Preview: John Keble's "The Christian Year" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show suggested we start a series on a work by a man who influenced Saint John Henry Newman in his "religious opinions" (as he called them in his Apologia) before he became a Catholic: John Keble, Anglican minister, holder of the Poetry Professorship at Oxford from 1831 to 1841, and preacher of the "National Apostasy" sermon that launched the Oxford Movement in 1833. 

So we'll start on Monday, June 1 to explore the text of The Christian Year, Keble's book of verse reflecting on the liturgical year of the Church of England.

The Book of Common Prayer, in its various iterations from the time Thomas Cranmer first composed and arranged it, maintained a liturgical calendar of seasons (Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, etc.) based on Catholic tradition. Our current "Ordinary Time" is called "Trinity" with numbered Sundays until Advent. Certain feast days, like St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents after Christmas were maintained; commemorations like the Gunpowder Treason, King Charles the Martyr, Restoration of the Royal Family, were added. There are also poems about Anglican sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, etc), reflecting the High Church aspects of the Oxford Movement as its leaders understood them.

We'll start with his Dedication:

When in my silent solitary walk,
   I sought a strain not all unworthy Thee,
My heart, still ringing with wild worldly talk,
   Gave forth no note of holier minstrelsy.

Prayer is the secret, to myself I said,
   Strong supplication must call down the charm,
And thus with untuned heart I feebly prayed,
   Knocking at Heaven’s gate with earth-palsied arm.

Fountain of Harmony!  Thou Spirit blest,
   By whom the troubled waves of earthly sound
Are gathered into order, such as best
   Some high-souled bard in his enchanted round

May compass, Power divine!  Oh, spread Thy wing,
   Thy dovelike wing that makes confusion fly,
Over my dark, void spirit, summoning
   New worlds of music, strains that may not die.

Oh, happiest who before thine altar wait,
   With pure hands ever holding up on high
The guiding Star of all who seek Thy gate,
   The undying lamp of heavenly Poesy.

Too weak, too wavering, for such holy task
   Is my frail arm, O Lord; but I would fain
Track to its source the brightness, I would bask
   In the clear ray that makes Thy pathway plain.

I dare not hope with David’s harp to chase
   The evil spirit from the troubled breast;
Enough for me if I can find such grace
   To listen to the strain, and be at rest.

I think that we can see what Saint John Henry Newman appreciated in Professor John Keble's person and character--not just that he inspired that work in England that Newman believed he was saved for when he was so ill in Sicily--but that:

Keble was young in years, when he became a University celebrity, and younger in mind. He had the purity and simplicity of a child. He had few sympathies with the intellectual party, who sincerely welcomed him as a brilliant {290} specimen of young Oxford. He instinctively shut up before literary display, and pomp and donnishness of manner, faults which always will beset academical notabilities. He did not respond to their advances. . . . He went into the country, but his instance serves to prove that men need not, in the event, lose that influence which is rightly theirs, because they happen to be thwarted in the use of the channels natural and proper to its exercise. He did not lose his place in the minds of men because he was out of their sight.

Keble was a man who guided himself and formed his judgments, not by processes of reason, by inquiry or by argument, but, to use the word in a broad sense, by authority. Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessens; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories, such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions. It seemed to me as if he ever felt happier, when he could speak or act under some such primary or external sanction; and could use argument mainly as a means of recommending or explaining what had claims on his reception prior to proof. (from the Note on "Liberalism" in the Apologia pro Vita Sua)

When Newman comments on The Christian Year in chapter one of the same work, he notes:

The Christian Year made its appearance in 1827. It is not necessary, and scarcely becoming, to praise a book which has already become one of the classics of the language. When the general tone of religious literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that time, Keble struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England. Nor can I pretend to analyze, in my own instance, the effect of religious teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful. I have never till now tried to do so; yet I think I am not wrong in saying, that the two main intellectual truths which it brought home to me, were the same two, which I had learned from Butler, though recast in the creative mind of my new master. The first of these was what may be called, in a large sense of the word, the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen,—a doctrine, which embraces in its fulness, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about Sacraments properly so called; but also the article of "the Communion of Saints;" and likewise the Mysteries of the faith.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Portrait of John Keble (1792-1866) by George Richmond (1809–1896)

Preview: Newman on "How to Read the Fathers of the Church", Part One

We'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show exploring how Saint John Henry Newman studied and learned from the Fathers of the Church on Monday, October 21. As a reminder, this series was inspired by a course at the Institute of Catholic Culture, Patristics 102 "Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers" running now; Anna Mitchell (who is the Program Assistant for ICC) asked me to explore how the Fathers of the Church influenced Newman's theology and contributed to his conversion to Catholicism and share what I learned. As he famously said, "The Fathers made me Catholic", so I've always (since 1979!) known this is an important theme in Newman studies.

On Monday, October 21, we'll talk about Newman's first unsuccessful attempt to the read the Fathers systematically and then his second more successful effort to the Fathers and how he advised others how to follow his lead. I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later (and remember you may subscribe to the SRMS daily Show Notes email there too).

I'm indebted for these insights today to Father Joseph Carola, SJ and his book Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the "Scuola Romana", published by Emmaus Academic. I read this review in the Summer 2024 issue of Word on Fire's The New Ressourcement Journal. If you read the first paragraph of that review, you'll see why I had to buy and read the book. I admit I skipped directly to the chapter on Newman, then read the next chapter on Giovanni Perrone, the Jesuit scholar Newman consulted on his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and other related Patristic issues.

Newman began to read the Fathers systematically in 1828, but he ran into trouble. Later, he wrote to Robert Wilberforce that 

It is so difficult to read without an object. I may almost add so unprofitable--but I rather mean this--that nothing at all is done, if a man begins to read the Fathers without a previous knowledge of the controversies which are built upon them . . . I read Justin [Martyr] very carefully in 1828--and made copious notes--but I conceive most of my time was thrown away. I was like a sailor landed at Athens or Grand Cairo, who stares about--does not know what to admire, what to examine--makes random remarks, and forgets all about when he is gone. (Letters & Diaries, Vol. 5, 133, quoted on pages 109-110)

In 1838, in an article in the January issue of The British Critic, "The Theology of Saint Ignatius [of Antioch]" (whose feast we just celebrated on November 17) Newman gave some more instruction on how to read the Fathers, repeating the same analogy of the traveler not knowing enough about the city she's visiting to appreciate its sights and their significance. He contends that when the reader--as he had first done--tries to impose her own views on the Fathers, she won't benefit from the experience:

