Blessed John Henry Newman and the Liturgy

In our continuing series preparing for the canonization of Blessed John Henry Newman, Matt Swaim (I presume) and I will talk about Newman and the Liturgy this morning around 7:50 Eastern DST/6:50 Central DST on the Son Rise Morning Show.

Newman and the Oratorians made several contributions to the revived liturgical life of Catholics in 19th century England and the Oratorians in Birmingham, London, Oxford, etc, continue those traditions today:

After becoming a Catholic, Newman soon went to Rome for education and ordination as a Catholic priest, returning to England to establish St. Philip Neri’s Oratory in Birmingham and in London--and hoping for one in Oxford. While the Church of England had experienced many changes and controversies in liturgical practice since its founding in the sixteenth century, Catholics had not been able to practice their faith or worship freely from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I until Emancipation in 1829.

The Catholic Mass had been illegal; it was a felony to attend Mass; it was an act of treason for a Catholic priest to be in England and a felony for a layman or woman to assist a Catholic priest in any way—there are more than a hundred canonized or beatified martyrs to testify to the dangers of being a Catholic in England from 1559 to 1829. With the re-establishment of the hierarchy in England in 1850, Catholics began building cathedrals, churches and chapels and worshipping freely again.

Newman’s Oratories contributed to this renewal of Catholicism in England—in both London and Birmingham they began the tradition of sung High Mass on Sunday with excellent choirs and musicians and of sung Vespers on Sunday evenings—traditions that are observed now also at the Oxford Oratory. Newman favored classical styles of architecture and music. In this he stands in opposition to one of the great architects of the nineteenth century, Augustus Welby Pugin who favored, nay required, the Gothic style of architecture and Gregorian chant.

Newman believed that the classical (or Byzantine revival) style of building for a church was more appropriate for the preaching of the Gospel and line of sight for the congregation to the Altar and the Tabernacle. The oratory churches of London and Birmingham are both in the Baroque style but were built after Newman’s death (the Birmingham Oratory is called the Little Rome)—but in the church for the Catholic University in Dublin, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, we can see what Newman desired in church architecture—the church is in the basilica style and was designed under Newman’s direction by John Hungerford Pollen, Senior. (Image Credit) 

Notice that the line of sight to the Altar and the Tabernacle are clear and direct; the pulpit is placed above the congregation for ease of sight and hearing.

He favored the Mass settings written by Mozart, Haydn, Cherubini, Hummel, and his favorite Beethoven—we should remember that Newman was a talented musician himself, playing the violin. Of course, this was before Pope St. Pius X revived Gregorian chant and polyphony in Tra le sollecitudini.

Newman and his fellow Oratorians, particularly Edward Caswall and Frederick Faber, wrote and translated hymns for congregational singing. We sing Faber’s “Faith of Our Fathers” and “There’s Wideness in God’s Mercy”, while Edward Caswall’s translations of St. Thomas Aquinas’ O Salutoris Hostia and Tantum Ergo are often used today at Benediction and Caswall’s translation of the Stabat Mater is sung at Stations of the Cross. . . .From Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, two great hymns are excerpted: “Praise to the Holiest in the Height” and “Firmly I Believe and Truly”. He translated many of the hymns of the Roman Breviary for congregational singing (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers).

Toward the end of his life, Newman started losing his eyesight and in preparation for not being able to read the words of the Mass, he memorized two votive Masses (the antiphons, collects, prayers, and readings in addition to the Ordinary of the Mass); he celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day, 1889. Instead of reading the Breviary, he prayed the Rosary.

As a preacher in the Church of England, he was famous for the quiet power of presentation, without any rhetorical flourish or emphasis, beyond the pause. Father John McCloskey describes his written Anglican sermons as meditations for a retreat—and he wrote 1,000 of them during those 20 years.

Newman changed his method of delivering homilies as a Catholic priest: instead of written sermons to be read, he prepared notes for more extemporaneous homilies (the Brothers of the Oratory published his sermon notes after his death).

What Newman found in the Catholic Church, the one true fold of Christ, as he called her after his conversion, was the fullness of what he and his Oxford Movement companions had sought to establish in the Church of England. What he had to defend—the ritual form of public worship, and the liturgical and sanctoral year, etc—before, Newman could celebrate fully now. . . .

Next Monday, the Monday of Holy Week, we'll discuss one of Newman's great Parochial and Plain Sermons, in which he urged his congregation "to raise [their] hearts to Christ, and to have keen feelings and piercing thoughts of sorrow and shame, of compunction and of gratitude, of love and tender affection and horror and anguish, at the review of those awful sufferings whereby our salvation has been purchased."

