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With unsettling frequency, when Newman
bowed to the bishops
he bumped his head against them.
Newman and the bishops
By George William Rutler
n John Henry Newman was in Rome in 1846 preparing for ordination as a Catholic priest.
On Sunday, November 22, he and his friend Ambrose St. John were notified by their rector
that a half hour later they were to present themselves for an audience of the
recently-elected Pope Pius IX. The Pope was lively and chatty. As Newman knelt and
attempted to kiss the Pope’s slipper according to custom, his head hit the pontifical
knee. There is a sermon in that, and one I would pursue, for it symbolizes the lifelong
story of Newman’s relations with many bishops. His instincts animated a profound
reverence for the apostolic office, and he became a Catholic by his conviction of an
inseparable association between the faith of the apostles and faithfulness to the Bishop
of Rome. But with unsettling frequency, when he bowed to the bishops he bumped his head
against them.
Newman had converted from the old-school High Church Anglicanism which
had ecclesiological roots in the seventeenth century divines Laud and Hooker, and which
maintained a principle, though not the only one, for which King Charles I died: “No
bishop, no church.” His earlier Evangelicalism had been subjective and emotive in its
appropriation of doctrine and rather nonchalant about bishops. Under the influence of such
as Hawkins, James, Froude, Pusey and Keble, he recognized the hierarchical charism of the
Church, persuaded that the Church of England was apostolic and was, indeed, the authentic
perpetuation of Catholic Christianity in the land. He strenuously opposed Robert
Peel’s bill for Roman Catholic emancipation in 1829, for he believed Romanism to be a
usurpation of the Church planted in the realm.
Newman could not credit the system known as Erastianism: the social
philosophy that makes the Church a bureau of the state, stripped of its supernatural
credentials and entrusted with tempering moral extravagance. He was familiar with St.
Augustine’s question: “When did a judgement of the Church receive its validity
from the Emperor?” Sentimentalists wanted religion to be an emotional experience
intended to make its clients feel good about themselves, while denying to the Church any
office of contradicting the laws of the state when they are contrary to the Gospel.
Doctrines could have no supernatural content for they were anthropological symbols
commonly arrived at, and unity of faith consisted in nothing more than comfortable
assumptions popularly invented: the commanding hill of Calvary was eroded down to a common
ground, a level playing field from which few were excluded for no one had to do much to be
included. Such a system could dilute a priest into a “presider” while contending
that the right to be ordained is like a civil right. Newman was unfamiliar with the term
“Baby Boomer” but in the Erastians he had met similar creatures and spent his
years mentally dissecting them.
The Notes of the Church are One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. It was
repugnant to Newman that some should talk of a Church of England and not the Church
Catholic, quite as some later would propose an “American Catholic Church.” The
validity of the Church is in her apostolicity, not in her credentials by law established,
for sometimes they are disestablished. He regrets in Essays Critical and Historical how
the Church’s children have replaced the Notes of the Church with “philosophical
and civil watchwords.” While still an Anglican he had preached on “The Church as
an Imperial Power,” charging: “If we will form to ourselves a ministry and a
Church bereft of the august power which I have mentioned, it will be of our own
devising.”
In Newman’s Anglical years, a sympathetic young clergyman
complained: “Nine-tenths of our bishops and priests neither know nor care more for a
bishop’s wig than for a broccoli head.” The author of that obscure reference,
referring to the traditional clergyman’s wig which indeed resembled a head of
broccoli, was Henry Edward Manning. Guided as a young scholar by Newman and others into
High Church ways, eventually he would become the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster,
unsure that Newman had been Catholic enough.
On July 14, 1833 John Keble preached against a decision of the Erastian
parliament to close down ten redundant Anglican bishoprics in Ireland to save money.
Newman revered Keble and later compared him kindly to St. Philip Neri. The government was
sensible of waste and logical inasmuch as most of Ireland was not Anglican anyway. But
Keble thought of himself as defending the apostolic principle against worldly
degradations. Bishops are not to be removed like inefficient postmasters. Newman marked
that sermon as the start of the Oxford Movement. In the first Tract launching that High
Church revival he urged: “Exalt our Holy Fathers the Bishops as representatives of
the Apostles.” This was awkward to those bishops who were content to think of
themselves as amiable functionaries. For Newman, “. . . if we trace back the power of
ordination from hand to hand, of course we shall come to the Apostles at last.”
