It went relatively unnoticed that Wednesday, the day Pope John Paul II created 44 new cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, was also the 200th anniversary of the birth of a man many consider the greatest cardinal of modern times.
A master of English prose, and a thinker of extraordinary subtlety, that man, John Henry Newman, is the only Catholic theologian of the 19th or 20th centuries (setting aside popes) to be cited in the official catechism of the Catholic Church.
No self-respecting anthology of English prose can be without passages from Newman's great autobiographical ''Apologia Pro Vita Sua'' or other works. No serious discussion of liberal education can proceed without grappling with his ''The Idea of a University.''
Newman may have been the 19th century's most celebrated convert to Catholicism, and yet, as priest and theologian, he lived for many years under a shadow of suspicion from Rome and many fellow Catholics. That shadow was not really lifted until 1879, 34 years after he entered the Catholic Church, when Pope Leo XIII gave him the red hat.
Today Newman is claimed by both liberals and conservatives within the Catholic Church -- and with some justice on both sides.Continue reading the main story
All his life, Newman testified, he opposed ''liberalism in religion.'' In his ''Apologia''(1864), he defined that liberalism as the ''anti-dogmatic principle.'' In 1879, on the eve of being made a cardinal, he defined it as ''the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.''
Because in this view, ''revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste,'' he continued, ''so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you?''
Newman feared that this outlook was sweeping Britain then, and he would not be surprised to find it the default opinion of most American undergraduates when they stop to think about the matter at all.
Critics see an unreasonable craving for authority in Newman's anti-liberalism. He was also a bred-in-the-bone Tory, and as the youthful leader of the Oxford Movement that sought a bulwark against Parliamentary manipulation of Anglicanism in its ancient Catholic roots, he could be savagely polemical.
But at the core of his religious thinking, Newman was a highly undogmatic anti-dogmatist. He had a strong sense of the limits of pure reasoning. On the one hand, religious truth involved realities infinitely surpassing the human mind -- and its words and categories as well. On the other hand, the pursuit of truth was far more a matter of disposition and temperament, critical experiences, moral sensitivities and a million other imponderables, than of syllogistic reasoning.
''So mysterious are the paths of thought,'' he once wrote, that by comparison it would be ''easy to enumerate the various external impulses which determine the capricious motions of a floating feather.''
Such thinking was far from a combative 19th-century church's rough-hewn confidence that doctrines could be rationally demonstrated and aligned in an invincible theological system.
If that were not enough to put Newman under a cloud, there was a plethora of other reasons. He refused, for example, to support wholeheartedly the papacy's insistence on retaining its rule over the papal states in Italy -- and under Pope Pius IX, affirming this ''temporal power'' was just as much a litmus test of Catholic loyalty and orthodoxy, especially for anyone in a position of church leadership, as the church's official condemnation of contraception has become today.
Likewise, Newman gave what were widely considered ''minimalist'' interpretations of papal decrees and even the First Vatican Council's declaration of papal infallibility. He repeatedly tangled with Catholics who practically made a cult out of the pope.
In return, he suffered rebuffs, insults and harassment, the pain of which was magnified by his hypersensitive character. The word ''tyranny'' appears more than once in his letters about Vatican policy. His 1862 confession that he found the church he loved and had joined ''very little but desert and desolateness'' could have been made at many another time as well.
Would it be made today? Newman would almost certainly recoil from the heresy hunting that has become standard fare in contemporary Catholicism. (There are Web sites that rate the orthodoxy of Catholic organizations and religious orders of priests and sisters.) He would certainly reject the angry polemics against the papacy that invoke his name. (Even some liberal Catholics of his own day took his tact for cowardice.)
For anyone serious about religious belief, Newman's opposition to the ''anti-dogmatic principle'' and his effort to understand how provisional opinions turn into religious certitudes (''A Grammar of Assent,'' 1870) remain relevant today. But two of his other concerns stand out as crucially important to Catholicism as an institution.
One is his theory of the development of doctrine. Newman had argued his way into Catholicism not by way of the familiar claim that the church was true because it was unchanging. Rather he had concluded (''Essay on the Development of Doctrine,'' 1845) that Catholicism had remained true to what was essential precisely by its power of changing.
The other is his concern for the role of the laity in discerning and guarding the faith (''On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine,'' 1859).
His thoughts on these two topics influenced much of the work of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's. But since then, church officials have had to recognize the difficulty of any responsible orderly development of doctrine and any serious consultation of the laity in an age of media hubbub and instant opinion polls.
Their response, however, has not been to look for new ways of addressing the questions that Newman opened up. Their response has been to put the questions on ice. Another John Henry Newman is still awaited.Continue reading the main story