Thus they are ever at cross-purposes with the author they are studying; they do not discern his drift; and then, according as their minds are more or less of a reverent character, they despise or excuse him. At best they call him "venerable," which means out of date and useless. We have known one whom all would have acknowledged to be at the time deeply versed in the Fathers, yet taken by surprise by the question whether bishops and priests were the same or distinct orders in the early Church? as not having even contemplated the question. Again, we know a person who, when he entered on them, read and analyzed Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and Justin, with exceeding care, but who now considers his labour to have been all thrown away, from the strange modern divisions under which he threw the matter he found in them. (p. 226)

That "a person" sounds like Newman himself! He goes on to tell his readers of one particular pitfall, trying to find support for particular Protestant doctrines in the Fathers of the Church:

Whatever then be the true way of interpreting the Fathers, and in particular the Apostolical Fathers, if a man begins by summoning them before him, instead of betaking himself to them,—by seeking to make them evidence for modem dogmas, instead of throwing his mind upon their text, and drawing from them their own doctrines,—he will to a certainty miss their sense. (p. 228)

What Newman recommends instead is that the student first study Church History and Theology. The student should know what the Fathers mean by certain terms by studying the vocabulary, and divest herself of "modern ideas and prejudices." (p. 233)

Father Carola describes how Newman wrote to Thomas William Allies in September of 1842 and described an even more exact method: study a "particular controversy in the Fathers" like Donatism. Study the history of that heresy, its terms and context, so you know what the issues were, what the Fathers were dealing with, how they were defending the teaching of the Church against errors in that case. He told Allies to read "the worthwhile tracts of Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo" in connection to the Donatist heresy. Newman suggested to Allies that it's best to "get a footing in some one place, and then proceed as our particular taste or curiosity leads." (pages 135-136, quoting Letters and Diaries, vol. IX, p. 119)

BTW: T.W. Allies (1813–1903) was received into the Catholic Church in 1850. Note how the 1912 Dictionary of National Biography describes his path into the Catholic Church: 

Study of the Fathers, and especially of Suarez's work, 'De Erroribus Sectæ Anglicanæ,' combined with the Gorham decision on baptismal regeneration in 1850, shattered his faith in the established church, and in his 'Royal Supremacy' (1850) he forcibly presented the Roman point of view (cf. Liddon's Life of E. B. Pusey, iii. 257 seq.). In October 1850 he resigned his Launton living and joined the Roman communion.

The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article about Allies, written by his daughter Mary, also mentions his reading the Fathers of the Church: 

The Fathers, especially St. Augustine, revealed to him the Catholic Church. Moreover, they revealed him to himself, and when he now set pen to paper it was to write prose. He thought to find Anglicanism in the Fathers, and his first book is the result of this delusion. It was entitled "The Church of England Cleared from the Charge of Schism", published in 1846, a second and enlarged edition appearing in 1848. It gives the key-note of his lifelong labour and the whole question between Anglican and Catholic in a nutshell. As he perceived early in the day, the choice of the Royal Supremacy or Peter's Primacy constitutes the kernel of the entire controversy.

That choice of the Royal Supremacy in the Gorham Judgment, when the Queen's Council overrode the decision of the bishops of the Church of England, led Allies (and Henry Manning and others) to the Catholic Church.

How he advised Allies seems to have been Newman's method: assigned to write a book about the First Ecumenical Councils and the development of the Doctrine of the Trinity, he focused on the Arian Heresy and thus wrote The Arians of the Fourth Century in 1832, an effort that led him to further controversy in later years when he wrote Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine in 1859, noting the faithfulness of laity during the Arian divisions in the Church.

Nevertheless, when in the summer of 1839 he started to study the Monophysite heresy and the Fathers of the Church defending the Church's true teaching on the Person of Jesus Christ and His two Natures, Human and Divine, Newman, like Allies as described above, read Pope St. Leo the Great and other Fathers to find support for his theory of the Via Media in the midst of the Fathers. He sought to find evidence that the Church of England was an Apostolic Church, in union with the Church Catholic from the beginning, in spite of its late establishment in the 16th century.

But we know that's not what he found. He described that crucial reading of the Monophysite crisis and its results in his Apologia pro Vita Sua in 1864/65, but he also spoke to his former Tractarian colleagues in the  lectures he presented in 1850 on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered Volume I (In Twelve Lectures addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Religious Movement of 1833), in Lecture 12:

After this I set myself to the study of [the Fathers of the Church], with the view of pursuing the series of controversies connected with our Lord's Person; and to the examination of these controversies I devoted two summers, with the interval of several years between them (1835 and 1839). And now at length I was reading them for myself; for no Anglican writer had specially and minutely treated the subjects on which I was engaged. On my first introduction to them I had read them as a Protestant; and next, I had read them pretty much as an Anglican, though it is observable that, whatever I gained on either reading, over and above the theory or system with which I started, was in a Catholic direction. In the former of the two summers above mentioned (1835), my reading was almost entirely confined to strictly doctrinal subjects, to the exclusion of history, and I believe it left me pretty much where I was on the question of the Catholic Church; but in the latter of them (1839) it was principally occupied with the history of the Monophysite controversy, and {373} the circumstances and transactions of the Council of Chalcedon, in the fifth century, and at once and irrevocably I found my faith in the tenableness of the fundamental principle of Anglicanism disappear, and a doubt of it implanted in my mind which never was eradicated. I thought I saw in the controversy I have named, and in the Ecumenical Council connected with it, a clear interpretation of the present state of Christendom, and a key to the different parties and personages who have figured on the Catholic or the Protestant side at and since the era of the Reformation.

I can't resist quoting Newman's vivid reaction to that summer of 1839 from chapter 3 "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841" of his Apologia pro Vita Sua:

I have described in a former work [cited above!], how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. (p. 114) 

So studying the Fathers of the Church to find the authority for certain Church teachings about Jesus and His Church Catholic was not enough. There had to be something more. Father Carola's book will guide us further in our next discussion on October 28.  

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): An icon of Ignatius of Antioch from the Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000 AD)

Preview: Newman to Pusey on Mary and the Fathers of the Church

On Monday, August 26, we'll continue our Son Rise Morning Show series on Newman and the Fathers of the Church. We'll take a break from the series on Labor Day, Monday, September 2 and resume the next Monday, September 9.

This Monday's topic is a look at how Saint John Henry Newman reached out to his Oxford Movement friend, E. B. Pusey to remind him of what the Fathers of the Church, whom Newman, Pusey, and their good friend John Keble had studied, said about the Mother of God as the Second Eve. 

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central DST/7:50 a.m. Eastern DST. Please listen live here or on the podcast later.