Language like this grated on those many bishops who were quite contented to think of
themselves as cautious bureaucrats with some social clout. Mediocrity was their qualifying
charism. It was humbug to have to start acting like St. Paul, let alone St. Athanasius.
And the bishops’ wives were even less enamored of any such alteration to their
domestic lives.
Newman’s own bishop, Bagot, asked Newman to tone the Tracts down.
Newman’s logic plotted that if bishops are apostles, they are to be obeyed as
apostles. “He who hears you hears me.” He immediately offered to stop the Tracts
altogether. Bagot, a pious and temperate man, dropped the subject. But the subject would
not go away.
Newman learned about bishops more through history than through
theology, though in the Christian construct there is little difference between the two. In
the first tract he said that he knew the apostolic succession “as a plain historical
fact.” Theology interprets what God has done in history, not what he should do in
theory. Christ is not an idea. He is not an hypothesis. Christ is not a mood or the sum of
opinions added up. Christ is a fact of history and the Lord of history. Between 1833 and
1836 Newman wrote historical sketches in which he learned and taught how holy bishops like
Ambrose and Augustine kept the Faith. The crucial turning point for him would be his study
of the Arians of the Fourth Century. It came clear that the Church of England was like
those sectarians who defied St. Athanasius and denied the truth about Christ.
The waters of controversy came to a boil early in the 1840s. The Church
of England and the Lutheran Church of Prussia embarked on a watered-down kind of
ecumenicism which is the toy of those for whom unity is a political condition
bureaucratically arrived at. They decided on a joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric in
Jerusalem. This defied all that the Oxford Movement had tried to maintain about the
Catholic credentials of the Church of England, much the way the campaign for ordaining
women has done more recently. All the way, Newman acted according to conscience. His
humble reading of historical evidences showed him where he had been right and where he had
been wrong. Until his conversion, he had virtually no contact with Catholics. With perfect
cogency he said that Rome had not made him Catholic, Oxford had. Pope John Paul II
approves such reasonable faith in the encyclical Fides et Ratio, citing Newman by name
just as the new Catechism does. Reason and our faith are companions in the formation of
conscience and allies in the journey “ex umbris et imaginibus in
veritatem”—out of shadows and imaginings into the truth. Here were the bones and
soul of his philosophical being, and he made it his epitaph, his password for heaven.
Newman’s dynamic confidence in conscience rightly formed was what
St. Thomas Aquinas stood for. But bishops who understood Aquinas poorly, and themselves
even less, would not stand for it. Newman said a very Catholic thing when he said he would
gladly propose a toast to the Pope if urged to do so, but not until he had toasted
conscience. Catholic bishops who had grown nervous by the growing infidelity of the day
did not parse that expression well. The more courageously some of them sought to defend
the Faith, the more they tended to become neurasthenically defensive. Truth for
truth’s sake is noble; defensiveness for defense’s sake is not.
Monsignor George Talbot, an Anglo-Irish curial official, was liaison
between the English and Irish bishops and the Pope. An unfortunately driven man, his
defensiveness was extreme, his impatience with Newman’s subtlety was blatant, and his
besmirching of Newman’s reputation in Rome was almost complete. In all this, Newman
remained courteous, sometimes icily so, and Talbot ended up in a mental asylum. There was
a mutual manipulation between Talbot and the bishops with whom he corresponded, and the
total effect on the Pope was not helpful to Newman. Pius IX was infallible in matters of
faith and morals, as he would define with famous formality, but he was not an infallible
judge of character, and his reliance on Talbot like his reliance on Cardinal Antonelli as
Secretary of State was not among those attributes that have made that amiable Pontiff
officially venerable to us.