Preview: Newman and the Liturgy

As we come near the holiest week of the liturgical year and the holiest three days of the holiest week of the liturgical year, it seems appropriate that we discuss Newman and the Liturgy this coming Monday on the Son Rise Morning Show. It is Matt Swaim's turn on Monday, April 8, to continue our series a little after 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST/6:50 a.m. Central DST. I'm citing a lecture I offered at Newman University in February 2016 for their Cardinal Newman/Founders celebrations. First, some notes on Newman and the Liturgy as an Anglican:

Because of his deserved reputation as a controversialist, intellectual, and author, we sometimes forget—and Pope Benedict XVI reminded us when he presided at Newman’s beatification during his September 2010 visit to England—that Newman was, for most of his life, a pastor. As both an Anglican minister and then as a Catholic priest, Newman celebrated a liturgy, prayed in accord with the liturgical year, and preached sermons and homilies urging his congregations to do so too.

We should also note, since we are celebrating his birthday on February 21, in 1801, that he was born in a devout Church of England family and experienced the liturgy throughout his childhood. He bought a copy of the Book of Common Prayer for himself so that he could receive it as a gift from his mother!

For 20 years as a minister of the Church of England, Newman celebrated the Anglican liturgy according to the Book of Common Prayer with careful attention to the rubrics of the rite. During his Oxford Movement period, he began to use the Roman (Catholic) Breviary (the Liturgy of the Hours) for his personal devotions. After his conversion in 1845, he studied for the priesthood, and thus celebrated Mass and the Sacraments according to the Roman Missal, etc—while continuing to pray the Breviary.

In 1959, Father Frank O’Malley wrote that, “the spirit of Newman moved within the spirit of the liturgy; the liturgy thought of in its most significant sense as the very rhythm of Christian existence, stirred and centered by the life of Christ. Newman absorbed the liturgical character of existence. He lived by the liturgy.”

He celebrated the services of the Church of England with care, solemnity, and devotion and he emphasized how essential religious worship was to the life of a Christian. This view and this liturgical emphasis was not without controversy in Newman’s time—and the celebration of the liturgy in the Church of England would become more controversial after he became a Catholic—because there were different parties in the Church of England, with different views of liturgy.

We can identify, as Aidan Nichols summarizes them in his book The Panther and Hind, three basic parties in the Church of England and their liturgical views:

• The High Church or Anglo Catholic party: liturgical beauty, including candles, incense, vestments; emphasis on doctrine; importance of Tradition; using Catholic devotions (I visited St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, RI—it’s known as a Tractarian church—the vestibule was filled with pamphlets on praying the Rosary, praying the Stations of the Cross, litanies, novenas, etc.) Adherents of this party followed the example of the Anglican Divines of the Stuart era: Lancelot Andrewes, William Laud, etc

• The Low Church or Evangelical party: emphasizing the Holy Bible and simplicity of worship and church architecture. Rejection of some religious imagery and church decoration; Puritan and Wesleyan background

• The Broad Church or Latitudinarian party: emphasizing moral behavior and reason in religious matters and sermons about the same—downplaying doctrinal or liturgical differences; 18th century background

Newman answered both Low Church and Broad Church objections to liturgical worship as “the essence of the life of the Church”, “supplying all our spiritual need”.

To Broad Church objections he replied in Parochial and Plain Sermon “Worship, A Preparation for Christ’s Coming” (an Advent sermon), starting with their questions:

Men sometimes ask, Why need they profess religion? Why need they go to church? Why need they observe certain rites and ceremonies? Why need they watch, pray, fast, and meditate? Why is it not enough to be just, honest, sober, benevolent, and otherwise virtuous? Is not this the true and real worship of God? Is not activity in mind and conduct the most acceptable way of approaching Him? How can they please Him by submitting to certain religious forms, and taking part in certain religious acts?

Even if religious worship is necessary, they object:

why may they not choose their own? Why must they come to church for them? Why must they be partakers in what the Church calls Sacraments?

Newman’s first answer is, because God tells them to do so! He tells them that liturgical worship prepares them for the sight of God:

They are not to be here for ever. Direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him.

Let us then take this view of religious service; it is "going out to meet the Bridegroom," who, if not seen "in His beauty," will appear in consuming fire. Besides its other momentous reasons, it is a preparation for an awful event, which shall one day be.

Not that Newman ignores good works and moral conduct, for he concludes this sermon urging his congregation to both moral conduct and liturgical worship:

Let us go out to meet Him with contrite and expectant hearts; and though He delays His coming, let us watch for Him in the cold and dreariness which must one day have an end. Let us wait for Him solemnly, fearfully, hopefully, patiently, obediently; let us be resigned to His will, while active in good works.

