Two hundred years ago, on 13 June 1824, the young Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who today the Church celebrates as a saint, made his way down the High and St. Aldate’s with his surplice and his MA hood, to be made a deacon of the Church of England in Christ Church Cathedral, the former medieval nunnery and shrine to St. Frideswide until Thomas Wolsey chose it to become Cardinal College in 1525.
Before becoming Catholic in 1845, Newman had ascribed to the Evangelical party and then later the High Church party of Anglicanism. It was through certain friendships penetrating his heart so deeply that he became attracted to the truths of the Catholic faith. When Pope Leo XIII made Newman a cardinal in 1879, Newman chose cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks unto heart) as his motto. His friends surely spoke to his heart, and his heart spoke to theirs.
When the Pope beatified Newman in 2010, he traveled to the United Kingdom to honor the “saintly Englishman” from whom he had learned numerous invaluable lessons. In his sermon for the occasion, the Pope exclaimed, “in Blessed John Henry, that tradition of gentle scholarship, deep human wisdom and profound love for the Lord has borne rich fruit.” It is in this scholarly yet prayerful pursuit of the truth that Ratzinger found a fellow friend in Newman.
In what follows, I trace Newman's distinctive approach across four essential aspects of his contribution, specifically, conscience, faith, doctrine, and education. Furthermore, I gesture toward the pathways that Newman's method and insights offer to address some of today's urgent questions within and without the church.
An important theological theme in the Christian tradition is that of the divine ideas or <em>logoi</em> in the mind or Word of God by which God knows and loves in himself eternally all the ways that creatures can or do participate in a living likeness of him.
The cumulative effect of the theological debates at Oxford, together with his pastoral experience and personal reflections, gradually led Newman to a more high church ecclesiological approach, especially on visibility, invisibility, and apostolicity of the church.
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