Newman against Liberalism:


On May 12, 1879, in Rome, Father John Henry Newman, Oratorian priest, 78 years old, formally received the official biglietto, or Ònote," from the papal Secretary of State informing him that His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, in a consistory that very morning, had elevated him to membership in the College of Cardinals.

In response the new cardinal delivered a short address to his well-wishers which has ever afterwards been known as his ÒBiglietto Speech."1 In this speech Cardinal Newman briefly outlined what he considered most significant in his long and varied life as a priest in what used to be called the Church Militant (the name seems especially apt for an ecclesiastical career as eventful as Newman's) .

He first spoke of his "wonder and profound gratitude" at what he called the "condescension and love" of the Holy Father towards him in singling him out for "so immense an honor." "I had passed through many trials," Newman recalled, "but they were over, and now the end of all things had almost come to me, and I was at peace. And was it possible that after all I had lived through so many years for this?"

Making Newman a cardinal really was a rather extraordinary thing at the time, for he had virtually never been free of "controversy," either as an Anglican or as a Catholic. "My cardinal," Pope Leo XIII later told an English visitor. "It was not easy, it was not easy. They said he was too liberal; but I had determined to honor the Church in honoring Newman . . . I was proud that I was allowed to honor such a man."2

For Newman himself it meant the lifting of a cloud, the "thorough wiping away" of a "stigma," and the end of the talk about him as, in his words, "a half Catholic, a Liberal Catholic."3 One of the reasons Newman had acquired a "stigma" lay in his very originality. He had not been educated as a Catholic, and did not think in the usual Catholic categories. And when, in his mid-forties, with the reputation of being one of the finest preachers as well as sharpest controversialists in the Church of England, he came into the Catholic Church, he brought with him his own unique and mature outlook and approach to the problems which beset Christianity everywhere in the nineteenth century.

Newman frequently worked in uncharted territory anyway, paying little attention to the conventional lines between recognized disciplines, speaking and writing in his inimitable style by turns as a philosopher, a theologian, an historian, a devotional preacher, or even as what we today call a "pundit" or as all of these at once. Nor was the future English cardinal someone who believed that "cut and dried answers out of a dogmatic treatise [were] weapons with which Catholic Reason can hope to vanquish the infidels of the day."4 On the contrary, he normally framed his own answers against the infidels of the day.

In short, Newman took many chances and went out on many limbs. Nevertheless, he always and steadily professed absolute submission to the decisions of legitimate Church authority when they were made; he not only submitted; few have ever defended both the necessity for, and the actual historical exercise of, Church authority as effectively and even eloquently as he did. But the stands that he took himself nevertheless sometimes made him liable to misunderstandings, and he was in fact sometimes misunderstood Ñ including in Rome.

But a "Liberal Catholic"? The very suggestion is astounding. Far from it: in his Biglietto Speech he summed up his entire priestly career as nothing else but one long battle against what he called the "great mischief" of liberalism. "For 30, 40, 50 years," he told his listeners on the occasion of his being made a cardinal, "I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion." He saw this religious liberalism as "an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth." He did not hesitate even to style it a "great apostasia." "Never," he declared on this very special occasion in 1879, did "Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now."

But what, according to Newman, was this phenomenon which he described in such graphic terms, identifying it as the principal thing he had always fought against while fighting for the faith? He defined it in these terms in his Biglietto Speech:

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 fraternize 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.

There had been a time, of course, when religion had been "the bond of society": this had been the case in the Christian centuries. "Even in countries separated from the Church as my own," Newman recalled, "the dictum was in force when I was young that: ÔChristianity is the law of the land.'" No more; that idea as far as Newman was concerned had become "history," as today's popular expression has it. "Everywhere," Newman went on, "that goodly framework of society which is the creation of Christianity is throwing off Christianity . . . [It] is gone, or is going everywhere; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten . . . "

What was this brave new world that Newman was thus describing well over a century ago now? He was describing nothing else but the de-Christianized world in which we live today. No doubt it took a little longer to arrive than he predicted; but arrive it did, without fail. It is the world in which our contemporary "culture" and virtually all of our public policies Ñ or, let us say, the current decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court Ñ all of which might once have been, and indeed were, influenced by Christianity Ñ all such things are today mostly alien to Christianity if not actually hostile to it. In society at large Christianity has indeed gone, is indeed largely forgotten, as Newman astutely foresaw. This is certainly the case as far as our public life is concerned Ñ and as far as the private lives of many of our fellow citizens are concerned as well.

