After our Pancake and Confession interlude last Monday, the Son Rise Morning Show hosts (Matt and Anna) are ready to pick up the Newman series in preparation for his canonization sometime this year. Our topic on Monday, March 11 at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central will be Newman on Conscience and Authority.
Last month on the anniversary of the executions of the members of the White Rose (Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans), I mentioned that Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, in 1990 described how much Newman's presentation of conscience meant to him after the war. At the end of 2010, the year in which he beatified Newman during his visit to Scotland and England, Pope Benedict reflected further on Newman, conscience, and authority:
Finally I should like to recall once more the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. Why was he beatified? What does he have to say to us? Many responses could be given to these questions, which were explored in the context of the beatification. I would like to highlight just two aspects which belong together and which, in the final analysis, express the same thing. The first is that we must learn from Newman’s three conversions, because they were steps along a spiritual path that concerns us all. Here I would like to emphasize just the first conversion: to faith in the living God. Until that moment, Newman thought like the average men of his time and indeed like the average men of today, who do not simply exclude the existence of God, but consider it as something uncertain, something with no essential role to play in their lives. What appeared genuinely real to him, as to the men of his and our day, is the empirical, matter that can be grasped. This is the “reality” according to which one finds one’s bearings. The “real” is what can be grasped, it is the things that can be calculated and taken in one’s hand. In his conversion, Newman recognized that it is exactly the other way round: that God and the soul, man’s spiritual identity, constitute what is genuinely real, what counts. These are much more real than objects that can be grasped. This conversion was a Copernican revolution. What had previously seemed unreal and secondary was now revealed to be the genuinely decisive element. Where such a conversion takes place, it is not just a person’s theory that changes: the fundamental shape of life changes. We are all in constant need of such conversion: then we are on the right path.
The driving force that impelled Newman along the path of conversion was conscience. But what does this mean? In modern thinking, the word “conscience” signifies that for moral and religious questions, it is the subjective dimension, the individual, that constitutes the final authority for decision. The world is divided into the realms of the objective and the subjective. To the objective realm belong things that can be calculated and verified by experiment. Religion and morals fall outside the scope of these methods and are therefore considered to lie within the subjective realm. Here, it is said, there are in the final analysis no objective criteria. The ultimate instance that can decide here is therefore the subject alone, and precisely this is what the word “conscience” expresses: in this realm only the individual, with his intuitions and experiences, can decide. Newman’s understanding of conscience is diametrically opposed to this. For him, “conscience” means man’s capacity for truth: the capacity to recognize precisely in the decision-making areas of his life – religion and morals – a truth, the truth. At the same time, conscience – man’s capacity to recognize truth – thereby imposes on him the obligation to set out along the path towards truth, to seek it and to submit to it wherever he finds it. Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart. The path of Newman’s conversions is a path of conscience – not a path of self-asserting subjectivity but, on the contrary, a path of obedience to the truth that was gradually opening up to him. His third conversion, to Catholicism, required him to give up almost everything that was dear and precious to him: possessions, profession, academic rank, family ties and many friends. The sacrifice demanded of him by obedience to the truth, by his conscience, went further still. Newman had always been aware of having a mission for England. But in the Catholic theology of his time, his voice could hardly make itself heard. It was too foreign in the context of the prevailing form of theological thought and devotion. In January 1863 he wrote in his diary these distressing words: “As a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life – but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion”. He had not yet arrived at the hour when he would be an influential figure. In the humility and darkness of obedience, he had to wait until his message was taken up and understood. In support of the claim that Newman’s concept of conscience matched the modern subjective understanding, people often quote a letter in which he said – should he have to propose a toast – that he would drink first to conscience and then to the Pope. But in this statement, “conscience” does not signify the ultimately binding quality of subjective intuition. It is an expression of the accessibility and the binding force of truth: on this its primacy is based. The second toast can be dedicated to the Pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth.
Pope Benedict packs a great deal of understanding of Newman and his times in those paragraphs:
--"The path of Newman’s conversions is a path of conscience – not a path of self-asserting subjectivity but, on the contrary, a path of obedience to the truth that was gradually opening up to him. "
As Blessed John Henry progressed from belief in Jesus Christ and an invisible church of believers, to belief in Jesus Christ and loyalty to the Church Jesus founded, located in the via media of the Church of England, to belief in Jesus Christ and the one, true, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, he was always focused on the Divine Person of Jesus and His truth, way, and life. Newman was always devoted to Jesus and to the truths He revealed. The Pope's words about the 'truth that was gradually opening up to him' contain an indirect reference to Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine!
Newman knew that conscience did not reflect his own decisions about what was right and what was wrong. It had to be formed to reflect on what God said was right and wrong. It was the voice of God, not his own voice, helping him decide whether or not to do something (or not do something). Too many people in his own day, and perhaps even more in ours, think that conscience is what keeps us consistent with our own standards--not keeping us consistent with God's standards.
--For him, “conscience” means man’s capacity for truth: the capacity to recognize precisely in the decision-making areas of his life – religion and morals – a truth, the truth. At the same time, conscience – man’s capacity to recognize truth – thereby imposes on him the obligation to set out along the path towards truth, to seek it and to submit to it wherever he finds it. Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart.
That's why Newman accepted authority: the search for the truth. Objective truth exists and it has been revealed by God. Jesus came to give us the fullness of that truth and He established His Church, including the Pope and the Magisterium, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to safeguard that truth.
Lest we think that we understand Newman and appreciate him so more than his contemporaries did, the Pope reminds us that Newman's toast comment is often misinterpreted and used to support dissent:
--"In support of the claim that Newman’s concept of conscience matched the modern subjective understanding, people often quote a letter in which he said – should he have to propose a toast – that he would drink first to conscience and then to the Pope. But in this statement, “conscience” does not signify the ultimately binding quality of subjective intuition. It is an expression of the accessibility and the binding force of truth: on this its primacy is based. The second toast can be dedicated to the Pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth."
Thus Pope Benedict reminded the Curia that Newman, believing that the Papacy and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church taught the truth as revealed by God, saw no contradiction between someone toasting or celebrating his conscience and then celebrating the Pope in his role of infallibility in matters of faith and morals.
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