Newman the Doctor
By Christopher Blum
When Benedict XVI presided over the beatification of John Henry Newman—fifteen years ago next month—his reflections touched upon the three offices of Christ. The Holy Father ended his homily at the Mass of Beatification by evoking Newman’s “profoundly human vision of priestly ministry.”1 His presentation of the saint as educator touched upon aspects of his life that may be called kingly. And Benedict underscored the significance of the date he chose for Newman’s liturgical memorial—October 9, the day he was received into the Catholic Church in 1845—by acknowledging his likeness to the prophets: “Newman’s life also teaches us that passion for the truth, intellectual honesty and genuine conversion are costly.”2 As the English-speaking Catholic world rejoices that Newman is soon to be declared a Doctor of the Church, it is well to think of him as a person who was deeply conformed to Jesus Christ.
There is some risk that we might not pause to do so. Benedict XVI himself allowed that it is Newman’s “intellectual legacy that has understandably received most attention.”3 It is only fitting that his writings should continue to attract so much admiration, both for their extraordinary range and for their many brilliant insights. In the period after the French Revolution, the Church has seen many bright lights cross its horizon: storytellers like Georges Bernanos and Sigrid Undset, philosophers like Edith Stein and Alasdair MacIntyre, theologians like Joseph Ratzinger and Charles Journet, and so many others. Few if any ecclesiastical writers, however, have gained such a loyal following as Newman. On the subject of his extraordinary literary gifts, we can let G. K. Chesterton speak for us all: “A magic that is like a sort of musical accompaniment changes and heightens the most prosaic fragments of personal biography or scholastic explanation.”4
Many of the great Catholic writers of the past two centuries have been men or women of one book, or at most two. Not so, Newman. For sheer fruitfulness of invention, he has no peer in recent centuries. The Idea of a University is, for many, the first and the last word on Catholic liberal education. His Grammar of Assent and his Oxford University Sermons together constitute an incisive response to the empiricism and skepticism of Locke and Hume. The Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine is held to be both a classic of ecclesiology and patristics. The incomparable Apologia Pro Vita Sua is at once a compelling autobiography and a narrative of the most successful movement of ecclesial renewal in the modern period. And just how is one to describe Newman’s achievement as a homilist, especially in his Parochial and Plain Sermons? To say that his preaching can be spoken of in the same sentence as that of Sts. John Chrysostom, Leo, and Augustine should suffice.
It is in his sermons that we can best hear Newman’s voice and appreciate the high seriousness and calm determination that were the characteristic marks of his fortitude. One of Newman’s best-loved sermons—indeed, a favorite of the late Dr. Don Briel, one of the foremost interpreters of Newman in our time—was The Ventures of Faith. Newman preached it on his own birthday, February 21, 1836, and his chosen theme of making a venture of one’s life—literally, to stake one’s whole life on faith in Christ—was a stirring call to his audience and the result of his own introspection and prayer. The month of February 1836 had seen the first crisis of the Oxford Movement, with the appointment of one of the leaders of the anti-dogmatic or liberal wing of the Church of England as Regius Professor of Divinity and with the impending death from tuberculosis of one of the most dynamic young leaders of the orthodox or Tractarian party, Hurrell Froude. It was on Saturday, February 20, that Newman received a letter from Froude’s father informing him that his friend and colleague was on his death-bed. The next morning, Newman wrote a letter to his sister Jemima that gives us a privileged look into his own deepest thoughts and concerns:
Thank also my Mother and Harriett for their congratulations upon this day. They will be deserved if God gives me grace to fulfil the purposes for which He has led me on hitherto in a wonderful way. I think I am conscious to myself that, whatever are my faults, I wish to live and die to His glory – to surrender wholly to Him as His instrument, to whatever work and at whatever personal sacrifice, though I cannot duly realize my own words when I say so. He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude – which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have.5
The phrase, “though I cannot duly realize my own words when I say so,” takes us to the heart of the sermon he preached just a few hours later.
In “The Ventures of Faith,” Newman took as his text the declaration of James and John that they were “able” to drink the same cup that Christ would drink (see Mark 10:39). The Lord’s response—“The cup that I drink you will drink”—was something they could not then understand. And so their willingness to continue following him showed them to be men of great faith. Newman’s reflection upon their faith was a pledge of his own:
In various ways, the circumstances of the times cause men at certain seasons to take this path or that, for religion’s sake. They know not whither they are being carried; they see not the end of their course; they know no more than this, that it is right to do what they are now doing; and they hear a whisper within them, which assures them, as it did the two holy brothers, that whatever their present conduct involves in time to come, they shall, through God’s grace, be equal to it.6
For Newman, what was soon to come was the crushing loss of his confidence in the Church of England, and then, some years later, the great venture of faith of making himself a stranger to his friends and family by joining the Church of Rome.
