2. Newman's Confidence in the Survival of the Church

Declining affiliation and practice; families, schools, and parishes less effective in transmitting faith; disillusionment with the criminal behaviour of some church personnel and its mismanagement; distraction by competing narratives and interests; remorseless media critique and increasingly hostile legislation; the march of secularism and anti-Catholicism through the institutions: Newman rightly foresaw much of this.

‘Secularization theory’ asserts that religious belief inevitably declines as individuals and communities modernize.^{Footnote 14} Yet despite the power of scientific culture and technocratic thinking, religious belief is projected to rise from 5 in 6 people worldwide to 7 out of 8 by 2060.^{Footnote 15} Agnosticism and atheism are in greater danger of extinction than Christianity. Indeed, the demise of Christianity has often been bemoaned or celebrated in history, yet it has repeatedly recovered after catastrophic declines. Furthermore, secular liberalism is still largely parasitic upon Christian ideas, and the faithful of each have found ways of co-existing and even collaborating.^{Footnote 16}

In his essays In Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) and On the Development of Christian Doctrine (1878), Newman suggests that Christianity is sui generis and not just one more philosophy on the buffet of ideas.^{Footnote 17} Only the incarnational-sacramental principle upon which Christianity is established can give access to all reality, seen and unseen, and make sense of it. Christianity's survival is divinely secured as both embedded within history and transcending it. And where natural religion and the other faiths falter on the problem of evil, the decline of civilization or the remedy for sin, Christians have some answers and cause for confidence.

This was at the heart of Newman's own conversion(s) as described in his Apologia pro vita sua (1865).^{Footnote 18} If Christ's coming was for all humanity, and not just the Jews around 33AD, then his promise to be with us always was already implicit in the Incarnation, long before it was made explicit at the Ascension; so, too, the institution of an indefatigable Church was logically required, long before Christ explicitly promised it at Caesarea-Philippi.^{Footnote 19} That the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church does not immunize it against all hell's sorties, nor exclude persecution, diminishment, or faithlessness in places. But its essence and mission continue, at least in a faithful few.^{Footnote 20} The Church's power is always in the present and its gaze perpetually on the future.^{Footnote 21} Thus the Mass recalls a sacrifice past, makes it present to worshippers now, and offers a foretaste of heaven to come.^{Footnote 22} The Church is always more than buildings, hierarchies, or present behavior: it is the continuing mission of Christ sent by the Father to all the world and of the Spirit extending to all nations and souls.^{Footnote 23}

Authentic Catholic tertiary institutions are concrete examples of the continuing missions of God and the Church in the world; they are a witness to the continuing relevance of Christian faith in people's lives; and they reflect the fact that God's revelation is for public sharing, research, and debate. The religion of the future will testify to Christian resilience against the forces of secularity, to an ecclesial sensibility amongst its adherents, and to the apostolic tradition humbly but confidently proposed anew in every age.

3. Newman on the Development of Doctrine

Newman's memorial epitaph is Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem—from shadows and images into truth.^{Footnote 24} For him that truth was something ‘living’ and knowledge a process of uncovering through this life into the next. His famous adage that ‘To be alive is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often’ captured both his own progress and how he thought humanity advances, including Christian doctrine.^{Footnote 25} The Church, as Newman taught, is not a museum for ancient artefacts and ideas. Its faith and practice have developed down the centuries and, if it is faithful to the Spirit, such development continues: ‘No one doctrine can be named which starts complete at first, and gains nothing afterwards from the investigations of faith’.^{Footnote 26} Yet Christianity, is also, as G.K Chesterton observed, the ‘democracy of the dead’: it gives tradition the fullest respect, so that the dead have a say in the faith of the living.^{Footnote 27} In what sense can these two competing claims be reconciled?

