FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS
By Fr Ross Jones SJ, Rector, St Aloysius’ College Milsons Point
“Growth is the Only Evidence of Life”.
So wrote John Henry Newman in his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in 1865. This very personal work of his captured a life of much churn and change.
That life began when Newman was born into a middle-class Anglican family in London in 1801. By the end of that century, he was to emerge as a significant theologian, philosopher, historian, public intellectual and preacher in a journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism.
At the beginning of this month, Pope Leo XIV honoured St John Henry Newman by declaring him a Doctor of the Church. This title is bestowed on saints whose writings and teachings are regarded as having significant insight and authority. He joined thirty-seven other saints so named — including four women, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Thérèse of Lisieux and Hildegard of Bingen. The paucity of women honoured this way is because for centuries they had little opportunity or encouragement to be theologians.
Newman studied at Oxford and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825. His ministry there was noted for its outreach to the sick and the poor. Then he was caught up in what became known as the Oxford Movement, a group of intellectuals and theologians who increasingly believed that the Anglican faith had lost much of its Christian tradition, in theology and liturgy, in the English Reformation. Members of the movement were drawn to so-called high-Anglicanism or Anglo-Catholicism. Many, including Newman, converted to Roman Catholicism.
In 1845 he was formally received into the Catholic Church. That dramatic step saw him lose not only his Oxford fellowship, but most of his Anglican friends and his family. Yet, Newman described the decision as bringing him great peace amid the isolation. He described his conversion as “like coming into port after a rough sea.” Two years later, he was ordained a priest. He then joined the Oratorian order and brought them to England.
Another Oxford man who was later swept up by the same movement was one Gerard Manley Hopkins. He sought counsel and spiritual direction from Newman, then living in Birmingham. Hopkins was later to emerge as a profound religious poet, decades ahead of his time. Curiously, in spite of his guidance of Hopkins into the Jesuits, Newman had reservations about the Society. Perhaps, with reference to our vow of obedience, he once suggested of us that:
They have the excellence and the fault of soldiers: they are perfect as an organised body, but, as individuals, they are often little more than mechanical instruments, and are, least of all men, able to deal with strangers, or with enemies, not to say with friends . . . The Jesuit does not know what tact is, cannot enter into the mind of others, and is apt to blunder in most important matters from this habit of mechanical obedience to a Superior and a system.
Clearly, he did not know us well – or had only met a few odd-bods! Perhaps, too, the Jesuits in that post-Restoration time were a little extra cautious in what they said or did – flying under the radar, so to speak. Later critics have said quite the opposite of us that, rather than being automatons, we are far too flexible and individualistic, too accommodating and easily unorthodox. Newman elsewhere declared in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, that, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”. In this regard, I suggest we Jesuits would see eye-to-eye with him.
During the First Vatican Council (1869-70) in the time of Pope Pius IX, Newman spoke out very strongly against the issue of papal infallibility which was being debated there. When the doctrine was declared, he accepted it, but argued that it ought be applied minimally – which, in fact, it has been.
In an allied issue in this environment, Newman was a determined advocate of the primacy of conscience, which he had described as “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ”, that is, the Vicar of Christ ahead of the Pope. In an open letter to the Duke of Norfolk, traditionally England’s “premier lay Catholic”, he famously wrote:
Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please, – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.
If that sounds excessive or provocative, he was defending a theological principle which can be traced back to the great medieval theologian, St Thomas Aquinas (with whom Newman shares the title of patron saint of Catholic Education).
Newman is also at one with Joseph Ratzinger (later the conservative Pope Benedict XVI) who asserted unambiguously that:
Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.
The Second Vatican Council nailed the position of the primacy of conscience once-and-for-all: “We must not be forced to act in any way against our conscience … particularly in religious matters.”
Pius IX had not trusted Newman, but his successor, Leo XIII (the champion of social justice) did. Leo made Newman a cardinal in 1879, the foundation year of St Aloysius’ College.
Thereafter, Newman lived for a little more than a decade, in a rather quieter life. Pope Francis canonised him in 2019.
Not withstanding his criticism of us, Newman’s spirituality, theology and intellectual ideas have much in common with the Society of Jesus’ charism. In the matter of conscience, of course.
His personal motto was Cor ad Cor Loquitur (“Heart Speaks to Heart”). Not unlike Ignatius’ advice for praying in his Spiritual Exercises where he said prayer should be “speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another.”
Our tradition in schools, grounded in humanism, is to strive to inculcate an eloquentia perfecta (“flawless eloquence”) and explore good literature. In his Idea of a University, Newman underscores the place of good literature:
Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. This is what I have been laying down, and this is literature: not things, not the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words; but thoughts expressed in language.
Ignatius encouraged humility in respectful conversations and deep listening. Newman abhorred bombastic enthusiasts in words that are apposite today for the world’s stage:
There will ever be a number of persons, professing the opinions of a movement party, who talk loudly and strangely, do odd or fierce things, display themselves unnecessarily, and disgust other people; persons too young to be wise, too generous to be cautious, too warm to be sober, or too intellectual to be humble. Such persons will be very apt to attach themselves to particular persons, to use particular names, to say things merely because others do, and to act in a party-spirited way.
When we teach religious studies here at St Aloysius’, faith is always coupled with reason. We try to convey an intelligent, robust faith. Newman would concur. He argued that “Mere inherited faith, in those who can’t have an intelligent faith, is dangerous and inconsistent.”
Ignatius was at first held in some suspicion when, in his Spiritual Exercises, he encouraged imagination in prayer. Dreams and desires are key elements in Ignatian discernment. Wonder and imagination are yet another dimension of the magis. Critical of any science that stopped short of moving one from “how?” to “why?” questions, Newman suggested a complementary path from mere knowledge to belief. “The heart,” he says, “is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination.”
We inculcate in our schools today the virtue of being “a man for others” and being one of compassion. In Newman’s celebrated, albeit slightly Victorian, Definition of a Gentleman, he begins,
He has his eye on all his company.
He is tender, gentle and merciful.
Finally, Newman advised, “Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.” He had a very dramatic and somewhat costly beginning in his conversion in faith. A change and a growth. A new start. As did our patron, Aloysius, in his “conversion”. Both of them, then, would counsel a freedom in us to be born – or re-born – “for greater things.”
Tapestry featuring the portrait of Saint John Henry Newman is draped over the balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square during his canonisation in 2019. Newman declared in ‘An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine’ that, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”. The author, Fr Ross Jones SJ, writes: “In this regard, I suggest we Jesuits would see eye-to-eye with him”. Picture: Arthur Edwards / Getty Images