Vatican Newspaper commemorates Cardinal Newman’s Birthday

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Categorised as News and published Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
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To mark the anniversary of Cardinal Newman’s birth on 21st February 1801, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published two articles on aspects of Newman’s life and thought.

The first, by Father Hermann Geissler, an official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and a member of the Spiritual Family of the Work, highlighted the significance that Newman gave to conscience. Father Giessler quoted Benedict’s XVI’s words explaining Newman’s influence on him during his time at seminary: ‘Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. … We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: “I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler”. The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes’. Father Geissler goes on to trace Newman’s developing understanding of conscience as an Anglican. He shows how he came progressively to see that the Roman Catholic Church was the ‘one true fold of Christ’, and indicates how his reception into the Catholic Church in 1845 was the fruit of his fidelity to the voice of conscience. Despite strong bonds to the Church of England, ‘the call of conscience was stronger than every human tie’, writes Giessler.

Another article by Monsignor Inos Biffi, a well known Italian theologian, concentrates on the influence of St. Ambrose on Cardinal Newman. Drawing attention to Newman’s early interest in this Father of the Church, Biffi quotes the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864): ‘I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, “Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum” [God does not desire to save his people through logic]—I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on … It is the concrete being that reasons’. It was this approach to human reasoning which an older Newman developed in the Grammar of Assent (1870). Biffi explains how the inscription Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ['Out of shadows and images into the truth'] that Newman asked to be placed on a memorial tablet after his death, was inspired by words that St. Ambrose preached on the death of his brother: ‘We find a shadow in the law, the image in the Gospel, the truth at the Last Judgment’. Thus Biffi identifies in Newman’s choice of text a conviction that ‘only after this life, in eternity, the Truth will appear: here below we live shrouded in the veil of shadows and images’.

To read the special message of Father Paul Chavasse to mark the 208th Anniversary of Newman’s Birth, click here

(Reference: L’Osservatore Romano, Daily Italian Edition, Saturday 21st February, p .5)