Yesterday, 09:28 AM
The following is taken from pages 42-53 of this issue of The Recusant [slightly adapted and reformatted]:
Part 2: What is the Real Problem with Newman?
If Newman is not a Saint, then he cannot, by definition, be considered a Doctor of the Church and we could end this article here. However, it is as one becomes gradually better acquainted with the man and his thinking that the picture which emerges becomes increasingly disturbing.
Newman’s Background
Lest we be accused of ignoring it, let us begin, then, with the question of Newman’s family background and antecedents. The introduction to Fr. Kimball’s fascinating book Cardinal Newman: Trojan Horse in the Church quotes an extract from Rev. Dr. William Francis Barry’s 1903 biography of Newman:
Barry would later change his mind and retract what he had written here (for whatever that is worth: some might say that his words stand or fall on their own merit). The Thomas Mozley to whom he refers was a friend and contemporary of Newman who became his brother-in-law after marrying one of Newman’s younger sisters. He too was part of the Oxford Movement and almost became a Catholic in 1843, until Newman talked him out of it. He was someone who ought to know what he was talking about, in other words. His work “Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement” is available here: https://archive.org/details/reminiscence...2/mode/2up.
Mozley also tells us that Newman’s mother was a Calvinist of French Hugenot extraction and as for the father’s having been a high-ranking Freemason, he is careful to add that, “...no one of his three sons was initiated” into it. Well, what if Newman’s family were originally Jews? Does that in itself mean that we cannot trust the man? No, of course not: on its own, that fact doesn’t mean a great deal, and if it is tempting to look at parallels between Newman’s thought and Jewish thought, it is also true that there are several very great Saints whose families were of Jewish origin, St Therese of Avila for instance. And if there were to be found a link between his family and upbringing and the thinking evident in his later writings, then the question still hinges on the soundness of that thinking. If there is, as Barry suggested, a dislike of metaphysics then that is the real issue.
Hence, for what follows, we will simply state what others appear already to have spotted in Newman’s thinking, and point the reader who wishes to know more in the direction of greater, more diligent minds than the author of these few pages. What follows is a non-exhaustive sample: we will try to focus on the relevant quotations and keep our own commentary to a minimum.
The Influence of Kant and Hegel
Proto- Ecumenism and Salvation Outside the Church:
“Manning” of course refers to Cardinal Manning, the Cardinal Archbishop primate of England and Wales from 1865 to his death in 1892 and therefore one of Newman’s superiors. “Faber” is Fr. Frederick Faber, contemporary and former-colleague of Newman, like him an Oratorian and the founder of the London Oratory (Newman’s Oratory was in Birmingham). This is not the only time that we will see Newman and Faber at odds, and the differences between the two always seem to be favourable to Fr. Faber. But more on that later. In the meantime, lest there be any doubt at all, what Newman is expressing is contrary to sound Catholic teaching:
The picture which emerges is that when the Vatican II modernists of today claim Newman as a precursor and one of their own, this is not mere wishful thinking on their part, but based, at least in part, on a genuine understanding and appreciation his thinking:
The idea that even after being received into the Church, Newman somehow remained an Anglican in his heart and in his thinking is something of a recurring theme and does seem to explain a great deal, including why so many of his fans today are converts to the conciliar Church from Anglicanism (and who, all too often, are found to be still Anglican in all but name). It would explain the fact that he seems to have been rather reluctant to attack the “Church of England” and even a little reluctant to convert too many of them, or even risk offending them. Concerning the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, which took place in 1850 and offended many Anglicans at the time, his biographer tells us:
And of course, latent Anglican sympathy or manner of thinking also would explain his surprising attitude towards devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Readers outside of England may not fully appreciate that, unlike Baptists, Calvinists and other “low church” Protestants, the Protestants of the so-called ‘Church of England’ had retained some devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary of a kind (as they still do in some places today), although only a pale imitation of the true devotion to her found in the Catholic Church. Hence we find that Anglicans then, as now, were very uncomfortable with Catholic Marian devotion as found, for instance in the writings of St. Louis de Montfort or St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
“Low Views About the Mother of God”
Newman’s perceived (in the eyes of his own superiors) Anglican Mariology is another stark contrast with his fellow Oratorian, Fr. Frederick Faber. Faber was the first to translate St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary into English, and was a great proponent of popular Marian devotions for the faithful, devotions which doubtless were of the sort regarded as “foreign” by Newman and his friends, at least in Cardinal Manning’s view.
Processions, devotional candles, the May crowning and other things which were commonplace in other countries had fallen out of use in England and were being reintroduced by men like Faber. In his introduction to True Devotion, Faber echoed Manning’s complaint about a certain type of English Catholic who is always trying to downplay the Blessed Virgin Mary. Though he does not name names, it is difficult not to see Newman in his complaint:
Newman’s own writings show that Manning’s opinion of him wasn’t so wide of the mark. Extravagant devotions are all very well for foreigners, but here in England it just won’t do:
Once again, it should come as no great surprise that today’s episcopal modernists claim Newman as their fore-runner. On this question of Marian devotion, for instance, the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales, like Cardinal Manning, identify Newman as a down-player of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Unlike Manning, however, they wholeheartedly approve:
The reader will no doubt recall that John XXIII appointed a preparatory commission which included, among others, Archbishop Lefebvre; that the preparatory commission spent two years prior to Vatican II preparing draft documents for discussion at the Council; that once the Council began, John XXIII allowed the modernists to hijack the proceedings and to throw out all the far too Traditional schemata and replace them with documents of their own which were far more modernist; that one of those new documents was Lumen Gentium; and one of the drafts thrown in the bin at the start of the Council was, according, to Archbishop Lefebvre who helped draft it, a beautiful document on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Co-Redemptrix. Perhaps that is one of the “pious legends” they have in mind here?