What Newman foresaw and dreaded is today taken as an axiom of any "democratic" society: "Every dozen men taken at random, whom you meet in the streets," he noted, "has a share in political power, Ñ when you inquire into their forms of belief, perhaps they represent one or other of as many as seven religions; how can they possibly act together in municipal or in national matters, if each insists on the recognition of his own religious denomination? All action would be at a deadlock, unless the subject of religion were ignored. We cannot help ourselves . . . "

This state of affairs, as Newman saw it, was the inevitable result of society's abandonment of Christian truth and its adoption of today's all-pervasive liberalism in its stead. It became inevitable, at least in part, because there was always, as Newman with his habitual clarity did not fail to point out in his Biglietto Speech itself, "much in the liberalistic theory that was good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence, which, as I have already noted, are among its avowed principles, and the natural laws of society. It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supersede, to block out, religion, that we pronounce it to be evil . . . "

"To supersede, to block out, religion . . . " This, then, for Newman, was the reason why, when he came to sum up his whole life as a Christian and as a priest, he identified his battle against liberalism as the common thread which ran through all of his many and varied efforts and accomplishments for the faith. The victory of liberalism meant the downgrading if not the destruction of religion in our lives, even though religion was the only thing that could give ultimate meaning to our lives. Determinedly and adamantly opposing liberalism was thus an unavoidable necessity for any man of faith or lover of truth, as Newman saw things.

It was not that Newman took a purely negative approach. On the contrary, as one of the greatest preachers of the faith in the nineteenth century, he was unsurpassable in his ability to expound the faith in a positive way to the heart as well as to the head. The spell Newman customarily cast over those who heard or read him was, and remains, legendary.

But Newman believed above everything else that Catholic faith had to be grounded in Catholic truth. The first article of his creed came from the famous Quicumque Creed, sometimes called the "Athanasian Creed"; it specifies: "For anyone who wishes to be saved before all things it is necessary to hold the Catholic faith." To hold it as belief, as doctrine, as truth. For Newman this had to come before any kind of Christian action; authentic Christian action could only be grounded in authentic doctrine Ñ in truth.

But religious liberalism, precisely, as Newman saw, was, again, "inconsistent with any recognition of religion as true." And liberalism, already in Newman's day, but even more so in our own day, was everywhere carrying the day against the faith, against Catholic truth; liberalism was winning. Today it appears nearly everywhere to have won, at least for the moment. "There never was a device of the enemy, so cleverly framed and with such promise of success," Newman lamented in his Biglietto Speech. "Already it has answered to the expectations which have been formed of it . . . "
II.

John Henry Newman did not come by his recognition of liberalism in religion as the enemy of religious truth either accidently or casually. Speaking of his Anglican days at Oxford University in his famous spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua, he wrote that, as a general thing, "My battle was with liberalism, and by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments."5 

As a believer in revealed truth, Newman often used the word "dogma" as a synonym for "truth," in fact; and, in his Apologia, he wrote further: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being."6

When asked to explain further what he meant by all this, Newman added a Note to his Apologia which rivals or surpasses the explanation in his Biglietto Speech as a definition or description of liberalism in religion:

Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word.7

Anyone who valued the primacy of truth in Christianity as much as Newman did was bound to find in modern religious liberalism the chief enemy of religious truth. And it was something he found very early in his career. While he was still in his twenties, a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford, and vicar of St. Mary's Parish there, Newman found it necessary to resign from a local Bible Society because its members, in his words, were seeking "common ground with dissenters" (emphasis added). 
"To wish to conciliate dissenters," the young Newman thought, meant nothing less than "preparing the downfall of the Church." Even then he realized that "the tendency of the age is towards liberalism," and religion, in his view, had to be "enforced by authority of some kind"; and so it was to the Church that belonged responsibility for what Newman called "the legitimate enforcement of Christian truth. The liberals know this," he remarked, "and are in every possible manner trying to break [the Church] up."8

It is not very hard to imagine what Newman would have thought of the "Common Ground" initiative launched by some prominent Churchmen in the Catholic Church in the United States in the 1990s: he had already rendered his judgment on such a misconceived idea as far back as the year 1830. For him, "by coming on common ground with dissenters, they seem to come on middle ground . . . and to concede that they ought to concede as well as the dissenters" (Italics in the original)9 Ñ the "they" in question being representatives of the Church. If only some American bishops today were as clear-sighted about the implications of some of the things they have gotten involved in as this young Oxford tutor and Anglican parish vicar was more than 150 years ago!

