Senior Lecturer, Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia
Robert M. Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Church History at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia, a member institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is the author of Apologia Pro Beata Maria Virgine: John Henry Newman’s Defence of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Doctrine and Piety (London & Washington, DC: Academica Press, 2017; revised, 2025).
Newman, as an Anglican, had a high Mariology (for an Anglican, a surprisingly high Mariology), yet he also combined his reverence for Mary with some kind of caution or warning that such notions could lead to doctrines and practices that were not sanctioned by the Church of England. In reality, that caution (or warning) was both a message by Newman to his congregation and a message to himself—to a conscience that was beginning to doubt the veracity of his own ideas.
Pusey’s appraisal of Mariology—a polemic containing a mixture of historical, theological and anecdotal evidence—was, on the whole, untrue and mostly a caricature; yet as Newman would be forced to admit in his formal published reply to Pusey in 1866, the <em>Letter to Pusey</em>, there was partial veracity to his claim that at times Mariology, in some of its devotional outpourings, has obscured devotion to God, especially God’s loving mediation brought to humanity through the Incarnation.