With Holy Mother Church now inviting us to reconsider Newman’s writings, we should read them as so many testimonies to his faith. Newman is first and foremost a witness to the reality of the unseen world of the spirit. Let us recall the oft-quoted line from the Apologia in which he described the effect of his first conversion, at the age of fifteen: “I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured,” which, he explained, had the effect of, “isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”7 This illumination of faith remained the core of his identity. In one of his last published sermons, Newman exhorted an audience of seminarians to maintain “a spirit of seriousness and recollection,” saying: “We must gain the habit of feeling that we are in God’s presence, that He sees what we are doing; and a liking that He does so, a love of knowing it, a delight in the reflection, ‘Thou, God, seest me.’”8
It is Newman the master of the interior life that our age so badly needs, for Christian life generally but also for the renewal of the holy priesthood. In this connection, his two-part spiritual conference on “The Mission of St. Philip Neri” is especially valuable. Newman delivered it in January 1850, to observe the completion of one year of the Oratory’s new life in Birmingham. Fresh in his mind was the year he had spent in Rome, working out his sense of vocation as a Catholic priest, the result of which was the commission from Pope Pius IX to found an Oratory in England. The address on Neri, the great founder of the Oratory in Rome, began with the story of Savonarola, who was Neri’s compatriot as a Florentine and precursor as a reformer of the Church, but his opposite in so many other ways. St. Philip Neri, he explained,
was to pursue Savonarola’s purposes, but not in Savonarola’s way; rather, in the spirit and after the fashion of those early Religious [who] . . . had little or nothing to do with ecclesiastical matters or secular politics; they had no large plan of action for religious ends; they let each day do its work as it came; they lived in obscurity, and laid a special stress on prayer and meditation; they were simple in their forms of worship, and they freely admitted laymen into their fellowship.9
Newman here alluded to the Benedictine influence on Neri, and then noted his debts to St. Ignatius Loyola. Like the founder of the Jesuits, Neri shared a concern for “interior religion” and insisted upon “obedience rather than sacrifice, on mental discipline rather than fasting or hair-shirt, [and] a mortification of the reason.”10 These are the qualities, or better, virtues, of the mature Christian. They are at once the marks of sincere conversion and the promise of apostolic effectiveness.
The task of the Oratorian, as with any priest or indeed any Christian, is to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, with the healing of its grace and the illumination of its truth. This work is of necessity a personal one. Cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart.
Newman brought his spiritual conference on St. Philip Neri to a close with a wish and prayer for his brother Oratorians. He did not mention the parable of the leaven from Matthew 13, but it could hardly have been far from his mind. What we need now is to fittingly honor him as the newest Doctor of the Church by remembering his own deeply-held convictions:
. . . and were I able, to gain some boon for you from St. Philip . . . I would beg for you this privilege, that the public world might never know you for praise or for blame, that you should do a good deal of hard work in your generation, and prosecute many useful labours, and effect a number of religious purposes, and send many souls to heaven, and take men by surprise, how much you were really doing, when they happened to come near enough to see it; but that by the world you should be overlooked, that you should not be known out of your place, that you should work for God alone with a pure heart and single eye, without the distractions of human applause.11
Christopher Blum is Professor of Philosophy at the Augustine Institute. He has edited two volumes of meditations drawn from Newman’s sermons, Waiting for Christ and The Tears of Christ, both published by the Augustine Institute. He will be teaching a course on Newman in the Augustine Institute’s Verbum Domini Seminars for the continuing education of priests in Summer 2026.
Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, Mass with the Beatification of Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman, September 19, 2010.
Pope Benedict XVI, Address, Prayer Vigil on the Eve of the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, September 18, 2010.
G.K. Chesterton, “The Style of Newman” in The Speaker, 1904.
St. John Henry Newman, Letter to His Sister Jemima, February 21, 1836, Letters and Diaries, Volume V: January 1835-December 1836,
St. John Henry Newman, “Sermon 20: The Ventures of Faith” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 4.
St. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, Chapter 1: History of my Religious Opinions up to 1833.
St. John Henry Newman, “The Infidelity of the Future,” October 2, 1873 in Faith and Prejudice and Other Sermons.
St. John Henry Newman, “Sermon 12. The Mission of St. Philip—Part 2,” January 18, 1850 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.
Ibid.
Ibid.