What might have been the cause of Newman’s retention of so much Anglican baggage after his conversion is another question altogether and is anyone’s guess. Ultimately, of course, it is not really what matters, but perhaps some light is shed in a letter written to Cardinal Manning by Mgr. Talbot, the papal chamberlain of Pius IX, in which he suggests that Newman suffered from a combination of being idolised and living in a bubble:
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was not the only point of dispute which Newman had with Faber, or with Manning for that matter. But it is noticeable that in all these disputes and controversies, it is Newman who always seems to be on the wrong side, whereas:
Latent Modernism?
An, at best, horrifyingly ambivalent attitude towards the soundness of Sacred Scripture is by no means unique to Newman, especially when one thinks of Catholic writers of the mid- to late-19th century, a generation or so before St. Pius X. Given the war which has been waged for some time in these very pages against Fr. Paul Robinson’s ideas, however, this deserves at least a passing mention:
Lacordaire was a French priest and a self-proclaimed “Liberal Catholic”. Quite apart from Pius IX’s Syllabus, he is clearly the sort whom Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos was aimed just prior to the period; and in the years just after it the sort whom Fr. Sarda’s excellent little book Liberalism is a Sin had in mind. Lacordaire is also said to have announced that he would die, “a repentant Catholic but an unrepentant liberal.” On the issue of modernism, it is worth reading the introduction to Fr. Kimball’s book, together with Chapters 4 and 15. Although never condemned by St Pius X (he had been dead twentyodd years in any case), it seems that Newman’s friends and followers were worried that his writings would end up falling under the condemnation of Pascendi, which is itself telling.
What seems fairly clear is that Newman himself was aware during the 1850s, 60s and 70s that he was under suspicion by his superiors in England and in Rome. Hence when one encounters a certain ambiguity in his writings, might that not be, at least in part, because he was trying to avoid getting into trouble? Such ambiguity - orthodox one moment, novel the next, hard to pin down - is a classic symptom of the modernists a generation or so after Newman:
This is why merely quoting from Newman is not enough: it is when one begins to see him in context, through the eyes of his contemporaries, that the picture begins to come into focus. Here, for instance, is one of the leading modernists condemned by St. Pius X, Fr. George Tyrell, who although not a disciple of Newman in the strict sense, nonetheless did claim Newman’s thought as having laid the foundations for his own modernism:
Another modernist condemned by St. Pius X, Fr. Alfred Loisy, wrote to his friend Freidrich von Hugel in 1896, saying that he was reading Newman “with enthusiasm” and that:
Seven years later, in Auteur d’un Petit Livre (1903), Loisy explicitly named Newman as having been his guide in formulating his novel ideas.
How was Newman Viewed by Pius IX?
We have already seen that Fr. Newman’s anti-liberal contemporaries during the reign of Pius IX were not fans. What about the Pope himself? Immediately following his conversion, it would seem that he was favourable:
Pius IX is the Pope who, it is said, started out a liberal and became an anti-liberal during the course of his own papacy, especially after witnessing the Revolutions of 1848. He became Pope eight months after Newman was received into the Church, and it was only three or four months after that that he awarded a doctorate to the newly converted Newman. From the same article:
Thus it would appear Pius IX favoured Newman when he first became Pope but soon changed his mind and then spent the remaining thirty-odd years of his papacy regarding Newman with suspicion. Newman himself as good as admits that fact, writing to Mr. R. W. Church in March 1879 that his being made a Cardinal would put an end to:
The current modernist scions of the conciliar Church, too, also recognise that fact about Newman - it is something which they like about him!
This is all consistent with the changing fortunes of modernism and the war of ideas which was going on during that time. The liberals, for want of a better term, were repressed during the reigns of Pius IX and St. Pius X but in-between they had a brief respite during the reign of Leo XIII. And yet who can doubt that Pius IX and his allies were right to see Newman as suspect?
In hindsight, Leo XIII’s decision to make Newman a Cardinal was ill-judged and brought with it terrible, unforeseen consequences. The attempt by modernists and enemies of sound thinking to use Newman to further their own ends began the moment he died, if not even before, and has continued down to our own day: does not that fact alone tell its own tale?
Newman’s Unsound Philosophy
This is where things become really interesting, but also not a little complicated and abstract. It is also arguably the most important point to grasp about Newman, as well as the one which is most often overlooked by his ’conservative’ would-be supporters. The excellent little book My Life with Thomas Aquinas, (a 1980s Angelus Press reprint of articles originally from Integrity magazine in the 1940s and 50s), names Cardinal Newman as a leading light of what the author calls the “Thank-God-I’m-not-a-Thomist Club”, along with Dietrich von Hildebrand, William Marra and others. In doing so, the author identifies what is perhaps the most important piece of Anglican baggage which Newman brought into the Church with him when he converted, the one thing which links everything together: his unsound philosophy. It is also his legacy to the Catholic Church, and a very dangerous legacy it is too!
