St John Henry Newman is surely Anglicanism’s greatest and ever-expanding gift to the Roman Catholic Church. This view is now further fortified by the recent news that Pope Leo XIV has decided to confer upon Newman the title, Doctor of the Church.[1]
A good number of conservative Roman Catholics have taken this to be a most promising harbinger of future travel in their direction by the current Pope[2]. It is certainly easy to see why Newman has so often been thought of as a conservative figure deeply opposed to liberalism. His incisive comments in 1879 (commonly known as the “biglietto speech”) on the morning that he learned officially in Rome that he was being made a Cardinal by Leo XIII, are highly apposite in this regard:
Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is 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? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.
Then there is too, the crisp judgement of Owen Chadwick that, “Newman never believed in progress”[3]. Yet despite all this, we have to remember too the huge claims made for Newman’s influence on the Second Vatican Council and its widely perceived pathfinding towards a more liberal church. Such claims are made all the more interesting when analysis of the Council and its documents show that Newman is nowhere cited in any of its decrees and the official five volume history of the council makes only oblique reference to him, while it seems that he was only mentioned once during the actual proceedings of the council when, in the third session, Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore quoted with approval the remark contained in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that: “a power of development is a proof of life”[4]. Nonetheless, in the words of the Council’s noted English historian and participant, Bishop Christopher Butler,
‘Now, after a hundred years, we have had another [Vatican] Council, marked like the first by the emergence of two broadly contrasting wings of opinion and aim. But this time, it is those who can be considered the heirs of the neo-ultramontanes who have constituted the minority, and have been forced back on their defences – though they have had, on the other hand, the immense advantage of strong curial support, not to say leadership – which, however, has been insufficient to bring victory to their cause. The tide has been turned, and a first, immensely important, step has been taken towards the vindication of all the main theological, religious, and cultural positions of the former Fellow of Oriel.”[5]
In the face of such a range of views upon the significance and placement of Cardinal Newman himself together with – the evidently quite contestable—nature of his theological legacy, there is clearly an important work of further discernment to be undertaken.
Here it has to be said, in the words of one commentator that Newman was ultimately an “occasional and unsystematic writer” even though he did write so a large treatise as his Grammar of Assent. Indeed, the writings of Newman in toto, fully partake of two essential features needed for academic longevity. The first is that, while individually written with clarity, they are cumulatively far from simple and rarely devoid of internal conceptual tension. Secondly, the views contained in his writings quite expressly changed profoundly as his thought evolved, such that they had to end up overall, on important points, in mutual opposition. All of this befits the fact that Newman changed his own religious identity over time, both while an Anglican and then quite expressly in becoming a Roman Catholic.
In consequence, there is much for academics to debate and others to ponder in terms of where Newman really falls in terms of Liberalism. Moreover, quite aside from the question of what he believed at various times, there is much to be gained by recognizing that in fact there are several varieties of liberalism in play, for the term is not deployed univocally. In short there are good reasons for doubting if he ended up in fact being as anti-liberal as some of his conservative advocates have been keen to suggest. Moreover, his prolonged and acute personal crisis over the declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870 may be seen as pointing to an awareness that proposing a path for doctrinal “development” could only in the end open the door to doctrinal innovation and that the negative potential of this was something that only the wider church and not merely the papal office could authoritatively adjudicate. So, one might be tempted to say that while Newman left the Anglican Church for Rome he took something of Anglican ecclesiology with him, leaving a bequest that may even now have only begun to unfold.
There is one episode which throws into particular relief the inner tension within Newman. This was evidenced by the crisis entailed for him when, long after having become a Roman Catholic in 1845, he was confronted with the new doctrine of Papal Infallibility, promulgated, amidst considerable controversy, by the First Vatican Council in 1870 (by which point he was sixty-nine but was still nine years away from being made a cardinal, which happened only eleven years before his death in 1890).
The difficulty the episode occasioned can be seen simply enough from the outside, but was deeply problematic for him to handle without ultimate inconsistency, as he himself saw. The obvious solution was never going to be a comfortable one, which was to remain resolutely anti-liberal in terms of political theology, vis a vis Christianity and society, while in the face of this manifest practical theological innovation of necessity to allow for the possibility of practical theological liberalism within the Church on the other.
