Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint Read Free

his adopted Church. None then could have imagined his profound contribution to the renewal of the Catholic Church into the twenty-first century.
His influence begins with his manner of writing. His theological style, as we have seen, was literary, with a preference for the essay form, reacting to the promptings of occasions and circumstances, rather than an attempt at a systematic opus. His beautifully crafted sermons, replete with fresh theological insights, followed the Church’s year and its cycle of scriptural readings. He liked to describe himself as a ‘controversialist’ rather than a theologian. His literary imagination was alive with creative connections, his prose ever musical and elegant. His mode of writing was concrete, dialectical, interrogative: treading carefully, tentatively, towards a conclusion. By comparison, the Catholic theological treatises of his time, many of them surviving down the generations into the twentieth century, were unrelievedly deductive, dogmatic, abstract, ahis-torical. He brought freshness, readability, clear thinking, accessibility, to the discipline of theology.
The sources of his theology, a legacy from Anglicanism, were in Holy Scripture; but then he became a master of the writings of the Early Fathers and the history
of the early Church; he believed that tradition and Scripture were inseparable. He encouraged a historical approach to theology; he thought in terms of processes, development, as opposed to the timeless abstractions of neo-scholas- ticism. He employed the principle of development to rebut charges that Roman Catholicism had nurtured corruptions; the same notion would be invoked by future Catholic theologians to defend doctrines such as religious freedom. One can see the continuation of his influence in the works of the great French theologians of the mid-twentieth century – Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, M. D. Chenu – who turned to the early Fathers and to history, exerting a powerful influence on the renewals and resourcement of the Second Vatican Council.
Newman’s regard for the Virgin Mary was sober and constrained. Following the teaching of Ephesus, he accepted that Mary was the Mother of God, ‘The Second Eve’. He enthusiastically accepted Mary’s birth without original sin (the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in 1854). When Pius XII was preparing to define the dogma of the Assumption, supporting commentaries, citing Newman, were written by the theologian Dr Henry Francis Davis of Oscott College who was the first promoter of Newman’s cause for canonization. Newman, however, could not accept that Mary was the Mediatrix of All Graces, or a Co-Redemptrix, or that she was corporeally present in the Blessed Sacrament.
As we have seen, Newman insisted, often vehemently, that the role of the laity should be recognized, honoured, celebrated; that the laity was an indispensible part of the Church’s ‘faithful’ (‘the Church would look foolish without them’); the faithful gave back that crucial echo of authentic doctrine: the consensus. In his famous essay On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine , he accused the bishops of the fourth century of having failed in their duty to defend the Church’s orthodoxy: it was the faithful, embracing the laity, that saved the Church from error.
Newman criticized excessive clericalism, Roman centralization (ultramontanism), creeping infallibility, and the denial of the laity’s right to make a contribution to the intellectual life of the Church. While defending the Church’s teaching, and the necessity of nurturing an informed conscience, he nevertheless spoke boldly of the primacy of conscience over papal authority (‘I shall drink to the Pope if you please – still, to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards …’). He saw the Church as a communion, and he urged that Catholics, and all Christians, should work for unity.
All these features – historicity, patristics,