“Through no fault of their own, most of the great and learned converts to Catholicism in the last 150 years brought Platonism into the Church with them, and along with it a strong bias against the robust intellectual thought of St. Thomas. Over my lifetime these two influences, the educational, cultural and cosmopolitan thought of the converts, and their covert detestation of St. Thomas, have both spread among native Catholics, especially in the United States. Lately, with the seeming weakening of the Church’s claims for St. Thomas, the philosophical positions of these ‘Platonists’ are making rival claims in their own right. Phenomenology is one of these currently in vogue. Even its language traces to Kant, and remotely to Platonic errors. Philosophical pluralism is claimed, to put them on a par with the thought of St. Thomas, with a view to eventually replacing him, in the Hegelian manner.”
“Through no fault of their own” is perhaps being generous, but how culpable Newman may or may not have been is hardly the point: unsound philosophy is still dangerous, even if it is brought forward in good faith. How is it dangerous? So that we do not fill another twenty pages with a discussion of Plato and Aristotle, let us take just one fairly obvious example, that of “conscience.” Here is a neat little summary from the officially website for Newman’s 2019 Novus Ordo “canonisation”:
This concept is not Catholic, it is a novelty, but it is not the word “conscience” itself which is novel, rather the meaning being attached to it. For St. Thomas Aquinas, “conscience” is a thing which one does, much as we might say “knowing” or “understanding” (which is the Latin root of the word); it is not an “aboriginal conscience” which informs us of right and wrong and how we ought to act: that honour belongs to the virtue of Prudence. Prudence, being one of the four cardinal virtues, is not a thing one does so much as a thing which one has, which one possesses (which is the Latin root of the word “habit” - a “habitus,” a thing which is had).
This concept of “a conscience” as a faculty which each of us possesses, the aboriginal voice of God within us and all the rest, is not new and wasn’t even in Newman’s day. How then can it be that Newman is given the credit for it? The answer is that it was new within the Catholic Church, because it is a Protestant idea and the fact that many Catholics have in some degree fallen for it in the years since does not change that fact. Newman himself as good as admitted that his concept of “conscience” was essentially Protestant:
Very well, but what difference does this make in practice? Well, as we have already seen above, Newman admitted to “thinking it highly injudicious, indiscreet, wanton, to interfere with” Anglicans by urging their conversion. Yes, that could be attributed to a lingering sympathy for the (false) religion which formed him, a nostalgia, Anglican baggage, and so forth - but how can an intelligent man justify it to himself? It is because these Anglicans must follow their conscience, even if what it says is wrong, even leads to them being in error:
It is no coincidence that liberalism as a phenomenon grew up in Protestant countries long before it began to take root inside Catholic ones. It is, after all, a fruit of the so-called Protestant “reformation”. It is also not hard to see where this leads, the link between a mistaken view of obeying one’s “conscience,” the “Religious Liberty” of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae and the dismantling of so many Catholic states in the years after, where everyone has a right to follow his conscience, whatever his religion may be. Is that what Newman intended all along? Almost certainly not, but as the modernist George Tyrrell so neatly puts it: “Newman might have shuddered at his progeny, but it is nonetheless his.”
And yet, had Newman simply been more ready to listen to the Popes of his own day, perhaps this could have been avoided. How he deals with the fact that both Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos and Pius IX in Quanta Cura condemn (or “scoff at” to use Newman’s exact words) “liberty of conscience” we will leave to the reader who has sufficient curiosity, leisure and patience to go beyond this article. For our purposes, it is enough to show that when Newman is accused of having brought foreign, un-Catholic ideas with him into the Church, that is not an unfair or fanciful charge.
And “conscience” is not the only example of his unsound thinking. Newman’s ideas about probability he owed to having read the works of Anglican “bishop” Joseph Butler, as he himself admitted; his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” was viewed as highly suspect by eminent Catholics then and since; and his article for The Rambler, “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine,” so controversial that he had it published anonymously, was denounced to Rome as heretical by the Catholic bishop of Newport and even Newman’s own ordinary, Bishop Ullathorne, intervened and told him to stop writing for that magazine.
Final Verdict?
Whether he intended it or not, there can be no doubt that John Henry Cardinal Newman was used by the enemies of the Church ultimately to bring about the revolution through which we are all living. His philosophy is Anglican and un-Thomistic; he held “low views” about the Blessed Virgin Mary; and he was at least hesitant about the need for Anglicans to abandon their heretical false religion and enter the One, True Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Like his modernist offspring, the liberal Catholic is a slippery customer. He seems to say now one thing, now another; now sound, now unsound; wholly orthodox-sounding one moment, the next, virtually heretical. For this reason he is hard to nail down, hence it is a difficult task for anyone to convict him. If he is a prolific writer it is all the harder, and Newman wrote a huge amount. For this reason, as we have already said, it makes sense not merely to look at his words in a vacuum, but to consider how they were received at that time. And it is when we look at how Newman was viewed by his contemporaries, that a clear picture begins to emerge.
Newman’s opponents, many of whom were great men in their own day, all seem to agree that his ideas were unsound and suspect: in a word, that he was a liberal. But if we look to his friends and admirers in his own day, very often liberal Catholics themselves, they too all seem to agree that Newman was a liberal. The one thing that both sides seem to agree on was that Newman was a liberal.
Newman died in 1890. In the period immediately after his death, the men who took up his banner and kept his writings alive were liberals and modernists: some of them went on to be condemned by St. Pius X even if Newman himself was not, but condemned or not, they too all seem to have regarded him as a liberal and a proto-modernist.
