The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Editorial: Who needs a miracle?

Categorised as News and published Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Papal Address to the Bishops of England and Wales: Newman, defender of the truth
Bishops of England and Wales in Rome: Newman, Catholic Priest and Oratorian pioneer

Revd Jack Sullivan, healed through Newman's intercession, meets parishoners at the Oxford Oratory, November 2009

Clifford Longley has written an interesting and provocative article on Canonisation (The Tablet January 9, print edition).

A key passage reads as follows:

The idea that God would demonstrate that a saint is truly in heaven by instantly healing someone’s fatal illness because he has been asked to by the said saint – who is in turn responding to the prayers of the victim or those near to him – seems to me so simplistic, so credulous, so presumptuous, so mechanical and so manipulative, that it brings no credit to the Catholic religion and indeed confirms the worst prejudices of its enemies. Is that really the kind of God we believe in? Don’t millions of people offer prayers every day for the recovery of a loved one – some of which are answered, some not? Doesn’t the very idea of canonisation miracles – in effect miraculous prayers as part of a PR exercise – mock them cruelly?

Perhaps the first thing to say about this is that Mr Longley does not convey the Church’s interest in ‘canonisation miracles’ quite accurately. She does not require that a miraculous healing be from a fatal illness. As Mr Longley recognises, of course, healings from fatal illnesses are not impossible to God, but neither is the Church exclusively concerned with them.

Why miracles?

Secondly, Mr Longley is concerned that in the matter of ‘canonisation miracles’ the Church risks being presumptuous. What does he mean? Mr Longley knows of course that God answers the prayers of the suffering, and that sometimes He does so in response to ’saintly intercession’. Mr Longley’s objection is specifically to the idea that God answers such prayers ‘as part of a PR exercise’ (as he puts it). His difficulty is with what ‘canonisation miracles’ imply about ‘divine intervention in the world.’

Mr Longley is rightly concerned to repudiate unworthy conceptions of God, and thinks that such a conception in implied in believing that God heals a person purely for the sake of a prospective Beatification or Canonisation. It is presumptuous, he believes, to think that in a matter as momentous as someone’s healing, God would act purely to assist an ecclesiastical interest group intent on having its candidate Beatified or Canonised. And he is surely right about this. The question, however, is whether this is what is implied by the Church’s theory and practice of Canonisation.

It may be that Mr Longley’s disquiet is based on a misapprehension. For surely in every instance, God works miraculous healings primarily for the sake of the person who is healed.

At the most fundamental level, all such healings disclose a bond of intimacy between the person who is healed and God, mediated by the multi-dimensional human friendships made possible by the communion of saints. It is no part of the Church’s understanding to suggest that God sometimes heals people purely instrumentally, simply as a means to the end of having someone Canonised. If anything, surely, it is the other way round: God wills Canonisations in order to manifest the relationships of healing intercession existing between the faithful on earth and the saints in heaven.

Reconsidering his difficulty, Mr Longley may therefore be able to agree that we do not have to think that ‘canonisation miracles’ show the Church treating God as Publicity Agent In Chief for heavenly clients whose interests He intends to advance. Once this is clarified, Mr Longley’s concerns about presumption and manipulation largely fall away. ‘Canonisation miracles’ do not embody an unworthy conception of God; on the contrary, they disclose in a wonderful way the economy of God’s mercy.

Granted Mr Longley’s misapprehension on this point, there is of course a profound question underlying his thoughts about canonisation; but canonisation as such is irrelevant to it. The profound question concerns why God heals some people and not others. This mystery haunts Mr Longley’s reflections; but surely he must acknowledge that his objection to some of the healings which God performs also being ‘canonisation miracles’ does not really get to the heart of the problem? God heals some and not others, and this is true regardless of issues of Canonisation. An objection to ‘canonisation miracles’ on the basis that some people are not healed is really an objection to anyone being healed unless everyone is. Whatever we say about why God heals some and not others, Mr Longley may surely wish to reconsider whether it is right to say (as he says about ‘canonisation miracles’ in particular) that when God heals someone, this fact mocks those whom He doesn’t?

Newman and miracles

Towards the end of his article, Mr Longley suggests that Cardinal Newman would have shared his reservations about ‘canonisation miracles’. There is evidence which points the other way.

Writing about Benedictine saints in his 1859 essay ‘The Benedictine School’ (Historical Sketches Vol. II No. 5), Newman remarked on those ‘whom the Church holds up as choice specimens of divine power, and, as being such, sealed by miracle for eternal bliss‘ (emphasis added). This passage surely gives conclusive reason to think that Newman had no objection in principle to ‘canonisation miracles’?

Elsewhere, Newman reflected upon intercessory prayer and miracles of healing. Mr Longley, of course, is not disquieted by these phenomena, but by ‘canonisation miracles’ in particular; Newman’s reflections, however, show how ‘canonisation miracles’ can be securely located within the Christian understanding of intercession and healing which Mr Longley does not question. Thus in his sermon ‘Intercession’ (Parochial and Plain Sermons Vol. III), Newman referred to intercessory prayer as ‘the characteristic of Christian worship, the privilege of the heavenly adoption, the exercise of the perfect and spiritual mind‘. From this passage, it is surely clear how, in Newman’s vision, ‘canonisation miracles’, which are above all confirmed manifestations of intercessory prayer, can be seen to flow from the Heavenly Liturgy of the sanctified? And in reflecting on the miracles of Christ, Newman noted how they were typically directed to ‘the infirmities of human nature, to show He was its redeemer … He had to do with sin; and bodily diseases are at once its symptoms and its representations’ (from notes for the 1851 sermon ‘On Disease as the Type of Sin’: Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman 1849-1878). In these words, does not Newman disclose the foundation of the healing miracles of the saints (and a fortiori of ‘canonisation miracles’) in the redemptive mission of Christ Himself?

