The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Editorial: Newman and The Tablet on becoming Catholic

Categorised as News and published Monday, November 16th, 2009
Revisiting Newman’s past, his work goes on: Deacon Jack Sullivan in Oxford
Deacon Sullivan at Littlemore

His Eminence Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), with Father Paul Chavasse, Actor for Newman's Cause, photographed together last month at the CDF in Rome. It is the CDF which worked on the Apostolic Constitution on behalf of the Holy Father

As has been recently suggested on this site, Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution, providing for the union of Anglican groups with the Catholic Church, can be interpreted as reinstating the fundamental priority of authentic ecumenism. Beyond ‘dialogue’ and ‘co-operation’, authentic ecumenism is ordered to non-Catholic Christians entering into full communion with the Catholic Church. It is this which, in the Apostolic Constitution, the Holy Father has above all desired to bring about.

With extraordinary pastoral imagination and generosity, Pope Benedict has understood that Anglican communities desiring full communion with the Catholic Church embody a liturgical and spiritual tradition differing significantly from typical Anglophone Roman Catholicism, but which is in essence authentically Catholic. Against many voices raised in contradiction, he has insisted that it would be profoundly wrong to require the abandonment of this tradition as a condition of entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Indeed, Pope Benedict may believe that the liturgical and spiritual tradition embodied in these Anglican communities has preserved things of importance which English-speaking Roman Catholicism, at the present time, typically repudiates or fails to understand. Perhaps Pope Benedict envisages that such impoverishment will be challenged, and even overcome, when exposed to the authentically Catholic elements which he is allowing former Anglican communities to maintain?

It has been axiomatic for Catholic ecumenists that the Church must learn from those with whom she is in ‘dialogue’. What is right in this way of thinking need not be abandoned, once it is recognised, as the Holy Father has recognised, that ‘dialogue’ cannot be an end in itself. Even when ‘dialogue’ is ordered, as it must be, towards conversion to the Catholic Faith, the Church may still stand to learn from those whom she receives into full communion. English-speaking Catholics, surveying the present state of their liturgical and devotional life, should not lose sight of this when they reflect on the deeper implications of the Apostolic Constitution.

If Pope Benedict is right to hope that former Anglican communities will assist in relieving the impoverishment of English-speaking Catholicism, it is only to be expected that some English-speaking Catholics will find it difficult to come to terms with the Apostolic Constitution. The Tablet, for example, in its latest Editorial on the Holy Father’s initiative, sounds uncharacteristically fierce – dare we say, even narrow-minded?

The Tablet’s basic argument is worth pondering. They believe that the Apostolic Constitution demands too little of the Anglican groups whom it is designed to assist. The Tablet suggests that these would-be converts should resist the easy path laid out for them by Benedict XVI. They must instead feel ‘transformed’ in becoming Catholic, with a sharpened consciousness of needing to leave their past behind them in order to come to terms with the radically new demands of Roman Catholicism.

It has to be admitted, this doesn’t sound like The Tablet. Nor (though for very different reasons) does it sound like Cardinal Newman. In 1864, almost twenty years after becoming a Roman Catholic, Newman wrote:

Newman knew nothing of what The Tablet legislates (in rather mechanical imagery) as the authentic experience of conversion: namely, that ‘the person coming out of it at the end does not feel the same as the person going in.’ What The Tablet describes as conversion sounds disconcertingly like brainwashing.

Reflecting further on The Tablet’s Editorial brings to light the extraordinary fact that in order to be ‘transformed’ into real Catholics, The Tablet is suggesting that these Anglican groups must be induced to relinquish the Catholic Faith. For the Editorial is quite open about the kinds of belief and practice which the Apostolic Constitution will, in The Tablet’s opinion wrongly, permit former Anglican communities to preserve:

In this inventory, surely, The Tablet’s distance from authentic Catholicism is laid bare? We can be confident that it is towards the healing of such wounds in English-speaking Roman Catholicism that the Holy Father’s determination to allow former Anglican groups to preserve their liturgical and spiritual tradition is directed.