Since revelation is first and foremost an encounter not with creeds but with the person of Jesus Christ, it is essentially dynamic. This is not to say that truth is born from history and fashioned according to culture and milieux. Newman was no relativist.^{Footnote 28} At a Newman symposium in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Newman's lifelong search for truth; his insistence on its objective reality and the mind's proper subjection to it; his surrendering his own interiority to ‘the objective truth of a personal and living God’; and his determination faithfully to live that truth once recognized.^{Footnote 29} He labored upon the relationship between truth's transcendental character and its communication in history through living individuals and communities. This understanding played a crucial role in his essay On the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman made the point that true doctrinal development is not simply accepting whatever idea is en vogue, nor being victim to irresistible historical forces, but rather adhering to the very conditions of revealed truth and faithfully expressing the apostolic tradition.^{Footnote 30}

Comparing the development of a doctrine with the organic development of acorn into an adult plant or an embryo into an animal, Newman famously offered seven ‘notes’ for distinguishing true development from false: species, continuity, assimilation, durability, anticipation, coherence and conservation. Corruptions, on the other hand, involve revolutionary rather than evolutionary changes, reverse or contradict earlier developments, involve contamination and loss of identity, are incoherent or disintegrative.^{Footnote 31}

Applying such criteria is not straightforward: important questions remain for those steeped in hermeneutics, history, and theology, who are faithful to the magisterium. So, a third purpose of Catholic institutions of higher learning is to enable healthy development of doctrine, and to test putative developments for their fidelity to revelation. Here faithful and informed scholars respond to the signs of the times through the lens of the Gospel and assist the magisterium in its role as authentic interpreter of the doctrinal tradition. By producing scholars and students with a holistic and robust understanding of Christian teaching, the academy helps ensure that the Church is, in St Paul's words, ‘the pillar and bulwark of truth’.^{Footnote 32} The religion of the future will know developments of doctrine, morals, and customs we do not yet fully foresee but which are faithful to Christ and all he revealed.

4. Newman on the Growing Role of the Laity

Archbishop William Ullathorne OSB (1806-89) was Newman's bishop. When the Oxford converts’ magazine, The Rambler, started treating theological subjects, identifying clerical shortcomings and recommending bishops take lay advice—all of which outraged the London Tablet—Ullathorne was expected to fix things. He tapped Newman to assume the editorship and in his first editorial he acknowledged most fully the prerogatives of the episcopate and apologized for any apparent disrespect. But Newman also asserted that ‘their Lordships really desire to know the opinion of the laity on subjects in which the laity are especially concerned’ and for good reason, as sometimes in history the laity were more solid in matters of faith or more prudent in matters of policy than the pastors.

Newman's editing of The Rambler lasted only two months, but before departing he published anonymously what came to be known as On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859).^{Footnote 33} As a true Catholic, he thought ‘the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of [the] tradition resides solely with the Ecclesia docens’—the pope and the bishops.^{Footnote 34}

So, without doubt, Newman was Episcopalian: he believed in the divine constitution of the Church and the particular charism of the bishops. Still, following the Fathers, he thought the relationship between pastors and faithful must be more than superiors and subordinates: it must be a conspiratio, ‘put together, as one twofold testimony, illustrating each other, and never to be divided’.^{Footnote 35} His thinking in this regard was influenced by the Italian Jesuit theologian Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876).^{Footnote 36} Newman now offered twenty-two instances of the consensus fidelium being more responsible for the preservation of orthodoxy than the consensus clericorum, including during the Arian crisis of the fourth century, about which he was an acknowledged authority.^{Footnote 37} He also quoted Ullathorne on how, at the definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854), the faithful ‘mirrored’ the pastors, reflecting and confirming each other's faith.

Newman was delated for these radical views to Rome, where his enemies contrived to deny him a hearing. His nemesis, Monsignor Talbot, warned Cardinal Manning that the laity are,

As the dispute dragged on, Ullathorne wondered publicly ‘Who are the laity and what have they to do with the Church?’, about which Newman famously quipped ‘The Church would look rather foolish without them’.^{Footnote 39} Ullathorne had no use for a theologically literate laity and feared it would be divisive. But Newman understood that the apostolic deposit is expressed:

Newman's claims were endorsed by the Second Vatican Council, and increasing numbers of lay faithful now belong to international and local Church bodies, run chanceries, schools, universities, hospitals, and other agencies, lead ecclesial movements, charities, and head various ministries. The emphasis on ‘synodality’ in recent times echoes some of Newman's thought. He would, like Pope Francis, encourage real listening, dialogue, and joint witness; he would also, like Pope Francis, repudiate any parliamentary or opinion poll model of how the Church identifies the truth. If the laity are to contribute to the ‘two-fold testimony’, they must be informed by the spirit that stirred the faithful at the time of Nicaea, built upon baptismal vocation and apostolic faith.