Mr Longley will find in Newman a good deal of material by which his anxieties about ‘canonisation miracles’ can be relieved.

The question of scepticism

Not unreasonably – for it is a vast topic – Mr Longley does not tell us what he thinks about the miraculous as such. But his reflections on ‘canonisation miracles’ naturally lead to consideration of what he calls ‘the concept of divine intervention in the world’ that is implied by the miraculous in general. Towards the end of his article Mr Longley approvingly invokes the spirit of ’scepticism’ – quite naturally, in a way, because in our times being ’sceptical’ is intimately connected to widely shared assumptions about what it means to be ‘reasonable’. But does thinking reasonably about the miraculous require us to be ’sceptical’? Here again Newman can help us to think these things through.

Newman considered how we ought to approach the question of the miraculous in his Grammar of Assent (Part II Chapter 8 Part 2) in the course of examining Hume’s sceptical argument that

we may establish it as a maxim that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any…system of religion.

Newman’s answer to Hume was as follows:

I will accept the general proposition, but I resist its application. Doubtless it is abstractedly more likely that men should lie than that the order of nature should be infringed; but what is abstract reasoning to a question of concrete fact? To arrive at the fact of any matter, we must eschew generalities, and take things as they stand, with all their circumstances.

As Newman’s answer unfolds, we see how his treatment of Hume’s scepticism exposes a double evasiveness. Not only does Hume favour abstract principle over the examination of particular cases; he also seeks to erase the sense in which thinking about a potential miracle requires deeper and more personal resources than mere skill in abstract reasoning. These resources are moral and religious, and this is the category to which miracles themselves essentially belong. For Newman, taking ‘things as they stand, with all their circumstances’ points us not only to the particular facts comprising a possible miracle, but also to the moral and religious ‘personality’ of the one who confronts it. Indeed, ‘facts’ and ‘personality’ are partially interdependent. Some of the ‘facts’ will not necessarily be even visible to someone who is morally and religiously impoverished. Hume’s ’scepticism’ obscures this interdependence. It treats the possibility of the miraculous as something which can be dismissed without any consideration of the moral and religious presuppositions of the enquiry.

In Newman’s view, such scepticism is not confined to Hume’s treatment of the miraculous. It represents nothing less than our culture’s dominant conception of rationality. Being ‘reasonable’ requires assent to the idea that the apparently impersonal and objective procedures of scientific enquiry are uniquely capable of disclosing the truth. Being ‘reasonable’ thus involves ’scepticism’ towards anything which cannot be considered impersonally and objectively. Moral and religious truths, which are pre-eminently of this kind, are therefore culturally marginalised. To accomplish and maintain this marginalisation has become one of the chief functions of the theories and practices which in our culture cluster around the complementary concepts of ‘rationality’ and ’scepticism’.

Despite the prestige in our culture of the ‘purely rational enquirer’, the idea is no more than an abstract fantasy. Real human beings are always already orientated, in one direction or the other, upon the spectrum of conscience and Faith: either alert to God, seeking Him and listening for Him – or not (or only restrictedly and incompletely). It is from such personal resources that we must face the possibility of miracles.

So Newman insists that there is no such thing as an impersonal (’scientific’) enquiry into whether something is possibly or even likely to be miraculous. One’s sense of what is possible or likely originates in the dense and intricate network of one’s antecedent desires, intuitions and convictions concerning such things as humanity and its condition, the reality of God and our need of Him, what revelation we may expect from Him, and so on. The fact that impersonal reason – essentially the same in every one – cannot apprehend a miracle, but only a complex network of personal and subjective desires, intuitions and convictions, does not undermine the reality of miracles; dependence on subjectivity does not turn something into a mere mental construct. The point is simply that miracles are not open to just anyone to discover, regardless of his or her moral and religious character.

As Newman make clear, this does not mean that ‘anything goes’. Mr Longley rightly criticises ’simplistic’ and ‘credulous’ dispositions, and there are indeed unworthy conceptions of God and His action in the world, which a properly sensitised person will instinctively repudiate. But he or she will not do so out of ’scepticism’. Such judgements will involve what Newman calls

a great complex argument, which so far can be put into propositions, but which, even between, and around, and behind these, still is implicit and secret, and cannot by any ingenuity be imprisoned in a formula, and packed into a nut-shell.

So as Mr Longley continues to reflect about these things, he will find that Newman offers a challenging reason to be suspicious of a settled or instinctive ’scepticism’ towards the miraculous.

As Mr Longley recognises, this is more than a merely theoretical question. He ends by wondering whether ‘the vast majority of English Catholics’ today are not inclined to be sceptical, at least about ‘canonisation miracles’. This touches on another important theme in Newman: the feeling or ’sense’ of the faithful for Catholic truth, especially in matters of devotion. Should we be concerned? The almost 300,000 people in England and Wales who recently made pilgrimage to the relics of St Therese of Lisieux suggest not.

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