Newman answers Evangelical objections to liturgical worship in “Ceremonies of the Church” in which he uses Jesus’s reply to John the Baptist when John thought he should not baptize Our Savior: “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15)

He uses the same question and answer method:

We sometimes meet with men, who ask why we observe these or those ceremonies or practices; why, for example, we use Forms of prayer so cautiously and strictly? or why we persist in kneeling at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper? why in bowing at the name of Jesus? or why in celebrating the public worship of God only in consecrated places? why we lay such stress upon these things? These, and many such questions may be asked, and all with this argument: "They are indifferent matters; we do not read of them in the Bible."

Newman’s response is first that the Bible

does not set about telling us what to do, but chiefly what to believe

For example:

there is no prohibition of suicide, dueling, gaming, in Scripture; yet we know them to be great sins; and it would be no excuse in a man to say that he does not find them forbidden in Scripture, because he may discover God's will in this matter independently of Scripture. . . .

This, I say, is the proper answer to the question, "Why do you observe rites and forms which are not enjoined in Scripture?" though, to speak the truth, our chief ordinances are to be found there, as the Sacraments, Public Worship, the Observance of the Lord's day, Ordination, Marriage, and the like. But I shall make another answer, which is suggested by the event commemorated this day, our Lord's conforming to the Jewish Law in the rite of circumcision; and my answer is this.

Scripture tells us what to believe, and what to aim at and maintain, but it does not tell us how to do it; and as we cannot do it at all unless we do it in this manner, or that, in fact we must add something to what Scripture tells us. For example, Scripture tells us to meet together for prayer, and has connected the grant of the Christian blessings on God's part, with the observance of union on ours; but since it does not tell us the times and places of prayer, the Church must complete that which Scripture has but enjoined generally.

He warns that

There is no such thing as abstract religion. When persons attempt to worship in this (what they call) more spiritual manner, they end, in fact, in not worshipping at all. This frequently happens. Every one may know it from his own experience of himself. Youths, for instance (and perhaps those who should know better than they), sometimes argue with themselves, "What is the need of praying statedly morning and evening? why use a form of words? why kneel? why cannot I pray in bed, or walking, or dressing?" they end in not praying at all.

But Newman goes beyond insisting that Christians should pray according to the Church’s forms of worship to emphasizing how important the liturgical year—and the sanctoral year—are in the life of a Christian.

In one of the Tracts for the Times, number 34, “Rites and Customs of the Church” Newman tried to convince his readers that the liturgy and the liturgical year were apostolic traditions, handed down from the Apostles to the Fathers of the Church and expressed in the Book of Common Prayer to impress the “great revealed verities of the Christian faith in the imagination of the faithful”. This, of course, was the aim of the Oxford Movement—to claim apostolic succession for the Anglican Church—to demonstrate that it was not just a Church formed by the State, but a true Church, a branch of the (lower case c) catholic Church. He was claiming an authority for the Church of England to, as he said above, give its members the order and form to fulfill what the Bible enjoined on them—through the liturgy and the liturgical year. And when he discusses the cult of the saints and the calendar of saints—Newman was speaking of something Englishmen associated with the Catholic Church—he was running the risk of being too “Papist” or “Popish”—Catholics and Catholic devotions were considered foreign and un-English (and to some extent, still are today in Great Britain).

Newman’s attempt, along with the other leaders of the Oxford Movement, to encourage both the clergy—especially the bishops—and the laity to live and pray as though the Church of England was part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, as we know, failed. The Church of England—especially the bishops—rejected the argument because it meant they had to acknowledge the teachings of the Catholic Church. Newman wrote Tract 90 in 1841, the last Tract for the Times, arguing that only the teachings of the Catholic Church give an authoritative and effective meaning and interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. It was soundly rejected by the University of Oxford and the Church of England. He was almost soundly rejected by the University of Oxford and the Church of England. He resigned his livings at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin and the little church in Littlemore outside Oxford that he had founded (St. Mary’s-St. Nicholas) and was on his death-bed as an Anglican.

Studying and praying in Littlemore, Newman finally resigned all his ties to Oxford and joined the Catholic Church on October 9, 1845, confessing his sins and receiving the sacraments from Father Dominic Barberi, a Passionist priest serving the newly emancipated Catholics of England. Newman received his first Holy Communion on October 10, 1845. . . .

More on Monday from the lecture about Newman and the Liturgy as a Catholic priest.