One of the projects of the Oxford Movement Newman, Pusey, and Keble collaborated on was the publication of volumes of the works of the Fathers of the Church. They wanted Church of England pastors to read them to demonstrate that the Church of England's Via Media was closer in the interpretation of the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church than either the Catholic Church or the Protestant dissenters (or Lutherans or Calvinists). This project, A Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, was published in separate volumes from 1838 to 1881, sold by subscription. Pusey and Keble completed the project after Newman converted in 1845.

So when Pope Pius IX proclaimed the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception in 1854, stating: "We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful", Pusey wrote a public letter to John Keble about how the Church of England should react to the proclamation, especially how it might hinder hopes for Christian unity. Pusey mentioned their colleague in their former effort to revive the Apostolic authority of the bishops in the Anglican Church, namely, Newman. 

Because of that former shared interest in the Fathers of the Church, one of Newman's main ways of addressing Pusey's comments was to highlight the Father's witness and authority, focusing on the image of Mary as the Second Eve, as Jesus is comparable (per St. Paul) to Adam. (1 Corinthians 15:45-49).

In the third chapter of his Letter to Pusey, Newman reminds his correspondent of "the great rudimental teaching" of the ancient Church, expressed by the Fathers:

What is the great rudimental teaching of Antiquity from its earliest date concerning her? By "rudimental teaching," I mean the primâ facie view of her person and office, the broad outline laid down of her, the aspect under which she comes to us, in the writings of the Fathers. She is the Second Eve [Note 1]. Now let us consider what this implies. Eve had a definite, essential position in the First Covenant. The fate of the human race lay with Adam; he it was who represented us. It was in Adam that we fell; though Eve had fallen, still, if Adam had stood, we should not have lost those supernatural privileges which were bestowed upon him as our first father. Yet though Eve was not the head of the race, still, even as regards the race, she had a place of her own; for Adam, to whom was divinely committed the naming of all things, named her "the Mother of all the living," a name surely expressive, not of a fact only, but of a dignity; but further, as she thus had her own general relation to the human race, so again had she her own special {32} place, as regards its trial and its fall in Adam. In those primeval events, Eve had an integral share. "The woman, being seduced, was in the transgression." She listened to the Evil Angel; she offered the fruit to her husband, and he ate of it. She co-operated, not as an irresponsible instrument, but intimately and personally in the sin: she brought it about. As the history stands, she was a sine-qua-non, a positive, active, cause of it. And she had her share in its punishment; in the sentence pronounced on her, she was recognized as a real agent in the temptation and its issue, and she suffered accordingly. In that awful transaction there were three parties concerned,—the serpent, the woman, and the man; and at the time of their sentence, an event was announced for a distant future, in which the three same parties were to meet again, the serpent, the woman, and the man; but it was to be a second Adam and a second Eve, and the new Eve was to be the mother of the new Adam. "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed." The Seed of the woman is the Word Incarnate, and the Woman, whose seed or son He is, is His mother Mary. This interpretation, and the parallelism it involves, seem to me undeniable; but at all events (and this is my point) the parallelism is the doctrine of the Fathers, from the earliest times; and, this being established, we are able, by the position and office of Eve in our fall, to determine the position and office of Mary in our restoration.

Newman then begins to offer translations from the Fathers of the Church (and he includes the original language text in a note), starting with the earliest Fathers:

First, then, St. Justin Martyr (A.D. 120-165), St. Irenæus (120-200), and Tertullian (160-240). Of these Tertullian represents Africa and Rome; St. Justin represents Palestine; and St. Irenæus Asia Minor and Gaul;—or rather he represents St. John the Evangelist, for he had been taught by the Martyr St. Polycarp, who was the intimate associate of St. John, as also of other Apostles. . . .

So those are the ante-Nicene Fathers (before First Council of Nicaea); Newman continues with examples through the post-Nicene Fathers. Throughout this listing, he highlights how each Father represents a part of the Christian world. He's demonstrating Saint Vincent of Lerins's general rule for holding to the Truth of the Catholic Faith: "Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."

You'll have to read the passages for yourself at the link at newmanreader.org, but Newman wants to remind Pusey (and Keble) what they had agreed upon when working together on the Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church as cited above:

Having then adduced these Three Fathers of the second century, I have at least got so far as this: viz., that no one, who acknowledges the force of early testimony in determining Christian truth, can wonder, no {39} one can complain, can object, that we Catholics should hold a very high doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin, unless indeed stronger statements can be brought for a contrary conception of her, either of as early, or at least of a later date. But, as far as I know, no statements can be brought from the ante-Nicene literature, to invalidate the testimony of the Three Fathers concerning her; and little can be brought against it from the fourth century, while in that fourth century the current of testimony in her behalf is as strong as in the second; and, as to the fifth, it is far stronger than in any former time, both in its fulness and its authority. That such is the concordant verdict of "the undivided Church" will to some extent be seen as I proceed. . . .

I'll stop with the citations from Newman there. I think this episode answers part of Anna Mitchell's question about how the Fathers of the Church influenced Saint John Henry Newman: they guided him--informing his great quest for Catholic Truth--to a community of faith and authority in "the one true fold of Christ" by their witness. As Joseph Carola, S.J. notes in Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the Scuola Romana (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2023):

The Oratorian Cardinal began his lifelong journey with the Church Fathers when he was fifteen years old. They remained his constant companions. The more than Newman probed the Fathers, the more clearly he perceived the truth that Christ had revealed. The ancient Fathers led Newman from a Bible-reading, Anglican Christianity through creedal Tractarianism into full Communion with the Catholic Church. . . . (p. 147)

This example of Newman writing to his old "creedal Tractarianism" friends demonstrates how Newman had found, beyond the study of the ancient Church, the need for what Carola calls "a theory of doctrinal development capable of distinguishing between genuine developments and perfidious corruptions. . . . For while the Fathers remain normative--they were after all Newman's first and final love--they are not an absolute rule in and of themselves. . . . (pp. 147-148)  

He found a sure rule in the living Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

NEW SRMS Series: Newman and the Fathers of the Church

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show on EWTN and Sacred Heart Radio asked me to talk about Saint John Henry Newman's study of the Fathers of the Church in a new Monday morning series. She requested this series--we've scheduled two so far--because of her participation in an Institute of Catholic Culture course: note the first paragraph of the description of Patristics 101:

St. John Henry Newman said of the Church Fathers: “They are witnesses to the fact of . . . doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere . . . down to our times, without interruption, ever since the apostles.” What are the teachings of these early Christian writers whom Newman so deeply appreciated? What were their beliefs, hopes, and concerns? Do these mirror our own?

