On Nov. 1, Pope Leo XIV will officially proclaim St. John Henry Newman a doctor of the church. The pope’s namesake, Leo XIII, created Newman a cardinal in 1879. In 2019 in a Mass at the Vatican, Pope Francis canonized Newman, who had been previously beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in a Mass in 2010 at Cofton Park of Rednal, England, not far from the oratory where Newman lived and where he is buried.
That Mass began with the singing of one of Newman’s great hymns, and one of my favorites, “Praise to the Holiest in the Heights,” set to the tune “Billing.” Newman was not only the greatest prose stylist of his time, and the outstanding theologian of his time, and one of the most compelling preachers of his times, he was a fine poet, and several of his verses have been set to music. Another favorite is “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom.”
Lovely hymns they are, but it is surely the case that the contribution Newman made to the Catholic faith that is most relevant to our own time was his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.” Newman’s time was not our own and his Victorian prose can be a challenge to the modern reader. He was careful and precise in his thought. The analogical imagination that is, at some level, the necessary method of doing theology, is a method that needs to be balanced by clarity and rigor.
Two of Newman’s insights — that different aspects of an idea “are capable of coalition” and that “whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy” — these could make him the patron saint of synodality.
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Michael Sean Winters, where this article originally appeared.
