The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Editorial: Newman’s significance, a response to The Tablet

Categorised as News and published Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Mass of Thanksgiving and Te Deum at the Oxford Oratory
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St Giorgio in Velabro in Rome, the Church given by Pope Leo XIII to Newman when he became a Cardinal. The picture, by Newman's Cousin Louise Deane, hangs in his room at the Oratory in Birmingham.

In the run up to Newman’s Beatification, the Cause website will publish from time to time editorial articles on his significance today. The first is a response to the Editorial of the most recent edition of The Tablet:

In its Editorial of 1 August, the Catholic weekly The Tablet offered some reflections on Newman’s Beatification, entitled ‘Newman for the nation’.

The article emphasises that Newman’s Beatification will have a key role to play in shaping how he is received, not only within the Church, but also by non-Catholic Christians, and by people of other faiths and none. It also brings out how the presentation of Newman will in turn be influential in people’s understanding of the Catholic Church herself. The Tablet helpfully gives these points the attention they deserve.

Along the way, the Editorial also makes several specific recommendations which are important to keep in mind: for example, that the Beatification must avoid Catholic triumphalism and self-congratulation, and should not emphasise Newman the thinker at the expense of Newman the pastor of souls.

Newman’s Challenge

But there’s one point in the Editorial that needs more discussion. In The Tablet’s opinion, Newman’s Catholicism is a potentially divisive issue, both ecumenically and in the nation as a whole, and his Beatification should therefore not accord it pride of place. Equally important, according to The Tablet, should be Newman’s ‘Englishness’, around which the whole nation can unite.

To some this suggested emphasis on Newman’s ‘Englishness’ will seem a little parochial. Newman’s own sources of inspiration are deep in times and places spanning the whole Christian world. Fully to appreciate the meaning of the path he travelled means understanding that ‘Englishness’ alone could not provide what he sought. For that reason his appeal, too, is manifestly international, as is his significance.

Even those qualities The Tablet praises in Newman – his pastoral zeal and intellectual stature – surely can’t be properly understood apart from his Catholicism. It would not be true to Newman, to apply to him the conventional divisions of benevolence from faith, and of mind from heart.

Any truthful and candid presentation of Newman must surely identify his Catholicism as the heart of his meaning and importance. Insisting on this does not have to be an exercise in triumphalism and self-congratulation. Quite apart from anything else, such lapses could not be less characteristic of Newman himself. But in fact Newman’s Catholicism is the key to understanding him. What service could his Beatification be, either to the nation or to an authentic ecumenism, if this fact were only tentatively or selectively acknowledged?

Must Newman’s Catholicism in fact be divisive? ‘Challenging’ seems a better word. Whatever we call it, however, we cannot evade Newman’s conviction that the Gospel puts ‘holiness before peace’, and makes the Church independent of every worldly configuration of power. Pope Benedict has recalled this imperative in Newman, his refusal of every secularising alternative so as to (in Newman’s own words) ‘detect and to approve the principle on which … peace is grounded in Scripture; to submit to the dictation of truth, as such, as a primary authority in matters of political and private conduct; to understand … zeal to be prior in the succession of Christian graces to benevolence’.

The Tablet draws upon Newman’s sermon ‘The Second Spring’, but seems to hesitate about what Newman means. The promise of a second spring took shape for Newman precisely because the Catholic faith could not be accommodated to the nation’s prevailing values and ambitions. It was exactly this discomfort – unavoidably an interrogation of the national conscience – which seemed to Newman to be so pregnant with the possibility of new life for the Church. Newman’s subject on that occasion was the restoration of the Bishops of England and Wales. His own Beatification may with God’s grace suit his words just as well.

The Meaning of the Beatification

Quite rightly, The Tablet says that the Bishops, and Archbishop Nichols in particular, should have a a key role in planning Newman’s Beatification. In co-operation with the Birmingham Oratory, this planning is already well underway.

Always bearing in mind the need for sensitivity, which The Tablet emphasises, everyone involved in this process should take heart from a number of recent interventions from Archbishop Nichols in questions of UK public policy. These interventions can be seen as having a definite affinity with Newman’s own conception of the creative encounter between faith and the nation. It is this encounter which should be a guiding idea for the Beatification and will, we may hope, also be among its fruits. As the Archbishop explained at one point, responding to criticisms of Church teaching made by a recent high-profile convert, we should take our lead, not in deference to popular opinion, but from Rome, and from Pope Benedict himself.

‘Newman’, writes Pope Benedict, ‘had become a convert as a man of conscience; it was his conscience that led him out of the old ties and securities into the world of Catholicism, which was difficult and strange for him. But this way of conscience is everything other than a way of self-sufficient subjectivity; it is a way of obedience to objective truth.’

It is this understanding, transcending dissent from whatever perspective it comes, which alone can supply what The Tablet rightly insists upon: Newman positioned truthfully and securely in the mainstream of Catholic life.