In our own day, the liberals and modernists claim him as one of their own and the basis for their own ideas. The picture is remarkably consistent, the only inconsistency being today’s “conservatives” - among whom are some who call themselves “Traditional” - who insist on the mistaken belief that Newman was somehow a sound Catholic, an anti-liberal, Traditional. Perhaps what is lacking is their own understanding of what those terms really mean. At any rate, Newman was not and is not; nor is he a Saint, nor is he a Doctor, nor ever will be. There is a reason that the conciliarists of today have raised him this far and seek to raise him further: they are not stupid, they know a fellow-traveller when they see him and they are doubtless hoping that their new “Doctor” will be of great use to them in the years ahead in slowly unravelling what little there remains of Traditionalist resistance to the Vatican II revolution in the Church. Let us hope that an ever greater number of Traditional Catholics will not allow themselves to be fooled.
Part 2: What is the Real Problem with Newman?
If Newman is not a Saint, then he cannot, by definition, be considered a Doctor of the Church and we could end this article here. However, it is as one becomes gradually better acquainted with the man and his thinking that the picture which emerges becomes increasingly disturbing.
Newman’s Background
Lest we be accused of ignoring it, let us begin, then, with the question of Newman’s family background and antecedents. The introduction to Fr. Kimball’s fascinating book Cardinal Newman: Trojan Horse in the Church quotes an extract from Rev. Dr. William Francis Barry’s 1903 biography of Newman:
Quote:“Born in the City of London, not far from the Bank, on February 21st 1801, John Henry was the son of John Newman and Jemima Fourdinier his wife, the eldest of six children, three boys and three girls. “His Father,” says Thomas Mozley, “was of a family of small landed proprietors in Cambridgeshire, and had an hereditary taste for music, of which he had a practical and scientific knowledge, together with much general culture.” He was chief clerk and afterwards partner in a banking firm, was also a Freemason, with a high standing in the craft, an admirer of Franklin and an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare.
These particulars, except the last, will prepare us for the fact that in an earlier generation the family had spelt its name “Newmann”; that it was understood to be of Dutch origin; and that its real descent was Hebrew. The talent for music, calculation and business, the untiring energy, legal acumen, and dislike of speculative metaphysics, which were conspicuous in John Henry, bear out this interesting genealogy. A large part of his character and writings will become intelligible if we keep it in mind. That his features had a strong Jewish cast, is evident from his portraits, and was especially to be noted in old age. It may be conjectured that the migration of these Dutch Jews to England fell within a period not very distant from the death of Spinoza in 1675.”
Barry would later change his mind and retract what he had written here (for whatever that is worth: some might say that his words stand or fall on their own merit). The Thomas Mozley to whom he refers was a friend and contemporary of Newman who became his brother-in-law after marrying one of Newman’s younger sisters. He too was part of the Oxford Movement and almost became a Catholic in 1843, until Newman talked him out of it. He was someone who ought to know what he was talking about, in other words. His work “Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement” is available here: https://archive.org/details/reminiscence...2/mode/2up.
Mozley also tells us that Newman’s mother was a Calvinist of French Hugenot extraction and as for the father’s having been a high-ranking Freemason, he is careful to add that, “...no one of his three sons was initiated” into it. Well, what if Newman’s family were originally Jews? Does that in itself mean that we cannot trust the man? No, of course not: on its own, that fact doesn’t mean a great deal, and if it is tempting to look at parallels between Newman’s thought and Jewish thought, it is also true that there are several very great Saints whose families were of Jewish origin, St Therese of Avila for instance. And if there were to be found a link between his family and upbringing and the thinking evident in his later writings, then the question still hinges on the soundness of that thinking. If there is, as Barry suggested, a dislike of metaphysics then that is the real issue.
Hence, for what follows, we will simply state what others appear already to have spotted in Newman’s thinking, and point the reader who wishes to know more in the direction of greater, more diligent minds than the author of these few pages. What follows is a non-exhaustive sample: we will try to focus on the relevant quotations and keep our own commentary to a minimum.
The Influence of Kant and Hegel
Quote:“...Newman’s writings have a marked influence from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who is commonly known to have provided the philosophic groundwork of Modernism, even though Newman himself categorically twice declares, ‘I never read a word of Kant’ in letters to W.S. Lilly in 1884-5, but he also said, ‘I never read a word of Coleridge.’ This latter remark is, as Wilfrid Ward says, ‘not the only instance in which his memory was in later years at fault.’ (Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman, 1912, vol.1, p.8) ”
(Cardinal Newman: Trojan Horse in the Church, Ch.6)
Quote:“He possessed it is true, a copy of Miekeljohn’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1855), and its leaves are cut from the beginning to the doctrine of categories.”
(Johannes Artz, Newman in contact with Kant’s Thought in The Journal of Theological Studies, vol.31 (1980), n.2, p.517)
Quote:“The philosophical basis of the Oxford Movement was indirectly derived from Kant. […] Coleridge was the first among English thinkers to study and understand Kant, to assimilate his teaching, and to reproduce it in a new form… I am concerned with his effect upon...the Tractarian Movement. Cardinal Newman, in a paper published in the British Critic in 1839, reckons him one of his precursors, as ‘providing a philosophical basis for it, as instilling a higher philosophy into inquiring minds than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept.’ ”
(W.S. Lilly, Ancient Religion and Modern Thought (London, 1884) p.ii, r 59-61)
Quote:“It was Newman’s contention that the intense theological study which had preceded Ineffabilis Deus [the Apostolic Constitution of Pius IX on the Immaculate Conception] ‘had brought Catholic Schools into union about it, while it secured the accuracy of each.’ He believed that each of the two schools of thought which had previously existed on the subject of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception ‘had its own extreme points eliminated, and they became one, because the truth to which they converged was one.’