Here, it has to be recognized that there was a profound irony for many of the proponents of making Papal Infallibility a doctrine required of all upon pain of damnation. This lay in their seeing the move as one enshrining the papacy as the ultimate guarantor of orthodox continuity, when in fact they created an incoherence by using an innovation as their mechanism for achieving that end. In acting as they did they arguably created a potential engine for the destruction of the very goal they sought.
Indeed, while it never rose to a dispute about the exercise of infallibility as such, something of this tension could clearly be seen playing out in very recent times among conservative Roman Catholics under the rein of the late Pope Francis. During his papacy many of those in this constituency moved away from having seen the Papacy as a great bastion for their cause, under John-Paul II and Benedict XVI, towards a far more conciliar model that stressed the importance of the wider church as a collegial and magisterial institution through time that transcended the Roman Papacy. Two powerful illustrations of the need to be able to call upon the wider Church to address a problem with the Papal office took the form of letters circulated under Pope Francis. Hence the letter released by nineteen senior theologians and clergy on April 30, 2019[6]. This stated starkly that Pope Francis had on occasions “knowingly and persistently” denied what he knew was divine revealed Church teaching. The signatories called on bishops to investigate the claims they put forward, and then correct Pope Francis by calling on him “to reject these heresies.” It went on to state that if he should “persistently refuse,” then the Roman episcopate should declare that Francis had “freely deprived himself of the papacy” by virtue of the fact that “A heretical papacy may not be tolerated or dissimulated to avoid a worse evil,” since, “It strikes at the basic good of the Church and must be corrected.”
It can further be noted that this letter came after a letter had been hand delivered to Pope Francis on April 25, 2017[7] from Cardinals Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke and Joachim Meisner with questions (formally known as dubia) asking that he clarify highly disputed parts of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. This letter was written after there being no response for over seven months after the dubia had first been forwarded to Pope Francis, and again reflected the Papacy as an institution under serious travail which only the wider church could be called upon to address.
All of which makes fascinating the prescient anxieties of Newman about the Papal Dogma proclaimed in 1870.
In the year immediately following the promulgation of Papal Infallibility the controversy very much continued and indeed deepened, as the fate of Ignaz von Döllinger, the German theologian, Catholic priest and church historian who rejected the dogma unfolded and led to his eventual excommunication on the one hand, and the final and complete loss of the temporal Papal States was suffered on the other. It was also even been remembered unfavourably that the Dogma had been proclaimed to the accompaniment of an intense thunderstorm!
This all led to various requests from Newman’s friends for him to make public his own views of the definition and the of formal new obligation upon Catholics to believe it. In a private diary note Newman observed that, “As far as it is a tax upon faith it is, from its wording little enough – but considered in its effects both upon the Pope’s mind and that of his people, and in the power of which it puts him in practical possession, it is nothing else than shooting Niagara.”
On that same day he replied to a letter from Mrs. William Froude, who had had major and evidently continuing doubts about the new doctrinal obligation with words that elucidate further his cast of mind. He opened with the reassurance that,
“As little as possible was passed at the Council,” and then continued saying that, “-nothing about the Pope which I have not myself always held – but it is impossible to deny that it was done with an imperiousness and overbearing willfulness, which has been a great scandal – and I cannot think thunder and lightning a mark of approbation, as some persons wish to make out, and the sudden destruction of the Pope’s temporal power does not seem a sign of approval either. It suggests too the thought that to be at once infallible in religion and a despot in temporals, is perhaps too great for mortal man.
Very likely there will be some re-action for a time in his favour, but not permanently-and then, unless the Council, when re-assembled, qualifies the dogma by some considerable safeguards, which is not unlikely, perhaps the secularly defenceless state of the Pope will oblige him to court that Catholic body in its separate nations with a considerateness and kindness, which of late years the Holy see [sic] has not shown, and which may effectually prevent a tyrannous use of his spiritual power. But all these things are in God’s hands, and we are blind.” (Letters and Diaries, 25, 262)
However, a later letter of March 5th to Mrs. Froude offers an illuminating glimpse of his historical perspective upon the whole matter, going back to the early church:
I doubt very much whether the point of the Infallibility of the Pope was clearly understood, as a dogma, by the Popes themselves at that time [Cyprian, in he third century]; but then I also doubt whether the Infallibility of a General Council was at that time understood either, for no General Council as yet had been. The subject was what Vincentius calls “obscurely” held.