In this first (of two) semesters on the Fathers of the Church, dive deeply into the writings of the first Christian centuries and become acquainted with such figures as St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and Origen, and come to an appreciation of their specific genius and legacy for our own generation.

The second course is in session now.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

We'll start with an overview of how his study of the Fathers influenced Newman in his youth and in his leadership of the Oxford Movement; particularly how that study led him closer to the Catholic Church --or at least away from the Church of England -- when he studied the Arian, Monophysite, and Donatist heresies and the Fathers's roles in combating them. So this first episode takes us to the 1865 Apologia pro Vita Sua:

In the first chapter, "History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833", he highlights an early influence just before he went to Trinity College at Oxford:

Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me in the same Autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, {7} . . . I read Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians . . .

On the other hand, he recalls that for a time, he forgot the Fathers and rejected primitive Christianity:

In the next year, 1827, [Whately] told me he considered that I was Arianizing. The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior. This is the meaning of a passage in Froude's Remains, in which he seems to accuse me of speaking against the Athanasian Creed. I had {14} contrasted the two aspects of the Trinitarian doctrine, which are respectively presented by the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene. My criticisms were to the effect that some of the verses of the former Creed were unnecessarily scientific. This is a specimen of a certain disdain for Antiquity which had been growing on me now for several years. It showed itself in some flippant language against the Fathers in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, about whom I knew little at the time, except what I had learnt as a boy from Joseph Milner. . . .

The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; I was drifting in the direction of the liberalism of the day [Note 2]. I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows—illness and bereavement. [His beloved sister Mary died suddenly.]

So he returns to the Fathers:

There is one remaining source of my opinions to be mentioned, and that far from the least important. In proportion as I moved out of the shadow of that Liberalism which had hung over my course, my early devotion towards the Fathers returned; and in the Long Vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically, beginning with St. Ignatius and St. Justin. . . .

When Newman studied the Arian heresy, he discovered the greatness of the Greek Fathers, especially Saint Athanasius:

What principally attracted me in the ante-Nicene period was the great Church of Alexandria, the historical centre of teaching in those times. Of Rome for some centuries comparatively little is known. The battle of Arianism was first fought in Alexandria; Athanasius, the champion of the truth, was Bishop of Alexandria; and in his writings he refers to the great religious names of an earlier date, to Origen, Dionysius, and others, who were the glory of its see, or of its school. The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away . . . Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long.

In 1832, he wrote a poem about the Greek Fathers.

In chapter 2 of his Apologia, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839", Newman describes several of the projects of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. Two of them he published highlighted the Fathers of the Church:

The Church of the Fathers is one of the earliest productions of the Movement, and appeared in numbers in the British Magazine, being written with the aim of introducing the religious sentiments, views, and customs of the first ages into the modern Church of England. . . .

The annotated Translation of the Treatises of St. Athanasius was of course in no sense of a tentative character; it belongs to another order of thought. This historico-dogmatic work employed me for years. I had made preparations for following it up with a doctrinal history of the heresies which succeeded to the Arian.

But it's in chapter 3, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841", that his study of the Fathers bring him great difficulties as he studies the Monophysite heresy and then reads an article by the Catholic priest Nicholas Wiseman (later his bishop!) during the Long Vacation in the summer of 1839. First the Monophysite heresy:

About the middle of June I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites. I was absorbed in the doctrinal question. This was from about June 13th to August 30th. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I recollect on the 30th of July mentioning to a friend, whom I had accidentally met, how remarkable the history was; but by the end of August I was seriously alarmed.

I have described in a former work, how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. Of all passages of history, since history has been, who would have thought of going to the sayings and doings of old Eutyches, that delirus senex, as (I think) Petavius calls {115} him, and to the enormities of the unprincipled Dioscorus, in order to be converted to Rome! . . .

What was the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position, if, after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring {116} Athanasius and the majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against them?

Then he read Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review about the Donatist heresy, and certain words troubled Newman greatly (even though at first he did not think much of the article): Saint Augustine's phrase, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." (The verdict of the world is conclusive):

they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,—not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius,—not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. . . . For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. . . . By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.

The complete sentence and its source: 

Quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum, bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum. (Contra Epist. Parmen. 3.24)
And on this account, the world securely judges that those who divide themselves from the world are not good, in whatever part of the world (they are).

So, although Newman was not yet ready to even consider being received into the Catholic Church, he felt he had no ground to stand upon for the position he had taken in the Anglican Church! Studying the Fathers of the Church, from whom he hoped to find support for his Oxford Movement efforts to strengthen the Anglican Church's authority, had backfired on him at this point.

Later in chapter 3, he explains his reasons for writing Tract 90, again noting the place of Fathers in his view of what he called "the Church Catholic" in other Tracts he had written:

Anglicanism claimed to hold, that the Church of England was nothing else than a continuation in this country, (as the Church of Rome might be in France or Spain,) of that one Church of which in old times Athanasius and Augustine were members. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; {130} it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth; but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there,—but this must be shown. It was a matter of life and death to us to show it. And I believed that it could be shown; I considered that those grounds of justification, which I gave above, when I was speaking of Tract 90, were sufficient for the purpose; and therefore I set about showing it at once.

As he writes at the beginning of chapter 4, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1841 to 1845", after the publication of Tract 90 and the vehement condemnation it received:

FROM the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees. . . .

In the terms of St. Augustine's dictum, the Anglican world had "securely" rejected his dissent where he was, in Oxford. Although he had escaped condemnation, he was in schism from the Church of England.

He would retreat to Littlemore and study the Church Fathers and Church History, in the midst of prayer and meditation, by writing his Essay on the Development of Church Doctrine.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Preview: Newman and Loneliness at Christmas Time

We all know someone who is celebrating a first Christmas after the death of a loved one--or the second, or the third, or even the 12th or the 31st--and the special pang of that absence. 

We may be experiencing that pang ourselves. That's one reason I selected this sermon by Saint John Henry Newman just based on the title for our last Advent reflection, Monday, December 19 on the Son Rise Morning Show: "The Church a Home for the Lonely".

So I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here and remember that you may find the recording of the show later that day on the Son Rise Morning Show website!

As the late Father Ian Ker noted in his biography of Saint John Henry Newman, as a priest and cardinal Newman remembered many of his departed loved ones in Masses on the anniversaries of their deaths. His private chapel in the Birmingham Oratory was filled with pictures of his favorite saints and of his living and departed friends, for whom he prayed and offered Mass. There's a video about that chapel in this post on the New Liturgical Movement website. As his eyesight began to fail, Newman prepared by memorizing the propers for two Masses: "a Mass of the Blessed Virgin and a Mass of the Dead" so he could continue to pray for his beloved dead.

