From the bulletin of July 12, 2020
Our next stop in the tour of the Church’s tradition is the life of John Henry Newman, an English convert to Catholicism, a Cardinal, and a saint. Born in 1801, John Henry Newman became an Anglican priest and taught at Oxford. While there, he led the Oxford Movement, which led many in the Church of England to emphasize the more traditional beliefs and practices of Christianity. It eventually led him and several followers to convert to Catholicism in 1845 because they recognized it as the Church with the most legitimate claim to being founded by Christ himself. This is because the Catholic Church had and still has an unbroken chain of Popes and Bishops leading back to Jesus Christ and the Apostles. As John Henry Newman once put it, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a protestant.”
Having become a Catholic, Newman left Oxford and began to teach at St. Mary’s College. He then was ordained a Catholic Priest and joined the Oratorians, an order that was founded by St. Philip Neri in 1575 in Rome. He continued to teach and write about the faith throughout his life, focusing especially on the relationship between protestant and Catholic Christianity as well as the idea of the development of doctrine within the Catholic Church. Eventually, in 1879, John Henry Newman was named a Cardinal, but not made a bishop. His famed motto was “Cor ad cor loquitur”, which means “heart speaks to heart” – a great summary of how he viewed the best way to communicate the faith. He died in 1890, was beatified in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI and canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.
As a theologian, Newman wrote many important works and contributed to many important debates going on at the time. This includes some letters between himself and a few bishops and theologians who played a role in the First Vatican Council. He even republished his own previous anti-Catholic arguments but included how he overcame those objections in order to become Catholic. Often considered his masterpiece, the Grammar of Assent is a work that focused on what it means to believe and put forward a variety of new arguments in favor of Catholicism. He also participating
Of all his contributions to the Church’s tradition, it is his understanding of the Development of Doctrine that I want to focus on. Throughout this series, I’ve emphasized that the Church’s teaching does not change because the Truth does not change. Yet, it is not always a simple thing. As Newman himself put it, the Church is a living thing and “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Just as a person is the same person despite their many changes or an acorn that becomes an oak tree is the same organism, so the Church and her teaching remain the same despite many apparent changes and developments. The core of the Truth given us by Christ does not change. What does change, however, is our understanding of this truth and our ability to express it fully. When we improve in our ability to understand and express the Truth, we call it development of doctrine. At the same time, there are always forces at work which do try to change the Church’s teaching, which is called heresy. The question is, then, how do we know the difference between development and heresy? Well, St. John Henry Newman gave seven criteria. I’ll give a summary here, but it is a complex topic so you can read his work yourself it would like, though it can be a tough read since it’s in an older style of English. It is called “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.”
The seven “notes” of development that he gives in the essay are: Unity of Type, Continuity of Principles, Power of Assimilation, Logical Sequence, Anticipation of Its Future, Conservative Action, and Chronic Vigor. We will take a look at these in more detail next week, with some examples to help make sense of them.
In Christ,
-Fr. Albert