Newman's Catholic Achievements

Either Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will conclude our overview of Blessed John Henry Newman's life this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show--a little after 7:45 Eastern/6:45 Central. Listen live here.  The segment will also be repeated during the EWTN hour later in the week and will be loaded to the SRMS SoundCloud!

There was a time that when I thought of Newman's life as a Catholic, I focused on his struggles and failures: the Achilli trial for libel, the Catholic University of Ireland, the Rambler incident, the Oratory conflicts, the translation of the Holy Bible, and the effort to establish an Oratory in Oxford--all great projects Newman undertook to help the Catholic laity in England (and Ireland) take their recently regained status of full citizens after Catholic Emancipation in 1829--that were stymied, thwarted, or blocked.

Now I think of all that he achieved in his day and in ours.

Blessed John Henry Newman wanted to help the laity in both practical and religious ways. And in that, he succeeded, in spite of all the obstacles, and in ways he never anticipated. Just as the two miracles that have led to his beatification and will lead to his canonization have occurred in the USA, I believe that his vision for an educated, catechized Catholic laity in the USA has been achieved. Think of all the Catholic lay apologists, writers, bloggers, speakers, etc and all the laity who have been leading the pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-family causes, not to mention Catholic education, charitable causes, etc. When the Catholic laity learn their faith and live it, we fulfill Newman's idea:

What I desiderate [desire] in Catholics is the gift of bringing out what their religion is. I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity. I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory. I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion.

Newman certainly wanted the laity to defend the faith, as I described last year in this post for the National Catholic Register blogs, but he also defended the laity's right to give our input on practical matters affecting how we prepare to defend the faith, in schools, colleges. That was why he wrote The Rambler article "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine" in first place, as this article from the EWTN library explains:

When 1859 began there was a debate in progress in England about elementary education. The government wanted to see more and more elementary schools established. It provided subsidies for their funding, and it appointed a commission whose representatives were to see that this money was well spent and that schooling was extended to all classes. The main providers of schools were the religious denominations. How were they to maintain their denominational integrity if they were to be subjected to public control?

A number of educated Catholic laity took the view that cooperation between the Catholic Church and the commission was not only possible, it was also advisable since the quality of education in Catholic elementary schools would be seen to be high, and the prejudice that Catholics make bad citizens would be put to flight. The commission's representatives would not be concerned with the content of religious education but with its method.

The Catholic bishops declined to cooperate in this way. Perhaps they would have cooperated if they had been guaranteed that the commission's representatives would have been Catholics. In fact, they probably could have secured that, but they were too slow at the time. Before the decision of the bishops became public, articles were already appearing in the Rambler advancing the contrary policy. This was not intentional contradiction of the bishops, but some embarrassment was caused by it. . . .

Newman agreed with the laity writing and published The Rambler that they had the right to be heard on such practical matters (he apologized to the bishops when he took over the publication of that periodical for some of tone of the arguments for cooperation, but he urged them to hear the laity out).

I think he would urge our bishops and the hierarchy, including the Pope and the Curia, to do the same today in the crisis over sexual abuse and cover up among our priests and bishops.