In this sermon from October 22, 1837, Newman takes a more existential point of view and sees the Church on earth as the place the Christian may find peace and consolation when rebuffed by the World*. But as I read the sermon, I thought of my parish church, and the other parishes or chapels at which I attend Mass, visit the Blessed Sacrament, or got to Confession, etc., as the local site through which the universal, Catholic Church is a home for me and I hope it is for you.

We have to remember that Newman's ideas about the Church on Earth and the Communion of Saints took some time to develop; influenced by Calvinist doctrines of Salvation after his major conversion at age 15, he for a time thought the true true communion of the Church was invisible. Yes, professed Christians gathered for services and registered in parishes, but unless they were predestined for salvation, they weren't really in the Church. I commented on Newman's developing ecclesiology here.

He takes as his verse Ephesians 2:6: "And [He] hath raised us up together, and hath made us sit together in the heavenly places, through Christ Jesus." 

In the excerpts Christopher Blum has provided in Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas for December 21, Newman offers examples of different kinds of Christians:

Those who have always understood that "heaven is an object claiming our highest love and most persevering exertions. Such doubtless is the blessedness of some persons: such in a degree is perchance the blessedness of many. There are those who, like Samuel, dwell in the Temple of God holy and undefiled from infancy, and, after the instance of John the Baptist, are sanctified by the Holy Ghost, if not as he, from their mother's womb, yet from their second birth in Holy Baptism."

Those who may have had this understanding "even though it has been latent; not quenched or overborne by open sin, even though it has not been from the first duly prized and cherished." . . .  They "have never been wedded to this world; they have never given their hearts to it, or vowed obedience or done folly in things of time and sense. And therefore they are able, from the very power of God's grace, as conveyed to them the ordinances of the Gospel, to understand that the promise of heaven is the greatest, most blessed promise which could be given."

And those who have wandered away and have returned: 

They are recovered by finding disappointment and suffering from that which they had hoped would bring them good; they learn to love God and prize heaven, not by baptismal grace, but by trial of the world; they seek the world, and they are driven by the world back again to God. The world is blessed to them, in God's good providence, as an instrument of His grace transmuted from evil to good, as if a second sacrament, doing over again what was done in infancy, and then undone. They are led to say, with St. Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" for they have tried the world, and it fails them; they have trusted it, and it deceives them; they have leant upon it, and it pierces them through; they have sought it for indulgence, and it has scourged them for their penance. O blessed lot of those, whose wanderings though they wander, are thus overruled; that what they lose of the free gift of God, they regain by his compulsory remedies!

Long before Pierce Brosnan as James Bond realized it (just for you, Matt Swaim), most of us, Newman says, recognize that "the world is not enough for [our] happiness".

[*If you go to the NewmanReader.org source for this entire sermon, you would find Newman's description of "the World" in the sense he means it. For example:

By the world, I mean all that meets a man in intercourse with his fellow men, whether in public or in private, all that is new, strange, and without natural connexion with him. This outward world is at first sight most attractive and exciting to the generality of men. The young commonly wish to enter into it as if it would fulfil all their wants and hopes. They wish to enter into life, as it is called. Their hearts beat, as they anticipate the time when they shall, in one sense or other, be their own masters. At home, or at school, they are under restraint, and thus they come to look forward to the liberty of the world, and the independence of being in it, as a great good. According to their rank {188} in life, they wish to get into service, or they wish to go into business, or they wish to be principals in trade, or they wish to enter into the world's amusements and gaieties, or they look forward with interest to some profession or employment which stirs their ambition and promises distinction.

Hint: Look for the page number (in bold type above)]

As Newman says, by whatever grace we discover this fact, that "the world is not enough", it demonstrates to us that  we need "some shelter, refuge, rest, home or sanctuary from the outward world" and that God [the Father] has provided us "the shelter or secret place . . . in Christ". He has provided us a home because we "need something which the world cannot give: this is what we need, and this it is which the Gospel has supplied."

Jesus has supplied with this home, establishing His Church and leaving a "blessing behind Him", after His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension: 

He left in the world what before was not in it,—a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever found, in spite of the world around us. Do you ask what it is? the chapter from which the text is taken describes it. It speaks of "the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone: In whom all the building, being framed together, groweth up into an holy temple in the Lord. In whom you also are built together into an habitation of God in the Spirit." (Ephesians 2:20-22) This is the Church of God, which is our true home of God's providing, His own heavenly court, where He dwells with Saints and Angels, into which He introduces us by a new birth, and in which we forget the outward world and its many troubles.

Newman notes that the Temple in Jerusalem served as the great home for the Jews, citing Psalm 27:4-5: "One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. That I may see the delight of the Lord, and may visit his temple. For he hath hidden me in his tabernacle; in the day of evils, he hath protected me in the secret place of his tabernacle." 

He says that the Church Jesus founded provides not just one place of refuge, in the Temple in Jerusalem, but "admits of being every where". In 1837, Newman may be speaking according to a less visible and established version of the Church (he uses the words "spiritual" and "invisible") but as Catholics we know that when we enter any Catholic church in union with the local bishop and the pope, we have entered The Catholic Church, "the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" with the Blessed Sacrament really and truly present in Tabernacle, and even sometimes with the hint of incense still lingering in air (if we make a Visit after a Funeral Mass has been celebrated, for example). The Church Militant throughout the world, the Church Triumphant in Heaven, and the Church Suffering, the Holy Souls in Purgatory, is all represented there. And I use the word "is" because it is all One.

As Newman concludes in Blum's selection, 

There is a great privilege which we may enjoy, if we seek it, of dwelling in a heavenly home in the midst of this turbulent world. . . .

We may be full of sorrows; there may be fightings without and fears within; we may be exposed to the frowns, censure, or contempt of men; we may be shunned by them; or, to take the lightest case, we may be (as we certainly shall be) wearied out by the unprofitableness of this world, by its coldness, unfriendliness, distance, and dreariness; we shall need something nearer to us. What is our resource? . . . it is that holy home which God has given us in His Church; it is that everlasting City in which He has fixed His abode. It is that Mount invisible where Angels are looking at us with their piercing eyes, and the voices of the dead call us. "Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world;" (1 John 4:4) "If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31)

Newman's complete sermon ends with this exhortation:

. . . Let not your past sins keep you from Him. Whatever they be, they cannot interfere with His grace stored up for all who come to Him for it. If you have in past years neglected Him, perchance you will have to suffer for it; but fear not; He will give you grace and strength to bear such punishment as He may be pleased to inflict. Let not the thought of His just severity keep you at a distance. He can make even pain pleasant to you. Keeping from Him is not to escape from His power, only from His love. Surrender yourselves to him in faith and holy fear. He is All-merciful, though All-righteous; and though He is awful in His judgments, He is nevertheless more wonderfully pitiful, and of tender compassion above our largest expectations; and in the case of all who humbly seek him, He will in "wrath remember mercy."