Newman listed four chief failures as a Catholic. All involved the
unhelpful agency of bishops. Not all bishops certainly, but many bishops undeniably. In
1852 he began a Catholic university in Ireland. The Irish bishops, in camps centered
around Cullen and McHale, did not make things easy for Newman. Cullen was responsible for
getting him to Ireland in the first place, but for mixed motives he turned boorish, and
those motives may have included insecurity, narrowmindedness and envy. Cullen prevented
Newman from becoming a bishop and when a guileless English visitor asked Pius IX why
Newman was not yet consecrated, the normally resourceful Pope became agitated, took a
pinch of snuff and changed the subject. Taking snuff, by the way, was not considered
vicious by the Pope: he once remarked that if it were a vice, Antonelli would certainly be
taking it. There were bishops, then, who blocked one of Christianity’s greatest
intellects from building what could have become one of the world’s greatest
universities right in Dublin.
Newman’s second failure was the translation of the Bible. Cardinal
Wiseman was one of the Church’s finest orientalists, which Newman was not. But Newman
had his Latin and Greek and he had his English more wonderfully than almost any Englishman
who ever lived. Wiseman and other bishops of England stopped the project when American
bishops launched a similar project, and when publishers resented loss of their market in
the Douai version. There were bishops, then, who denied to the world of literature what
might have been one of its greatest texts.
Newman’s third failure was his dream of starting a Catholic
revival of learning at Oxford under the aegis of the Oratory. His former disciple in that
university, but never in mind or heart his acolyte, blocked Newman’s plan for what he
genuinely believed were sound reasons. Manning was not innocent of unreflective
prejudices. If Oxford had been the last breath of the Middle Ages, Newman had the moral
enchantments to revive that breath so that scholar saints might rise up for a looming
twentieth century as they had risen for the twelfth. But it was delayed for a long time by
a bishop who had been shown by Newman and his friends what a bishop is.
Newman’s fourth failure was in his effort to provide the Church
with a journal, the Rambler which would explain the splendor of the Faith confidently, in
a way more sophisticated than the arguments pseudo-sophisticates used to chip away at it.
Within two months of assuming editorship, some bishops were persuaded that Newman was
“the most dangerous man in England.” So the Church was deprived of a model for
Catholic journalism, and one which we are still struggling to define today.
Newman’s chief obstacles in these enterprises were bishops whom he
revered as “Angels of the Churches.” What he called his failures were the
bishops’ failures more than his. When any man fails in an enterprise he fails
himself, but when a bishop fails he fails the Church entire.
Cardinal Wiseman became tentative in his alliances with Newman,
beginning with a squabble over the dedication of a book. This was particularly annoying
since Wiseman had asked Newman to pursue a libel action against a criminous and apostate
priest and then mislaid the supporting documents, as a result of which Newman endured a
humiliating trial and almost went to prison. One reliable ally was Bishop Ullathorne of
Birmingham, whose lack of scholarly credentials and social pretense may have helped his
large spirit to measure what was in Newman without withdrawing into envy. He went full
steam ahead for his friend when Manning tried to confuse Pope Leo XIII’s decision to
make Newman a cardinal. The Pope later would tell Lord Selborne’s daughter: “Il
mio cardinale. My cardinal. It was not easy. It was not easy.” The magazine Punch
printed a jingle with an ungainly pun on NEWman and OLD MANning. Both Newman who blushed
easily and Manning who frowned just as easily must have thought that vulgar. But Newman
had a sustaining, if preternaturally subtle, sense of humor and it is nice to think that
he might have indulged it on this occasion. He made no comment when the artist Millais,
doing his portrait, whimsically offered to include Manning’s head at no extra cost.
Only in private exchanges did Newman vent himself on these matters. He
writes to Ambrose St. John in 1856 during the Irish university business: “I go to
Rome to be snubbed. I come to Dublin to be repelled by Dr. McHale and worn away by Dr.
Cullen. The Cardinal taunts me. . . .” During the Rambler controversy in 1858 Lord
Acton met with him for three hours: “[Newman] came out at last with his real
sentiments to an extent which startled me, with respect both to things and persons, as
[His Eminence] etc. etc.;—natural inclination of men in power to tyrannise, ignorance
and presumption of our would-be theologians, in short what you and I would comfortably say
over a glass of whiskey.” Two years later Newman writes: “. . . in the Blessed
Sacrament is my great consolation . . . while I have Him who lives in the Church the
separate members of the Church, my Superiors, though they may claim my obedience, have no
claim on my admiration, and offer nothing for my inward trust.”
