Last week Pope Leo XIV, in the first major decision of his reign, declared that St John Henry Newman would be made a Doctor of the Church. And within minutes the squabbling had begun.
That wasn’t because people didn’t think Newman deserved to become one of only 38 saints — out of more than 10,000 recognised by the Catholic Church — whose writings receive the ultimate papal imprimatur. Pope Leo’s announcement was almost universally welcomed. But what did it mean?
St John Henry (1805-90) will join the ranks of Saints Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. He will be the first native English Doctor of the Church since St Bede, born in Northumbria in 672 AD. And Newman — who was canonised in 2019 — will be the first former Protestant to be granted this exalted title.
Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, at the age of 21 in 1822. Three years later, he was ordained an Anglican priest. By 1828 he was Vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. Soon he developed a cult following among undergraduates, who would skip meals in order to hear him preach. His sermons — couched in exquisite prose laced with sarcasm — were the most glittering product of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce the Church of England to the pure apostolic faith of the early Fathers.
Then, in 1845, swayed by study, Newman sensationally went over to Rome, eventually becoming a cardinal. The decision cost him his teaching post at Oxford and many friends. The Victorian public was horrified. Even Newman’s enemies — of which he had many, since he was both outspoken and thin-skinned — realised that the dreaded Papists had poached the finest mind in Anglicanism.
But the point-scoring that followed Pope Leo’s announcement wasn’t inspired by Protestant sour grapes. Anglicans long ago came to terms with Newman’s defection. They argue that his most celebrated insights — above all, his notion that doctrine of the Church “develops” as successive generations uncover fresh truths — are derived from his Oxford sermons, whose brilliance was perhaps unsurpassed by anything he wrote as a Catholic. If Pope Leo wants to make him a Doctor of the Church, then they accept the implied compliment. It is rarely mentioned that Newman went to his grave believing that the Church of England was a heretical body that should submit to Rome.
No: last week’s infighting was between Roman Catholics, who are mostly united in their devotion to St John Henry, but at loggerheads over his legacy. Both conservative and liberal Catholics want to “own” Newman, and in a Church scarred by the partisan liberal pontificate of Pope Francis they are ready to fight it out. To quote one prominent traditionalist, “Now that Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church, it’s important that those who have actually read his works take control of the narrative before the Woke brigade hijacks him.”
The problem for conservatives is that plenty of liberal Catholics have read Newman and believe that he foreshadowed the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, which for that reason has been called “Newman’s Council”. And it’s true that Newman believed that lay Catholics could play a role in safeguarding doctrine. He noted that, during the fourth-century Arian conflict, bishops disavowed the divinity of Christ but their faithful flocks held on to it. Also, while accepting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was dismayed by its triumphalist definition by the First Vatican Council in 1870.
Yet the constant invocation of Newman by modernising Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era. As an Anglican, Newman lampooned Victorian progressives who believed that moral truths could be uncovered by science. He returned to the subject with renewed ferocity nearly half a century later, in an address when he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.
“The constant invocation of Newman by modernising Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era.”
Liberals were guilty of believing that “one creed is as good as another”, he said, and that “it is the right of each individual to make [revealed religion] say just what strikes his fancy”. This would lead to the ruin of souls. To quote Dr Samuel Gregg of the conservative Catholic Acton Institute, “Today, I suspect, the sheer force of Newman’s critique of what he called ‘liberalism in religion’ would make him persona non grata in most Northern European theology faculties.”
Of course, conservative and liberal Catholics are simply indulging in guesswork when they transport an eminent Victorian into the 20th or 21st centuries. What we do know, however, is that John Henry Newman was persona non grata in certain Anglican circles before he even considered converting, and also among powerful Catholics after he sacrificed everything to join their Church.
Partly this was his own fault. Professor Eamon Duffy, doyen of English Catholic historians and a huge Newman enthusiast, writes that as an Anglican the young theologian was “far from fastidious” in advancing his agenda, orchestrating “an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest” against a liberal churchman. (Perhaps he would have felt at home on X.) Decades later, as Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman ministered selflessly to the poor while nurturing ancient grudges and ghosting friends who had offended him. That isn’t saintly behaviour — but, on the other hand, it isn’t uncharacteristic of many saints who have temporarily lost sight of human decency in their crusades against “error”.
A more fundamental problem was that, in both his Churches, Newman was looking for a via media — a middle way. As an Anglican he tried to reconcile the apostolic teachings of Rome with the insights of the Protestant Reformers before deciding that he was wasting his time. As a Catholic he criticised liberals while trying to moderate the dogmatism of Pope Pius IX and his ally Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, a fellow ex-Anglican convert who wanted to impose papal authority on every aspect of English Catholic life.
Manning privately thought Newman was a heretic — an absurd notion. When the new Pope Leo XIII offered the old man a red hat, Manning played a really dirty trick, spreading anonymously authored false reports that Newman had declined the honour. Fortunately, a message from Birmingham reached Rome just in time.
Such are the perils of trying to find common ground in a fractured Church. This year the first American pope took the name Leo in order to honour the pope who, in making the great English theologian a cardinal, implicitly conceded that Pius IX had dragged the Church into unnecessary controversies. Newman was more explicit. Pius had suffered the fate of any pope who reigns for too long: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”
Does that ring a bell? Pope Francis reigned for only 12 years, but it seemed longer. He was a liberal, not an ultra-conservative in the mould of Pope Pius; indeed, he sometimes flirted with the notion, so scandalous to Newman, that “one creed is as good as another”. But, like Pius, Francis tolerated no contradiction, displayed little intellectual curiosity, and did cruel things to Catholics who attended the Latin Mass celebrated by St John Henry. He issued encyclicals that merited the latter’s verdict on Pius’s “Syllabus of Errors” – in Duffy’s paraphrase, “a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise.” Above all, despite the pantomime of “synodality”, he centralised the government of the Church in the despotic fashion that Newman deplored.
Leo XIV has, so far, given us few hints of specific policy initiatives. But most commentators agree that he is looking for a middle way between conservatives and liberals, and already we can see trouble ahead: both hardline liberals and paranoid conservatives are determined to cast him in the role of Pope Francis II. My guess is that there is a via media out there, but that Leo will find it only if he displays the sort of courage that enabled St John Henry to cross the Tiber, and walks away from the path to chaotic secularism mapped out by his predecessor.
