How a British critic of the Catholic Church became holier than a saint

Telegraph

a day ago

The future King's article also referred to other aspects of Newman's life: his work as a writer; his flawed character, marked by pride and defensiveness; his vast body of writings, including 30 volumes of his collected letters; his warmth towards friends; his leadership of the Catholic community in England so soon after emancipation; and, above all, the way that he spoke up for the importance of individual conscience. Newman, the Anglican priest who became a Catholic cardinal, famously said: 'I shall drink to the Pope but to conscience first.'
This might seem surprising, given that Newman had joined a Church akin to a pyramid – with the Pope at its top, the figure of ultimate authority. But Newman was no subservient cleric.
Born in 1801, Newman was first ordained an Anglican priest in 1825, becoming a leader of the Oxford Movement that wanted to restore many of the Roman Catholic rituals practised in England before the Reformation. But it was not enough for him and he became a Roman Catholic at enormous personal cost – including him having to resign his teaching post at Oriel College, Oxford, losing friends, being reviled and getting embroiled in very public rows while defending the Catholic Church – until his death in 1890.
Becoming a Catholic did not end the controversies that beset Newman. His advocacy of more dialogue in the Catholic Church was criticised by other clerics, notably Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (and also later a cardinal), who complained that Newman's problem was that he was somehow too English, taking with him into the Catholic Church an 'old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone'. Newman was not averse to criticising the Catholic Church for mistakes, not least its failure at that time to encourage different schools of theology.
Contentious arguments
Roderick Strange, author of several books on Newman, says that Newman 'felt there was a lack of healthy debate and argument among scholars' in the Catholic Church. Just as Newman had been more than ready to take on anti-Catholic criticism of people like Liberal politician William Gladstone and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies, he was happy to debate with Catholics who took issue with his views.
Among the most contentious of his arguments about the Catholic Church was that there should be a greater role for the laity in the Church – that they should be consulted when it came to doctrine. In one of his most famous works, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, Newman argued that the laity would help develop doctrine, not as an ultimate authority, but as a source of insight and a way of testing teaching.
His concern about authority also led him to write to his friend Emily Bowles in 1863: 'The Holy See was but the court of ultimate appeal. Now, if I, as a private priest, put any thing into print, [the Vatican office] Propaganda answers me at once. How can I fight with such a chain on my arm? It is like the Persians driven on to fight under the lash. There was true private judgment in the primitive and medieval schools – there are no schools now, no private judgment (in the religious sense of the phrase) no freedom, that is, of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect.'
For many, used to the priest-dominated Church of the 19th century, such a view was shocking. But it went on to help shape the Catholic Church of both the last century and this.
This then, is the man that Pope Leo has announced is to be a Doctor of the Church: a loyal Catholic, yet a critic and a prophet. A cardinal who loved tradition yet understood the Church also needed to change. A man shaped by the Church of England and by his English experience of dialogue and debate. The Doctor ahead of his time with his prescription for the Church.