Newman seemed to assert that the only means of doctrinal progress was along the Hegelian lines of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. He apparently imagined that when two groups are opposed on some issue, the ultimate resolution can come only through a sort of compromise, in which the ‘extreme’ points of both opposing theories are abandoned while all the contestants unite in their adherence to a middle position. He seems not to have considered the possibility of a situation in which two parties might debate, and one turn out to have defended a truth which the other attacked.”
(Mgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton: John Henry Newman and the Vatican Definition of Papal Infallibility in The American Ecclesiastical Review, vol.113, n.4 (Oct.1945), p.313)
Proto- Ecumenism and Salvation Outside the Church:
Quote:“As to the prospect of those countless multitudes of a country like this, who apparently have no supernatural vision of the next world at all, and die without fear because they die without thought, with these, alas! I am not here concerned. But the remarks I have been making suggest much of comfort, when we look out into what is called the religious world in all its varieties, whether it be the High Church section, or the Evangelical, whether it be in the Establishment, or in Methodism, or in Dissent, so far as there seems to be real earnestness and invincible prejudice. One cannot but hope that that written Word of God, for which they desire to be jealous, though exhibited to them in a mutilated form and in a translation unsanctioned by Holy Church, is of incalculable blessing to their souls, and may be through God’s grace, the divine instrument of bringing many to contrition and to a happy death who have received no sacrament since they were baptised in their infancy. One cannot hope but that the Anglican Prayer Book, with its Psalter and Catholic prayers, even though these, in the translation, have passed through heretical intellects, may retain so much of its old virtue as to cooperate with divine grace in the instruction and salvation of a large remnant. In these and many other
ways, even in England, and much more in Greece, the difficulty is softened which is presented to the imagination by the view of such large populations, who, though called Christian, are not Catholic or orthodox in creed.”
(Newman: Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching: In Twelve Lectures addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Religious Movement of 1833, 1901, vol.2, pp.356-357)
Quote:“All this is quite consistent with believing, as I firmly do, that individuals in the English [i.e. Anglican] Church are invisibly knit into that True Body of which they are not outwardly members; and consistent, too, with thinking it highly injudicious, indiscreet, wanton, to interfere with them in particular cases - only it is a matter of judgment in the particular case.”
(Newman: Letter to Jemima Mozley, October 9th 1845 [i.e. the very day of his reception into the Catholic Church! - Ed.] )
Quote:“[Newman writes that his fellow Catholics in England are complaining that he is doing nothing and are saying:] ‘Why, he has made no converts, as Manning and Faber have.’ Here is the real secret of my ‘doing nothing.’ The only thing of course which it is worth producing, is fruit - but with the Cardinal, immediate show is fruit, and conversions the sole fruit. At Propaganda [i.e. in Rome], conversions, and nothing else, are the proof of doing anything. Everywhere with Catholics, to make converts, is doing something; and not to make them is ‘doing nothing.’ […] But I am altogether different - my objects, my theory of acting, my powers, go in a different direction, and one not understood or contemplated at Rome or elsewhere. […] I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men, lest they should not have counted the cost, and should have difficulties after they have entered the Church, I do but imply the same thing, that the Church must be prepared for converts, as well as converts prepared for the Church. How can this be understood at Rome? What do they know there of the state of English Catholics? Of the minds of English Protestants? What do they know of the antagonism of Protestantism and Catholicism in England? The Cardinal might know something, were he not so onesided, so slow to throw himself into other minds, so sanguine, so controversial and unphilosophical in his attitude of mind, so desirous to make himself agreeable to the authorities at Rome.”
(An extract from Newman’s journal, January 1863, which can be found here: (www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume1/chapter19.html)
“Manning” of course refers to Cardinal Manning, the Cardinal Archbishop primate of England and Wales from 1865 to his death in 1892 and therefore one of Newman’s superiors. “Faber” is Fr. Frederick Faber, contemporary and former-colleague of Newman, like him an Oratorian and the founder of the London Oratory (Newman’s Oratory was in Birmingham). This is not the only time that we will see Newman and Faber at odds, and the differences between the two always seem to be favourable to Fr. Faber. But more on that later. In the meantime, lest there be any doubt at all, what Newman is expressing is contrary to sound Catholic teaching:
Quote:“Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”
(Pius IX, Syllabus Errorum, 1863 - condemned proposition 17)
Quote:“Some say they are not bound by the doctrine, explained in Our Encyclical Letter of a few years ago [Mystici Corporis Christi], and based on the Sources of Revelation, which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.”
(Pius XII, Humani Generis, 27)
Quote:“The teaching that the dogma of the necessity of the Church for salvation admits of exceptions is, in the last analysis, a denial of the dogma as it has been stated in the authoritative declarations of the ecclesiastical magisterium and even as it is expressed in the axiom or formula Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. It is important to note that that teaching is found in Cardinal Newman’s last published study on this subject. […] Obviously, there could be no more effective way of reducing the teaching on the necessity of the Church for the attainment of eternal salvation to an empty formula than the explanation advanced by Newman in what are probably the least felicitous pages of all his published works. That explanation is certainly one of those reproved in the encyclical letter Humani Generis.”
(Mgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation, 1958, quoted by Fr. Kimball in Cardinal Newman: Trojan Horse in the Church, Ch.7)
The picture which emerges is that when the Vatican II modernists of today claim Newman as a precursor and one of their own, this is not mere wishful thinking on their part, but based, at least in part, on a genuine understanding and appreciation his thinking:
Quote:“After his conversion he could and did publish dismissive statements about Anglicanism that were wounding to his former Anglican friends. But at a more fundamental level, Newman was a bridge figure between Catholicism and Anglicanism.
Quote:His Apologia pro Vita Sua insisted on the reality and permanent value of his teenage Evangelical conversion, and the book is pervaded by affection and gratitude for the Anglican mentors from whom he learned and deepened his Christian faith. More fundamentally, he never abandoned the historical, scriptural and patristic studies that shaped his Anglican writings. […] But perhaps Newman’s greatest contribution to Ecumenism is the extraordinary fact that after his conversion, instead of repudiating his Anglican writings, he republished most of them, with only minor changes, a body of work shaped by Anglican theological method, which has proved a new and fertilising force for the ongoing renewal of Catholic theology.”
(Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales, Scripture, the Fathers and Ecumenism, cbcew.org.uk/newman-scripture-the-fathers-and-ecumenism)
The idea that even after being received into the Church, Newman somehow remained an Anglican in his heart and in his thinking is something of a recurring theme and does seem to explain a great deal, including why so many of his fans today are converts to the conciliar Church from Anglicanism (and who, all too often, are found to be still Anglican in all but name). It would explain the fact that he seems to have been rather reluctant to attack the “Church of England” and even a little reluctant to convert too many of them, or even risk offending them. Concerning the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, which took place in 1850 and offended many Anglicans at the time, his biographer tells us:
Quote:“He was not in complete sympathy with the Cardinal’s [i.e. the new Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman] constructive programme. He had already deprecated in his letters to Faber the policy of unnecessary advertisement akin to boasting, and the
proclaiming of supposed triumphs out of all proportion to facts and realities. This feeling henceforth steadily deepened in his mind. He seems from his letters to have regarded the institution of the new hierarchy as part of the movement associated with the name of Augustus Welby Pugin. […] He did not wish to weaken the hold of the Church of England on the masses. The Established Church was in his eyes a great power in English society for good - for religion and against the growth of infidelity. The ‘conversion of England’ was, moreover, not a practical prospect. To weaken the Establishment was to damage a bulwark of religion, while Catholics had as yet no adequate force to supply in its place. It was true enough that the Bishops and clergymen up and down the country had used most violent and unjustifiable language against Catholicism. But Newman's more normal policy was to be above cheap retort, to consider solely the practical interests of religion. From his letters at this time we may gather that he would have been glad rather than sorry if the new hierarchy had been abandoned […]”
(Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman, vol.1, p.257 ff)
And of course, latent Anglican sympathy or manner of thinking also would explain his surprising attitude towards devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Readers outside of England may not fully appreciate that, unlike Baptists, Calvinists and other “low church” Protestants, the Protestants of the so-called ‘Church of England’ had retained some devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary of a kind (as they still do in some places today), although only a pale imitation of the true devotion to her found in the Catholic Church. Hence we find that Anglicans then, as now, were very uncomfortable with Catholic Marian devotion as found, for instance in the writings of St. Louis de Montfort or St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
“Low Views About the Mother of God”
Quote:“Whether he knows it or not he has become the centre of those who hold low views about the Holy See, are anti-Roman, cold and silent, to say no more, about the Temporal Power, national, English, critical of Catholic devotions, and are always on the lower side. […] It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. It takes the line of deprecating foreign devotions, Ulatramontanism, antinational sympathies. In one word it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side and will deceive many. […] The thing which will save us from low views about the Mother of God and the Vicar of Our Lord is the million Irish in England, and the sympathy of the Catholics in Ireland. I am thankful to know that they have no sympathy for the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen.”
(Cardinal Manning, Letter to Mgr. Talbot, 25th Feb. 1866)
Newman’s perceived (in the eyes of his own superiors) Anglican Mariology is another stark contrast with his fellow Oratorian, Fr. Frederick Faber. Faber was the first to translate St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary into English, and was a great proponent of popular Marian devotions for the faithful, devotions which doubtless were of the sort regarded as “foreign” by Newman and his friends, at least in Cardinal Manning’s view.
Processions, devotional candles, the May crowning and other things which were commonplace in other countries had fallen out of use in England and were being reintroduced by men like Faber. In his introduction to True Devotion, Faber echoed Manning’s complaint about a certain type of English Catholic who is always trying to downplay the Blessed Virgin Mary. Though he does not name names, it is difficult not to see Newman in his complaint:
Quote:“Here in England, Mary is not half enough preached. Devotion to her is low and thin and poor. It is frightened out of its wits by the sneers of heresy. It is always invoking human respect and carnal prudence wishing to make Mary so little of a Mary that Protestants may feel at ease about her. Its ignorance of theology makes it unsubstantial and unworthy. It is not the prominent characteristic of our religion which it ought to be.”