The Popes acted as if they were infallible in doctrine—with a very high hand, peremptorily, magisterially, fiercely. But when we come to the question of the analysis of such conduct, I think they had as vague ideas on the subject as many of the early Fathers had upon portions of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. They acted in a way which needed infallibility as its explanation.
However, he expressed himself rather more freely in his reply to the wife of one Mr. William Maskell, who had forwarded to him for comment, her husband’s pamphlet entitled: What is the Meaning of the Late Definition of the Infallibility of the Pope? An Enquiry
Newman thus wrote:
The truth is I have been too much pained and scandalized at what happened last year in Rome, not to wish to get rid of the subject, if I could. Not that it has had any effect on my own faith, thank God. It has long been my belief that the Pope had the infallibility which he was proclaimed to have last July— and there have been great scandals at Councils before those of the Vatican.
But what has been the deepest of distresses to me, has been the cruel unsettlement which the conduct of a fanatical party has brought about to so many good religious minds who had up to this time found peace and rest in the Church…”
But it is his further comments that were perhaps the most prescient, as he continued:
But under a great trial, the question is what are we to do – and I seem to see clearly that our duty is patience. Remedies spring up naturally in the Church, as in nature, if we wait for them. The definition was taken out of its order—it would have come to us very differently, if those preliminaries about the Church’s power had first been passed, which, I believe, were intended. And now, if the Council proceeds, I trust that it will occupy itself in other points which will have the effect of qualifying and guarding the dogma. …. Our wisdom is to keep quiet, not to make controversy, not to make things worse, but to pray that He, who before now has completed a first Council by a second, may do so now.
(Newman to Mrs. Monique Maskell, 31 January 1871, The Letters and Diaries, 25:277-78.)
Is it not in the light of this, that we can read afresh the comments cited before, regarding Newman’s essentially liberal theological legacy as celebrated by Bishop Christopher Butler, who saw in Vatican II the point at which, “The tide has been turned”?
This is not quite, we may suppose, what the conservative Roman Catholic proponents of the newly minted Doctor of the Church have had in mind — even if the wider vision for an authentically Ecclesial Catholicity, to which Newman I suggest can ultimately be seen to point, is one which we classical Anglicans are yet well placed to help unfold.
[1] A company that now has thirty eight members, including the four “outstanding Fathers of the Church” given this title in the early Middle Ages: Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, as well as the “Three Great Hierarchs” of the Byzantine church: John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzus.
[2] E.g., Adrian Vermeule, “The Doctor of Anti-Liberalism, Writings on St. John Henry Newman”, The New Digest, 1 Aug, 2025 https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/the-doctor-of-anti-liberalism?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5590d1e0-50f7-4920-92c9-333de5814c6f_1280x720.jpeg&open=false
[3] Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman. The Idea of Doctrinal Development, Cambridge, 1957, p. 97.
[4] Norman Tanner, ‘The Church in the World (Ecclesia ad Extra)’, History of Vatican II, Vol. IV, Church as Communion. Third Period and Intersession. September 1964 – September 1965(Peeters,2003), pp.269 -386; p.288.
[5] B. C. Butler OSB, ‘Newman and the Second Vatican Council’ in, The Rediscovery of Newman. An Oxford Symposium, John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (Eds.) , London, 1967,, pp. 244-5. Bishop Butler was himself a convert from Anglicanism who became a Benedictine monk and 7th Abbot of Downside, Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation, and Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster. He was widely regarded as one of the most important English speaking Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, see also his, The Theology of Vatican II. On the wider issue see, Nicholas Lash, Newman and Vatican II, New Blackfriars, 2011, Vol. 92, No. 1038 pp. 243-246.
[6] The feast day in the traditional calendar of St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century saint famous for her criticism of Pope Gregory XI. The letter was published in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish and comprised, the “third stage” of a process that began in the summer of 2016 when a group of Catholic clergy and scholars wrote a private letter to cardinals and Eastern patriarchs pointing out heresies that they had identified in the Pope’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia. This was followed by a “filial correction” the following year, which expressed grave concern about various papal pronouncements but stopped short of accusing the Pope of knowingly spreading heresy. The full text is available here: https://ncreg-multimedia.sourcefabric.org/images/uploads/open-letter.pdf
