From the shadows to the truth

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) will be proclaimed Blessed next September 19, during a solemn celebration in the archdiocese of Birmingham presided over by Benedict XVI. The Apostolic Palace, in simultaneity with Buckingham Palace, the archbishop of Westminster and the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Kingdom made the official announcement on Tuesday 16. The website of the General Procura of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri (Newman founded an oratory in Birmingham in 1848) reads as follows: “Oratorian John Henry Newman, who speaks to us through his path of conversion which he followed his entire existence, and through the plentitude and richness of his written works, is accurately portrayed in the motto chosen for his personal coat of arms upon his elevation to the cardinalate, taken from Saint Francis of Sales: ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’. These words perfectly convey Newman’s spirit, for whom words are not conveyed through abstract channels but rather through concrete relations, marked by intimate kinship. Indeed, we ‘know’ not only through the mind, but through the whole body, i.e. though the affectus, after Gregorius Magnus statement ‘Amor ipse notitia’, (love is itself a source and principle of knowledge), namely, ‘to love is to know'”.Biographic notes. John Henry Newman was a theologian and a philosopher. He was the first of six siblings, son of John Newman, a banker, and Jemina Foundrinier, of a Huguenot family settled in London from France, after the Edict of Nantes. A Calvinist pastor, Walter Maser, provided his religious training. He matriculated at Oxford, where he founded the Oxford Movement with his friends John Keble, Richard H. Froude and Edward B. Pusey, representing the “critical” and reformist “conscience” of Victorian Anglicanism, which he developed as a “middle way” between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. He was ordained priest of the Anglican Church in 1825. He embraced Catholicism on October 9 1845, after a profound reflection on the nature and mission of the Christian Church, which led him to state in the Essays for Modern Times (1841): “the articles of Anglican faith are incompatible with Christian tenets”. He was received in “Christ’s only sheep-fold” – as he wrote in his Diary – by Passionist Father Domenico Barberi, proclaimed blessed in 1963. In the same year he published one of his major works: the Essay on the development of Christian doctrine, in which he states, “the Catholic Church is formally guided by reason”. In the Apologia pro vita sua he wrote, as relates to his conversion to Catholicism: “It was like entering a safe harbor after traveling through a tempest; since then, my happiness has remained unchanged”. Pondering joy. To his friend Pusey he wrote that the study of the origins of Christianity and Church Fathers – notably the “IV century friends”, Ambrose, Ahtanasius, Basilius, Chrysostome and Gregory the Nyazian – persuaded him to embrace the “true” Catholic “faith”. He was attracted by what German author Goethe described as Saint Philip Neri’s ‘pondering joy’. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII elevated him to cardinalship, in recognition of his “genius and doctrine”. He celebrated his last public Mass on Christmas 1889. Following his own will, the following phrase was engraved on his tomb: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (From shadows and images to the truth).Doctor of the Church. Newman “was born in a “tormented era”, in which “old-dated certainties were being questioned and the faithful were faced with a twofold threat: rationalism and fideism”, said John Paul II. “The passionate contemplation of the truth” induced Newman to “embrace the authority whose roots are in Christ, along with an understanding of the extramundane capable of opening human hearts and minds to a vast array of possibilities revealed in Christ”. “Newman’s genius”, as Pope Wojtyla said on various occasions upon the bi-centenary of the birth of the cardinal that he himself proclaimed Venerable Servant of God on January 22 1991 – was marked by a profound intellectual honesty, faithfulness to conscience and grace, priestly piousness and zeal, devotion to the Church of Christ and love for her doctrine, unconditional faith in the Providence and full obedience to the will of God”. For these reasons, John Henry Newman is considered a contemporary Church Doctor and one of the “absent fathers” of the Second Vatican Council.