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

All photos (C) Stephanie A. Mann (2013-2022) and All Rights Reserved. Top photo: Crucifix carved by the deceased father of Jeanne Gordon, taken at her Rosary in Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Wichita, Kansas on January 3, 2017; Second photo: pulpit in the University Church of St. Mary's the Virgin in Oxford, England; Third photo: Stained glass  of the Third Joyful Mystery (detail) in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Wichita, Kansas; Fourth photo: Christmas Day Mass in 2013 at Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, Wichita, Kansas.

Preview: The Light of Conscience and The Way of Obedience

As Christopher O. Blum selected, excerpted, and arranged these sermons by Saint John Henry Newman in Waiting for Christ, he has placed "Dispositions for Faith", (for December 14) about the role of Conscience in our lives as we begin to believe in God and His authority, and "Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ", (for December 15) about the role of Obedience in our lives as we continue to follow and imitate Him, one before the other. 

The excerpts from the first sermon take us only so far: the excerpts from the second present a plan for life that we should follow. So in our second Advent reflection on the Son Rise Morning Show, on Monday, December 12, we'll look at some brief highlights from both sermons. 

The first sermon is a Catholic sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 1856 preached at the University Church in Dublin, included in Sermons on Various Occasions; the second is from Parochial and Plain Sermons Volume 8, Sermon 14, offered in October 1830, just a couple of years after Newman had been named the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

So I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here and remember that you may find the recording of the show later that day on the Son Rise Morning Show website!

In the complete sermon from 1856, Newman has taken as his verse "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight His path. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways plain: and all flesh shall see the salvation of God." Luke 3:4-6, and he wishes to explore how these images from nature apply to the preparation of the individual human soul to be disposed to Faith in God and the Good News. What prepares a man or woman to have Faith in God?

Newman suggests one great means: the Light and the Voice of Conscience, which each of us sees and hears:

What is the main guide of the soul, given to the whole race of Adam, outside the true fold of Christ as well as within it, given from the first dawn of reason, given to it in spite of that grievous penalty of ignorance, which is one of the chief miseries of our fallen state? It is the light of conscience, "the true Light," which enlightens every man." (John 1:9) 

Whether a man be born in pagan darkness, or in some corruption of revealed religion,—whether he has heard the name of the Saviour of the world or not,— whether he be the slave of some superstition, or is in possession of some portions of Scripture, and treats the inspired word as a sort of philosophical book, which he interprets for himself, and comes to certain conclusions about its teaching,—in any case, he has within his breast a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others. 

I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands,—that it praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses the unseen. It is more than a man's own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it. 

He may silence it in particular cases or directions, he may distort its enunciations, but he cannot, or it is quite the exception if he can, he cannot emancipate himself from it. He can disobey it, he may refuse to use it; but it remains.

Newman asserts that because we perceive that this voice comes from outside of us and calls us to an authority above us, it is preparation for Faith in God:

As the sunshine implies that the sun is in the heavens, though we may see it not, as a knocking at our doors at night implies the presence of one outside in the dark who asks for admittance, so this Word within us, not only instructs us up to a certain point, but necessarily raises our minds to the idea of a Teacher, an unseen Teacher: and in proportion as we listen to that Word, and use it, not only do we learn more from it, not only do its dictates become clearer, and at its lessons broader, and its principles more consistent, but its very tone is louder and more authoritative and constraining. And thus it is, that to those who use what they have, more is given; for, beginning with obedience, they go on to the intimate perception and belief of one God. His voice within them witnesses to Him, and they believe His own witness about Himself. They believe in His existence, not because others say it, not in the word of man merely, but with a personal apprehension of its truth.

Newman further points out--still before we have encountered Jesus and the Gospel--that as we learn and respond to the Light and Voice of Conscience we become frustrated with our own inability to obey it, and we may become fearful of the consequences of our failures, not knowing what to do. Thus, Newman says, we cry out, "Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!" (Romans 7:24)

Nevertheless, this experience of our efforts to follow the Natural Law of Conscience is a preparation for Faith in Christ and the Gospel.

Indeed, in 1830--in a passage Blum does not quote--Newman told his Anglican congregation that 

"obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel, which, instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches". It almost seems that Newman delivered  "Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ" the week after "Dispositions for Faith", not some 25 or 26 years earlier!

Blum's excerpt begins with another sign of continuity:

It would have been strange if the God of nature had said one thing, and the God of grace another; if the truths which our conscience taught us without the information of Scripture, were contradicted by that information when obtained. But it is not so; there are not two ways of pleasing God; what conscience suggests, Christ has sanctioned and explained; to love God and our neighbor are the great duties of the Gospel as well as of the Law; he who endeavors to fulfil them by the light of nature is in the way towards, is, as our Lord said, "not far from the kingdom;" (Mark 12:34) for to him that hath more shall be given.

It is not in one or two places merely that this same doctrine is declared to us; indeed, all revelation is grounded on those simple truths which our own consciences teach us in a measure, though a poor measure, even without it. It is One God, and none other but He, who speaks first in our consciences, then in His Holy Word; and, lest we should be in any difficulty about the matter, He has most mercifully told us so in Scripture, wherein He refers again and again (as in the passage connected with the text) to the great Moral Law, as the foundation of the truth, which His Apostles and Prophets, and last of all His Son, have taught us: "Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man." (Eccles 12:13.)

The Anglican Newman warns his congregation against Christian views that offer different paths to salvation, 

. . . because, it being very hard to keep God's commandments, men would willingly persuade themselves, if they could, that strict obedience is not necessary under the Gospel, and that something else will be taken, for Christ's sake, in the stead of it. Instead of laboring, under God's grace, to change their wills, to purify their hearts, and so prepare themselves for the kingdom of God, they imagine that in that kingdom they may be saved by something short of this . . .

substituting their own methods or measures of being disciples. But Newman presents many passages from the New Testament to demonstrate that these other methods are not what God has taught us. 

These texts, and a multitude of others, show that the Gospel leaves us just where it found us, as regards the necessity of our obedience to God; that Christ has not obeyed instead of us, but that obedience is quite as imperative as if Christ had never come; nay, is pressed upon us with additional sanctions; the difference being, not that He relaxes the strict rule of keeping His commandments, but that He gives us spiritual aids, which we have not except through Him, to enable us to keep them. Accordingly Christ's service is represented in Scripture, not as different from that religious obedience which conscience teaches us naturally, but as the perfection of it, as I have already said. We are told again and again, that obedience to God leads on to faith in Christ; that it is the only recognized way to Christ; and that, therefore, to believe in Him, ordinarily implies that we are living in obedience to God.