To this end, Catholic institutions of higher learning play a fourth indispensable role: as centers for forming and expressing lay leadership; cultivating excellent minds and courageous wills to fertilize Church and society; eschewing any ‘parallel magisterium’ and instead collaborating in giving joint witness. Though the principal field for the lay apostolate is always the world beyond the Church, the religion of the future will also include an enlarged role for the laity within.

5. Newman on an Educated Faith and Conscience

Newman's ‘intelligent, well-instructed laity’ would obviously require an appropriate education. In a journal entry from 1863, Newman wrote that ‘from first to last, education…has been my line’.^{Footnote 41} Though his conversion cut short his time as an Oxford don, his influence in the realm of higher learning continued with the invitation to establish a Catholic University in Dublin.^{Footnote 42} This gave rise to lectures including those that contributed to The Idea of a University (1852), described by Jaroslav Pelikan as the ‘most important treatise on the idea of a university ever written in any language’.^{Footnote 43} In this work, Newman makes his famous advocacy for a liberal education, the chief aim of which being ‘the real cultivation of mind’.^{Footnote 44}

But what did he mean? In modernity scholarship is divided into multiple distinct disciplines and degrees, increasingly narrow teaching units and research tasks. For all the talk of being cross- or inter-disciplinary, most academics stick to their corners and many universities gave abandoned or ideologized the humanities. Certain skills are privileged in the market for ‘job-ready’ graduates. Newman, on the other hand, proposed an education offering breadth and depth, vision, and virtues. His scholars would be characterized by an appreciation for ‘the whole’ of reality, for possessing a ‘philosophic habit of mind’ and an interest in many disciplines, and for bringing such an integrated mind to the rest of life.^{Footnote 45} All this requires comprehension of spiritual matters, and so—contrary to the self-consciously ‘secular’ institutions being established in his day—Newman was convinced that ‘divinity’ had a rightful place not just in the seminary but the university. As the divine logos permeates all of creation, our rational faculties, while truly natural and human, rely upon the divine mind.

One area where the faith-reason relationship plays out is in formation of conscience, a topic Newman addressed most famously in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875).^{Footnote 46} Unlike modern readings of conscience as subjectivist sincerity or relativist tribalism, Newman insists that ‘Conscience is… a messenger from Him, Who, both in nature and grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’.^{Footnote 47} Newman foresaw that the tradition on conscience was being ‘superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it… It is the right of self-will… an Englishman's prerogative to be his own master in all things’.^{Footnote 48} Revelation, tradition, community, even reason itself, were increasingly deplored as rivals of free agency. But just as the value of memory is in remembering accurately, so the value of conscience is in yielding right judgment and action: only for this reason do we take it so seriously. Left to its own devices, ‘though it tells truly at first, [conscience] soon becomes wavering, ambiguous, and false; it needs good teachers and good examples to keep it up to the mark and the line of duty; and the misery is, that these external helps, teachers and examples, are in many instances wanting’.^{Footnote 49}

What's more, the ‘seeds’ of faith and morals that natural conscience plants in the soul point toward the Gospel. With the gift of Christian faith, this natural voice is transformed into the Christian sense of responsibility before God. ‘Conscience has its rights because it has its duties’ – duties to self, fellows, God.^{Footnote 50} But:

On Newman's account, a truly liberal education, including some theology, is essential for formation of sound Christian consciences. A fifth reason for Catholic universities, then, is to prepare intelligent, well-instructed people to act well in this life and so serve the betterment of self and society. This requires a more expansive and holistic conception of education than is offered in highly specialized and job-focused programs, one that addresses character and ethics. The religion of the future will require the faithful to be better and more roundly educated in spiritual and moral matters.