(F.W. Faber, Introduction to True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary)
Newman’s own writings show that Manning’s opinion of him wasn’t so wide of the mark. Extravagant devotions are all very well for foreigners, but here in England it just won’t do:
Quote:“I suppose we owe it to the national good sense that English Catholics have been protected from the extravagances which are elsewhere to be found. […] In the case of our own common people I think such a forced style of devotion would be simply unintelligible; as to the educated, I doubt whether it can have more than an occasional or temporary influence. If the Catholic faith spreads in England, these peculiarities will not spread with it.”
(Newman: Letter to John Keeble, 8th October 1865)
Once again, it should come as no great surprise that today’s episcopal modernists claim Newman as their fore-runner. On this question of Marian devotion, for instance, the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales, like Cardinal Manning, identify Newman as a down-player of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Unlike Manning, however, they wholeheartedly approve:
Quote:“His 1866 Open Letter to Pusey formulated a rich Marian theology based entirely on Scripture and patristic writings, rather than the pious legends and extravagant emotion that partly characterised nineteenth-century Catholic Mariology. That reliance on Scripture and the Fathers would prove fruitful for the twentieth-century movement, “nouvelle theologie,” which helped revitalise Catholic theology, and influenced the theological idiom of the Second Vatican Council – for instance, the chapter in Lumen Gentium on the role of Mary in salvation history owes a great deal to Newman’s example.”
The reader will no doubt recall that John XXIII appointed a preparatory commission which included, among others, Archbishop Lefebvre; that the preparatory commission spent two years prior to Vatican II preparing draft documents for discussion at the Council; that once the Council began, John XXIII allowed the modernists to hijack the proceedings and to throw out all the far too Traditional schemata and replace them with documents of their own which were far more modernist; that one of those new documents was Lumen Gentium; and one of the drafts thrown in the bin at the start of the Council was, according, to Archbishop Lefebvre who helped draft it, a beautiful document on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Co-Redemptrix. Perhaps that is one of the “pious legends” they have in mind here?
What might have been the cause of Newman’s retention of so much Anglican baggage after his conversion is another question altogether and is anyone’s guess. Ultimately, of course, it is not really what matters, but perhaps some light is shed in a letter written to Cardinal Manning by Mgr. Talbot, the papal chamberlain of Pius IX, in which he suggests that Newman suffered from a combination of being idolised and living in a bubble:
Quote:“Newman’s work none here can understand. Poor man, by living almost ever since he has been a Catholic surrounded by a set of inferior men who idolize him, I do not think he has ever acquired the Catholic instincts.”
(Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, vol.2 p.323)
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was not the only point of dispute which Newman had with Faber, or with Manning for that matter. But it is noticeable that in all these disputes and controversies, it is Newman who always seems to be on the wrong side, whereas:
Quote:“Faber’s name was to be coupled with Manning and Ward, those Catholics who were opposed during the next decades to liberal Catholicism - and by implication to Newman.”
(Ronald Chapman: Father Faber, p.342)
Latent Modernism?
An, at best, horrifyingly ambivalent attitude towards the soundness of Sacred Scripture is by no means unique to Newman, especially when one thinks of Catholic writers of the mid- to late-19th century, a generation or so before St. Pius X. Given the war which has been waged for some time in these very pages against Fr. Paul Robinson’s ideas, however, this deserves at least a passing mention:
Quote:“Far removed from fundamentalism, Newman was dubious about the historical accuracy of many biblical stories; but he lamented the reckless attacks of liberals on the reliability of the Bible because they deprived conservative Protestants of a needed support. ‘To unsettle the minds of a generation, when you give them no landmarks and no causeway across the morass is to undertake a great responsibility.’ (Newman to Malcolm Maccoll, March, 24 1861)”
(Avery Cardinal Dulles S.J., Church and Society p.61)
Quote:“His friends included some of a type known to history as ‘Liberal Catholics.’ Of Montalembert and Lacordaire he wrote in 1864: ‘In their general line of thought and conduct I enthusiastically concur and consider them to be before their age.’ He speaks of ‘the unselfish aims, the thwarted projects, the unrequited toils, the grand and tender resignation of Lacordaire.’ That moving description might be applied to Newman himself. He was intent on the problems of the time and not alarmed at Darwin’s Origin of Species.”
(Catholic Encyclopaedia: John Henry Newman)
Lacordaire was a French priest and a self-proclaimed “Liberal Catholic”. Quite apart from Pius IX’s Syllabus, he is clearly the sort whom Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos was aimed just prior to the period; and in the years just after it the sort whom Fr. Sarda’s excellent little book Liberalism is a Sin had in mind. Lacordaire is also said to have announced that he would die, “a repentant Catholic but an unrepentant liberal.” On the issue of modernism, it is worth reading the introduction to Fr. Kimball’s book, together with Chapters 4 and 15. Although never condemned by St Pius X (he had been dead twentyodd years in any case), it seems that Newman’s friends and followers were worried that his writings would end up falling under the condemnation of Pascendi, which is itself telling.
What seems fairly clear is that Newman himself was aware during the 1850s, 60s and 70s that he was under suspicion by his superiors in England and in Rome. Hence when one encounters a certain ambiguity in his writings, might that not be, at least in part, because he was trying to avoid getting into trouble? Such ambiguity - orthodox one moment, novel the next, hard to pin down - is a classic symptom of the modernists a generation or so after Newman:
Quote:“Hence in their books you find some things which might well be expressed by a Catholic, but in the next page you find other things which might have been dictated by a rationalist.”