It is also not hard to imagine what Newman, as the sworn enemy of liberalism, would have thought of the theological dissent that has been so common in the Catholic Church in the United States over the past thirty years. He would have seen immediately, of course, that this dissent is one of the principal fruits of liberalism and of the infidelity that liberalism inevitably fosters. He would not have been very surprised about it, though, for he had already encountered it in the Anglican Church when he was at Oxford in the 1830s and the 1840s. In those years the liberal party effectively took over Oxford (and, not incidentally, the Church of England) while John Henry Newman, appalled and dismayed, looked on. The experience of living through this twin takeover was one of the major factors that impelled him to enter the Catholic Church in 1845.

More exactly, of course, consistent with his lifelong fidelity to revealed truth, Newman entered the Catholic Church because he had reached the conviction that she was the true Church of Christ. He wrote to his sister, perplexed about his motive for converting, saying that "my motive is that I simply believe the Roman Church to be true."10 But one of the things that mightily helped him see the truth of the Catholic Church was the spectacle of professing Christians in the Church of England, not merely Oxford men but working pastors and even bishops as well, relinquishing one by one essentials of the historic Christian faith in line with the tenets of the liberal party that had gained ascendancy.

Precisely because he had taken the measure of the corrosive power of liberalism among the Anglicans, Newman would not have been in the least surprised at the spread of dissent among Catholics in our day in response to the liberal imperative. Nor, more importantly, would he have been surprised that the principal bulwark and counterweight to dissent in the Church would turn out to be the Holy See; for he had compiled abundant proofs of the providential role of the Holy See in defense of the true faith in the course of his studies of the ancient Church. He would not have been able to foresee the election of a Pope John Paul II, but he knew from studying history how God raised up leaders to guide the Church in times of special peril.

In 1877, Newman wrote to a friend of his as follows concerning the future of the Church:

As to the prospects of the Church, as to which you ask my opinion . . . my apprehensions are not new but above 50 years standing. I have all that time thought that a time of widespread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters. I speak principally of the Protestant world Ñ but great actions and successes must be achieved by the Catholic leaders, great wisdom as well as courage must be given them from on high, if Holy Church is to be kept safe from this awful calamity, and, though any trial which came upon her would but be temporary, it may be fierce in the extreme while its lasts.11

"May God keep us all from this terrible deceit of the latter days," he wrote to another correspondent in 1882. "What is coming upon us? I look with keen compassion on the next generation, and with, I may say, awe."12 Several generations later we are in a position to know whereof he spoke. In view of the way he saw things generally, it seems pretty clear that would have viewed the present era of dissent and turmoil in the Catholic Church as yet another one of the fruits of the infidelity brought about by the acceptance and application of religious liberalism.
In a sermon entitled "The Infidelity of the Future," preached in 1873, Newman remarked that:

I think that the trials which lie before us are such as would appall and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I or St. Gregory VII. And they would confess that, dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it . . . Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious. The ancient world of Greece and Rome was full of superstition but not of infidelity, for they believed in the moral governance of the world and their first principles were the same as ours . . . But we are now coming to a time when the world does not acknowledge our first principles.13

This, of course, is the world we live in today. It does not acknowledge our first principles because it has long since adopted contrary principles which necessarily entail the dissolution of ours. It had already substantially adopted these same contrary principles at the time that John Henry Newman delivered his Biglietto Speech over a century ago on the occasion of his being named a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. That is why the old cardinal was able to discern so well in outline what we have since experienced in fact. Having identified and briefly described the kind of world which liberalism was rapidly bringing into being in his Biglietto Speech, Newman concluded by affirming, as a man of faith, what we too should continue to affirm, living as we do in that same world which he so presciently foresaw:

Such is the state of things . . . and it is well that it should be realized by all of us; but it must not be supposed for a moment that I am afraid of it. I lament it deeply, because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls; but I have no fear at all that it really can do aught of serious harm to the Word of God, to Holy Church, to our Almighty King, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Faithful and True, or to his Vicar on earth. Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves His elect inheritance. Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; sometimes he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed. Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and see the salvation of God.14


Kenneth D. Whitehead, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, has been a lifelong student and disciple of Newman.