Pell, Newman’s beatification provides ‘a powerful spiritual help as we strive to respond to some of the most important and damaging intellectual errors of our age.’

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.