We should be grateful to The Tablet for making the issue so clear. At stake are traditional beliefs about the Liturgy, the Priesthood and our Blessed Lady. For The Tablet, such beliefs, tragically, provoke conflict and repudiation. But for the Anglican communities addressed by the Apostolic Constitution, such beliefs represent hard-won convictions, which because discovering and adhering to them has been so difficult, are correspondingly precious. What has been so difficult? It is this: Anglicanism’s Protestant roots go very deep, yet as Anglicans these communities have fought to articulate beliefs which cut against Protestantism, embodying a Catholic truth which, at last, they have realised that Anglicanism cannot accommodate. It betrays a truly momentous failure of understanding for The Tablet to suggest that becoming Catholic requires such convictions to be left behind.

This is the reason The Tablet cannot see why these Anglican groups seem very ready to sign the 2,865 paragraphs of the definitive Catechism of the Catholic Church, rather than what The Tablet would prefer, the ‘far less elaborate’ profession of faith made by individual converts. Here The Tablet seems unable to get its position straight: on the one hand it says that the Apostolic Constitution makes conversion too easy, and on the other suggests that imposing the Catechism is too arduous. What The Tablet doesn’t get is that these Anglican communities want the Faith of the Catholic Church, nothing more and nothing less. Would The Tablet care to propose to interested Anglicans which parts of the Catechism they would be better off without?

If The Tablet had a better grasp of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’, it would be in a better position to see how much it has to learn from the Anglican groups towards which it is, at present, so severe. The Tablet claims that the ‘fundamental aim’ of Anglo-Catholicism

Such an analysis is profoundly misconceived. The Anglican Newman explored the ‘Anglo-Catholic’ position more profoundly than anyone else, and he never believed that the ‘Catholic credentials’ of the Church of England were simply there to be ‘reasserted’ through recreating in the present an idyllic medieval Church. What was ‘there’ for Newman was a conception of the Faith of Apostolic Christianity, the true Faith of the Catholic Church. This conception was engendered in him by grace and by his study of the Fathers and the Councils. This, he knew, was authentic Christianity, and therefore not just an idea but a living reality. Newman’s question was where this Faith and this Church are to be found today. This is always the question at the heart of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’. It is not, as The Tablet implies, a matter of the nostalgic recreation of a vanished past, but of something searched for and awaited. ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ is essentially interrogative. Can Anglicanism’s entanglement in the distortions of the Reformation be overcome, so as to vindicate its ‘Catholic credentials’? One remains an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ for as long as one believes that this question can be given an affirmative answer.

The Anglican communities addressed by the Apostolic Constitution have concluded that an affirmative answer is impossible. The Tablet’s desire to impose upon them a model of conversion as ‘transformation’ is irrelevant to their experience. It is Newman’s description of his conversion – ‘it was like coming into port after a rough sea’ – which will better capture these communities’ embrace of Roman Catholicism. For ‘Anglo-Catholics’ typically have the Catholic Faith; what they lack, until they become Roman Catholics, is the Church in which that Faith is truly at home. The Tablet’s own position inverts this progression, and this is why it misunderstands ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ and fears the Apostolic Constitution. The Tablet has the Catholic Church; what it is all too clearly unsure about is whether it wants the Catholic Faith.

Interested in the significance of Newman’s Beatification? Click here to read more about Newman and the new Apostolic Constitution for Anglicans. Click here to read Deacon Jack Sullivan on the importance of Newman for today, or here to read about Tony Blair and Newman.

Like to read more about Deacon Jack Sullivan, who was healed through Newman’s intercession, and his visit to England? Click here to read the story of Jack’s healing. Click here to read about Jack’s lecture at the London Oratory, here for his visit to the Birmingham Oratory, or here to read about his trip to Oxford.

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