6. Newman on Catholicism versus the Zeitgeist

Not all Church-sponsored institutions of higher learning will serve Newman's goals and so the religion of the future. Some subscribe to ideologies incompatible with Christianity or are led and staffed by people more comfortable with the secular gods of ‘diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ than with the much richer Catholic intellectual tradition. Some reimagine Christianity as little more than feel-good slogans, social causes, and pastoral care. These colleges turn out graduates inoculated with dead or weakened strains of Christianity against the kind of ‘full-on’ faith that might carry them through life and convert others.

In his sermon The Religion of the Day (1839), Newman bemoaned the reduction of Christianity to a consoling belief system, requiring no Scripture or Tradition, making no moral or ascetical demands, not even eschewing sin and its disastrous effects.^{Footnote 52} This ‘lukewarm’ Christianity’ does not oppose Christianity so much as fasten on to:

Thus, Christianity is reduced to a hybrid of Gospel kindness and human justice; conscience is dulled, fear of hell eliminated loyalty to the Church reduced, ‘religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins [and] austerity is an absurdity’.^{Footnote 54}

Some proponents of this truncated version of the faith have claimed Newman as one of their own, latching onto statements about development, conscience or the laity. Newman biographer Ian Ker thinks he would be horrified to see his words hijacked in this way.^{Footnote 55} In his Biglietto Speech (1879), given on the occasion of his being created cardinal, Newman said that:

Renewing his protest against the idea that revealed religion ‘is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and [that] it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy’, Newman argued that this puts religion beyond rational critique, encourages the privatization and bracketing of belief, and at best generates tolerance but never devotion or evangelization.^{Footnote 57}

Newman predicted that Christian societies and polities would increasingly forget their roots and ‘throw off’ faith in what he called ‘the great apostasia’.^{Footnote 58} But what would then underpin law and order was unclear. He speculated that the first step would be to substitute ‘a universal and thoroughly secular education, calculated to bring home to every individual that to be orderly, industrious, and sober, is his personal interest’. There would be moves to deChristianize institutions, to exclude faith (as divisive) from the public square, and to win ‘great numbers of able, earnest, virtuous men’ to secularity. Finally, religion would be relegated to the class of ‘private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course he must pay for, and which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance’.^{Footnote 59}

Newman's response was to call on intelligent Catholics to rediscover the ‘dogmatical principle’:

So, a sixth role for the Catholic academy is to humbly and intelligently critique truncated views of reason in liberal thought and of religion in ‘lukewarm Christianity’, offering a more animating version of each worthy of minds and hearts. Reclaiming a central place for the reality of truth; providing a ‘safe space’ for people to explore faith intelligently and intelligence faithfully; exploring and proclaiming all of faith and reason, not avoiding the hard bits—Catholic institutes can out-narrate prevailing worldviews and their emaciated epistemologies and anthropologies. That, too, will be a gift to the future, as religion recovers its intelligence and confidence.

7. Newman on Catholicism's Missionary Impulse

Newman concluded his Biglietto Speech by regretting liberal modernity's abandonment of Christianity, as it would be the ruin of many souls. But, he insisted, we should not despair as it cannot really:

Newman knew that the Church had been through many highs and lows through history and proven remarkably resilient. Each time the death of God had been proclaimed or the end of Christianity predicted, a major revival was just around the corner. In his own lifetime the forces of the French revolution and the Napoleonic empire sought to wipe out Catholicism, closing churches, convents, and schools, confiscating property, and imprisoning two popes. Yet Newman witnessed how this released spiritual and missionary energies unseen in centuries. Within decades new religious orders were evangelizing the global south and populating the ecclesial infrastructure in the North. Thus, while Newman could be rather bleak about the direction of the culture, he remained confident in the power of the Gospel. Christianity had encountered superstition and false religion of many kinds down the centuries, but never before encountered the radical unbelief it does today.

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), Newman called for an educated and mobilized laity to help defend and promote the Catholic faith:

To the missionary mandate given by Christ to of Church is attached the promise that He would be with us always. A seventh reason to persevere with Catholic tertiary institutions, therefore, is to serve the mission of the Church to the members of the university and the wider community they influence, and to provide an alternative wisdom to that ‘of this world’, the wisdom of Christ crucified and risen. The religion of the future will be the fruit of such persuasion of minds, conversion of hearts and commitment of souls to Christ.