Blum does not include the end of Newman's Anglican sermon on "Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ", but in that exhortation, he reminds us of the reward those who obey will receive:

These, be they many or few, will then receive their prize from Him who died for them, who has made them what they are, and completes in heaven what first by conscience, then by His Spirit, He began here. Surely they were despised on the earth by the world; both by the open sinners, who thought their scrupulousness to be foolishness, and by such pretenders to God's favour as thought it ignorance. But, in reality, they had received from their Lord the treasures both of wisdom and of knowledge, though men knew it not; and they then will be acknowledged by Him before all creatures, as heirs of the glory prepared for them before the beginning of the world. 

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Permission Details): Conscience by Andrei Mironov (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image Credit (Public Domain): James Tissot, Jesus Sits by the Seashore and Preaches

Preview: "The Weapons of Saints" in Advent

For our first Newman sermon reflection/meditation for Advent on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday, December 5, I've chosen "The Weapons of Saints", a Parochial and Plain Sermon. It seems appropriate to reflect on saints during the Second Week of Advent since we'll celebrate several holy memorials and one Solemnity during the week:

Saint Nicholas of Myra on December 6

Saint Ambrose of Milan on December 7

The Immaculate Conception on December 8 (a Holy Day of Obligation!)

Saint Juan Diego on December 9

Our Lady of Loreto on December 10

So I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here.

In this sermon, originally delivered in October 29, 1837, Newman reflects on a verse from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, "Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first" (Matt. 19:30), exploring how the Kingdom of God has turned the world upside down:

Strength, numbers, wealth, philosophy, eloquence, craft, experience of life, knowledge of human nature, these are the means by which worldly men have ever gained the world. But in that kingdom which Christ has set up, all is contrariwise. "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." (2 Cor 10:4)  What was before in honour, has been dishonoured; what before was in dishonour, has come to honour; what before was successful, fails; what before failed, succeeds. What before was great, has become little; what before was little, has become great. Weakness has conquered strength, for the hidden strength of God "is made perfect in weakness." (2 Cor 12:9) Death has conquered life, for in that death is a more glorious resurrection. Spirit has conquered flesh; for that spirit is an inspiration from above. A new kingdom has been established, not merely different from all kingdoms before it, but contrary to them; a paradox in the eyes of man,—the visible rule of the invisible Saviour. . . .

Yes, so it is; since Christ sent down gifts from on high, the Saints are ever taking possession of the kingdom, and with the weapons of Saints. The invisible powers of the heavens, truth, meekness, and righteousness, are ever coming in upon the earth, ever pouring in, gathering, thronging, warring, triumphing, under the guidance of Him “who died and came to life” (Revelation 2:8)

Newman then asks his congregation and his readers to apply this "great truth" to themselves because they and we "are the sons of God" . . . "soldiers of Christ." Crucially, he advises, "the kingdom is within us" and

really we are a part of it, or ought to be; and, as we wish to be a living portion of it, which is our only hope of salvation, we must learn what its characters are in order to imitate them. It is the characteristic of Christ's Church, that the first should be last, and the last first; are we realizing in ourselves and taking part in this wonderful appointment of God?

Newman, speaking to a university congregation, explores the hopes and dreams of youth to achieve great things, "something greater than the world can give". . . "having desires after things about this world":

While their hearts are thus unsettled, Christ comes to them, if they will receive Him, and promises to satisfy their great need, this hunger and thirst which wearies them. He does not wait till they have learned to ridicule high feelings as mere romantic dreams: He comes to the young; He has them baptized betimes, and then promises them, and in a higher way, those unknown blessings which they yearn after. . . .

But he applies the same rule to all of us, young or old:

The way to mount up is to go down. Every step we take downward, makes us higher in the kingdom of heaven. Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little. There is a mysterious connexion between real advancement and self-abasement. If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the ill-tempered, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works. . . .

They rise by falling. Plainly so, for no condescension can be so great as that of our Lord Himself. The more they abase themselves the more like they are to Him; and the more like they are to Him, the greater must be their power with Him.

Finally, Newman offers a warning about the true power of the saints, which the world cannot understand:

Our warfare is not with carnal weapons, but with heavenly. The world does not understand what our real power is, and where it lies. And until we put ourselves into its hands of our own act, it can do nothing against us. Till we leave off patience, meekness, purity, resignation, and peace, it can do nothing against that Truth which is our birthright, that Cause which is ours, as it has been the cause of all saints before us.

And I'd propose that we could look at the lives of each of these saints to find examples of this rule: both Saint Nicholas of Myra and Saint Ambrose of Milan were known for their great works of charity and their battles against the Arian heresy, defending the true Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, despite the conflict and danger. 

Saint Ambrose had the office of bishop forced upon him by popular demand, giving up his secular power. He had to receive the Sacraments of Initiation before he could be ordained! Saint Juan Diego obeyed Our Lady of Guadalupe with great patience and humility--like any visionary, his path was difficult.

In the midst of her Magnificat, the Mother of God demonstrated that she knew this rule of life from God's actions; as the handmaid of the Lord, she had submitted to His will:

From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.

 
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

And, as Newman himself reminds us, no One abased Himself like Our Lord (". . . no condescension can be so great as that of our Lord Himself. The more they abase themselves the more like they are to Him; and the more like they are to Him, the greater must be their power with Him."):

For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man.
He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.
For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names:
That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth:
And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-10)

Saint Nicholas, pray for us!

Saint Ambrose, pray for us!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

Saint Juan Diego, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Saint Nicholas by Jaroslav Čermák (1831-1878)

Image Credit (Public Domain): Saint Ambrose by Claude Vignon

Image Credit (Public Domain): Saint Juan Diego by Miguel Cabrera

Preview of a Preview: "Waiting for Christ" on the Son Rise Morning Show!

While we're all waking up from our Thanksgiving Day long weekend with friends and family, we've also begun a new Liturgical Season: Happy Church New Year! It's Advent! 

So, next Monday, December 5, Anna Mitchell, Matt Swaim, and I will begin a new Newman series on the Son Rise Morning Show.

Each Advent Monday in December, we'll discuss a sermon featured in Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas. On January 2, 2023, we'll wrap up this series with a Christmas Season sermon from the book. The show's hosts and Paul Lachmann (who calls me before my interviews) have the week of December 26-30 off!!