Although Newman was lied to many times, he was not scandalized by
clerics who thought deceit a virtue when in an ecclesiastical cause. His Apologia was born
of indignation when Charles Kingsley said “Truth for its own sake had never been a
virtue with the Roman clergy.” Whatever some of the clergy might do to the truth,
truth is still truth. Newman’s refrain was, “I have not sinned against the
Light” and it is the Church’s anthem in our age of decayed reasoning. Long
before Newman, enemies of the Church had mocked unfortunate abuses of casuistry in the
life of the Church and turned “jesuitical” into a synonym for deviousness. It is
tempting to fall into that cynicism today when it is possible for men in high public
office to be educated even by Jesuits and end up careless about truth. But that does not
invalidate St. Ignatius Loyola or his good sons. Nor does corruption of the annulment
process invalidate the Church’s power to bind and loose. And a timorous bishop cannot
cancel the apostolic tradition. In the apostolic succession a bishop may be an
unsuccessful apostle but he is a successor nonetheless.
Newman’s prophetic voice eloquently condemned Garibaldi’s
usurpations, but it just as finely preached that property is not needed for prophecy, and
the Pope’s temporal power was not necessary for his spiritual power. Today we may
give thanks that the Holy Father does not have to govern large parts of Italy. When Newman
said it, he ruffled some bishops who did not see his position based on a higher, not a
lower, historical intelligence of the See of Peter. A similar appreciation of the dynamic
of history made him wince at the stubbornly untutored attacks that the Anglican bishop
Samuel Wilberforce made on Darwinism in 1860.
Jean Honoré, Archbishop of Tours, has written with elegant poignancy
in The Spiritual Journey of Newman:
Newman had all the necessary gifts to initiate and conduct with success the affairs of
men. The great disappointment in his Catholic life was to look like an underemployed, even
a useless tool in a Church which never knew how to use him according to his talents. It is
not that he was lacking in courage and good will; he answered all requests from
ecclesiastical authorities and accepted and assumed all roles proposed to him with the
same loyal and generous heart with which he pursued his own personal projects.
Nevertheless, one remains under the irresistible feeling that by giving him these various
tasks, the Catholic hierarchy was seeking more to keep him busy than to truly entrust him
with their confidence. The history of a man who seems always to be running after his
destiny, without ever attaining it, is always worthy of pity. But what can we say when
such a man is Newman! It is hard to prevent a feeling of irritation and regret at the
spectacle of all those occasions lost for the Catholic Church in England and for the whole
of the Catholic Church during the second half of the nineteenth century.
In August of 1887, Bishop Ullathorne, about to retire as a titular
archbishop, paid a visit on the eighty-six-year-old Newman at the Birmingham Oratory.
Newman was now a Prince of the Church but not a bishop, and he knelt for the bishop’s
blessing. Ullathorne wrote: “I felt annihilated in his presence, there is a saint in
that man.” Manning would preach a generous panegyric when Newman died, but what
Newman wrote about St. Cyril’s behavior toward St. John Chrysostom may apply to
Manning’s earlier years: “Cyril, I know is a Saint, but it does not follow that
he was a Saint in the year 412.”
Had Newman been sentimental about bishops some of them would have
broken his heart, but he was Catholic about bishops, and so their supernatural authority
inspired his prophecy and their natural abuses refined his virtue. When the Church comes
to her Second Spring for which the patient still wait, she will be led by bishops and some
of them will have great crowds of people poking them on. There are those who will need no
poking, and for Newman these would be new men like Augustine and Cuthbert and Chad and
Dunstan. In his sermon Christ Upon the Waters he sees the great scene: “A brotherhood
of holy pastors, with mitre and crosier and uplifted hand, walked forth and blessed and
ruled a joyful people . . . till he who recollected the old time, would think it all
unreal that he beheld and heard, and would conclude he did but see a vision, so
triumphantly were chased away the fiends of darkness to their prison below.”
Reverend George William Rutler is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and national Chaplain of Legatus. In addition to his regular television broadcasts on EWTN he has preached and lectured around the world. Fr. Rutler is the author of The Seven Wonders of the World (Ignatius). His last article in HPR appeared in May 1994.
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