By the way, I reviewed this book for the National Catholic Register in 2018, when it was published with the words "Blessed John Henry Newman" at the top of the cover! Christopher Blum of the Augustine Institute selected, excerpted, and revised Newman's punctuation, spelling, and use of Bible translation (from King James to Douai-Rheims or Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition) from the original Parochial and Plain Sermons.

So please watch this space on December 2, 9, and 16 for previews for those Monday discussions!

Blessed Advent to you all, as we wait for Christ to come at Christmas and at His glorious Second Coming!

Preview: St. Thomas More on Zacchaeus's House and Holy Communion

On Monday, October 31 (All Hallow's Eve), we'll conclude our discussion of Saint Thomas More's Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord on the Son Rise Morning Show. 

So I'll be on about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern in the last segment of the second EWTN hour (there's a local hour after that just on Sacred Heart Radio). You may listen live here.

After the string of examples from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew of those who either begged Jesus for some healing (the father with the mute son and the Centurion) or whom Jesus used as an example of contrition and humility (the Publican in the Temple in contrast to the self-righteous Pharisee), More concludes this brief treatise with the reminder of our own need for contrition and humility, especially as we remind ourselves of all that Jesus suffered in His Passion for our redemption:

 . . . And yet with all this remembrance of our own unworthiness, and therefore with great reverence, fear and dread for our own part, let us not forget on the other side to consider His inestimable goodness, which disdaineth not for all our unworthiness to come unto us, and to be received of us, but likewise as at the sight or receiving of this excellent memorial of His death (for in the remembrance thereof doth He thus consecrate and give His own Blessed Flesh and Blood unto us) we must with tender compassion remember and call to mind the bitter pains of His most painful Passion. And yet there-with-all rejoice and be glad in the consideration of His incomparable kindness, which in His so suffering for us, to our inestimable benefit, He showed and declared toward us. So must we be sore afraid of our own unworthiness, and yet therewith be right glad and in great hope at the consideration of His immeasurable goodness…

The last two paragraphs are an extended application of the story of Zacchaeus from the Gospel of Luke (19:1-10) to how we should receive Holy Communion:

And entering in, he walked through Jericho. And behold, there was a man named Zacheus, who was the chief of the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who he was, and he could not for the crowd, because he was low of stature. And running before, he climbed up into a sycamore tree, that he might see him; for he was to pass that way. And when Jesus was come to the place, looking up, he saw him, and said to him: Zacheus, make haste and come down; for this day I must abide in thy house. And he made haste and came down; and received him with joy. And when all saw it, they murmured, saying, that he was gone to be a guest with a man that was a sinner. But Zacheus standing, said to the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have wronged any man of any thing, I restore him fourfold. Jesus said to him: This day is salvation come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. (Douai-Rheims translation)

Very appropriate timing, since the story of Zaccheus is the Gospel reading for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time October 30th!

More uses the story not only to encourage us to imitate Zacchaeus's repentance and penance, but to demonstrate the rewards we will receive from bringing Jesus into our bodies and souls (our own houses):

Let us (good Christian readers) receive Him in such wise, as did the good publican, Zacchaeus, which when he longed to see Christ, and because he was but low of stature, did climb up into a tree, our Lord seeing his devotion called unto him, and said: "Zacchaeus, come off and come down: for this day must I dwell with thee." (19:5) And he made haste and came down, and very gladly received Him into his house. But not only received Him with a joy of a light and fond feeling affection, but that it might well appear that he received Him with a sure, earnest, virtuous mind, he proved it by his virtuous works. For he forthwith was contented to make recompense to all men that he had wronged, and that in a large manner; for every penny a groat; and yet offered to give out also forthwith the one half of all his substance unto poor men, and that forthwith also; by and by, without any longer delay. And therefore he said not: Thou shalt hear, that I shall give it: but he said: "Ecce dimidium bonorum meorum de pauperibus. Lo, look, good Lord, the one half of my goods I do give unto poor men." (19:8)

More is emphasizing that Zacchaeus didn't just promise that he would do it: he did do it!

With such alacrity, with such quickness of spirit, with such gladness and such spiritual rejoicing, as this man received our Lord into his house, our Lord give us the Grace to receive His Blessed Body and Blood, His Holy Soul and His Almighty Godhead both, into our bodies and into our souls, that the fruit of our good works may bear witness unto our conscience, that we receive Him worthily and in such a full Faith, and such a stable purpose of good living, as we be bounden to owe. And then shall God give a gracious sentence, and say upon our soul as He said upon Zacheus: "Hodie salus facta est huic domui,:This day is health and salvation come unto this house" (19:9): which that Holy Blessed Person of Christ which we verily in the Blessed Sacrament receive, through the merit of His Bitter Passion (whereof He hath ordained His own Blessed Body in that Blessed Sacrament to be the memorial) vouchsafe, good Christian readers, to grant unto us all.

That's where More ended his Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord, but he did not stop wanting to receive Holy Communion worthily himself. After his trial and condemnation on July 1, he wrote a long prayer in preparation for his execution, which as far as he knew at that time, was going to be the brutal torture of hanging, drawing, and quartering. In that prayer, he demonstrates that he was of the same mind as he urged his readers to be:

. . . And pardon me, good Lord, that I am so bold to ask so high petitions, being so vile a sinful wretch, and so unworthy to attain the lowest. But yet, good Lord, such they be as I am bounden to wish, and should be nearer the effectual desire of them if my manifold sins were not the let. From which, O glorious Trinity, vouchsafe, of Thy goodness to wash me with that blessed blood that issued out of Thy tender body, O sweet Saviour Christ, in the divers torments of Thy most bitter passion.

Take from me, good Lord, this lukewarm fashion, or rather key-cold manner of meditation, and this dulness in praying unto Thee. And give me warmth, delight, and quickness in thinking upon Thee. And give me Thy grace to long for Thine holy sacraments, and specially to rejoice in the presence of Thy very blessed body, sweet Saviour Christ, in the holy sacrament of the altar, and duly to thank Thee for Thy gracious visitation therewith, and at that high memorial with tender compassion to remember and consider Thy most bitter passion.

Make us all, good Lord, virtually participant of that holy sacrament this day, and every day. Make us all lively members, sweet Saviour Christ, of Thine holy mystical body, Thy Catholic Church. . . .

I don't know if Saint Thomas More was allowed to prepare spiritually for his execution with a visit by a priest to hear his last Confession or receive Holy Communion. I've never read that detail in any biography.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us.

Image credit: (Public Domain) James Tissot's Zacchaeus in the Sycamore Awaiting the Passage of Jesus

Image credit: (Public Domain) Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns. Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his height in the tree.