(St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 18)
This is why merely quoting from Newman is not enough: it is when one begins to see him in context, through the eyes of his contemporaries, that the picture begins to come into focus. Here, for instance, is one of the leading modernists condemned by St. Pius X, Fr. George Tyrell, who although not a disciple of Newman in the strict sense, nonetheless did claim Newman’s thought as having laid the foundations for his own modernism:
Quote:“The solidarity of Newmanism with Modernism cannot be denied. Newman might have shuddered at his progeny, but it is nonetheless his. He is the founder of a method which has led to results which he could not have foreseen or desired. The growth of his system has made its divergence from scholasticism clearer every day. If scholasticism is essential to Catholicism, Newman must go overboard and the defiance hurled in the face of history at the [First] Vatican Council and reiterated with emphasis by Pius X is superabundantly justified.”
(Fr. George Tyrell, in the Hibbert Journal, vol.6 p.243)
Another modernist condemned by St. Pius X, Fr. Alfred Loisy, wrote to his friend Freidrich von Hugel in 1896, saying that he was reading Newman “with enthusiasm” and that:
Quote:“Newman must have been the most open-minded theologian that had existed in the Church since Origen.”
(Mémoires pour server a l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, Vol.1, 426)
Seven years later, in Auteur d’un Petit Livre (1903), Loisy explicitly named Newman as having been his guide in formulating his novel ideas.
How was Newman Viewed by Pius IX?
We have already seen that Fr. Newman’s anti-liberal contemporaries during the reign of Pius IX were not fans. What about the Pope himself? Immediately following his conversion, it would seem that he was favourable:
Quote:“In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for St. Mary's College, Oscott, where Nicholas Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX.”
Pius IX is the Pope who, it is said, started out a liberal and became an anti-liberal during the course of his own papacy, especially after witnessing the Revolutions of 1848. He became Pope eight months after Newman was received into the Church, and it was only three or four months after that that he awarded a doctorate to the newly converted Newman. From the same article:
Quote:“In 1878, Newman’s old college elected him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford after an interval of thirty-two years, on the same day Pope Pius IX died. Pius had mistrusted Newman but his successor, Pope Leo XIII, was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other English Catholic laymen to make Newman a cardinal, despite the fact that he was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome. Cardinal Manning seems not to have been interested in having Newman become a cardinal and remained silent when the Pope asked him about it.”
(Ibid.)
Thus it would appear Pius IX favoured Newman when he first became Pope but soon changed his mind and then spent the remaining thirty-odd years of his papacy regarding Newman with suspicion. Newman himself as good as admits that fact, writing to Mr. R. W. Church in March 1879 that his being made a Cardinal would put an end to:
Quote:“...all the stories which have gone about of my being a half Catholic, a Liberal Catholic, [and] not to be trusted . . . The cloud is lifted from me forever. … For 20 or 30 years ignorant or hot-headed Catholics had said almost that I was a heretic … it had long riled me, that Protestants should condescendingly say that I was only half a Catholic”
(Letters and Diaries, vol. 29, 72 & 160)
The current modernist scions of the conciliar Church, too, also recognise that fact about Newman - it is something which they like about him!
Quote:“Following his conversion, St. John Henry Newman faced both misunderstandings from the Anglican world and misgivings in the Catholic world, where he was even seen as an ‘infiltrator’ or ‘a kind of Trojan horse.’ ”
This is all consistent with the changing fortunes of modernism and the war of ideas which was going on during that time. The liberals, for want of a better term, were repressed during the reigns of Pius IX and St. Pius X but in-between they had a brief respite during the reign of Leo XIII. And yet who can doubt that Pius IX and his allies were right to see Newman as suspect?
In hindsight, Leo XIII’s decision to make Newman a Cardinal was ill-judged and brought with it terrible, unforeseen consequences. The attempt by modernists and enemies of sound thinking to use Newman to further their own ends began the moment he died, if not even before, and has continued down to our own day: does not that fact alone tell its own tale?
Newman’s Unsound Philosophy
This is where things become really interesting, but also not a little complicated and abstract. It is also arguably the most important point to grasp about Newman, as well as the one which is most often overlooked by his ’conservative’ would-be supporters. The excellent little book My Life with Thomas Aquinas, (a 1980s Angelus Press reprint of articles originally from Integrity magazine in the 1940s and 50s), names Cardinal Newman as a leading light of what the author calls the “Thank-God-I’m-not-a-Thomist Club”, along with Dietrich von Hildebrand, William Marra and others. In doing so, the author identifies what is perhaps the most important piece of Anglican baggage which Newman brought into the Church with him when he converted, the one thing which links everything together: his unsound philosophy. It is also his legacy to the Catholic Church, and a very dangerous legacy it is too!
“Through no fault of their own, most of the great and learned converts to Catholicism in the last 150 years brought Platonism into the Church with them, and along with it a strong bias against the robust intellectual thought of St. Thomas. Over my lifetime these two influences, the educational, cultural and cosmopolitan thought of the converts, and their covert detestation of St. Thomas, have both spread among native Catholics, especially in the United States. Lately, with the seeming weakening of the Church’s claims for St. Thomas, the philosophical positions of these ‘Platonists’ are making rival claims in their own right. Phenomenology is one of these currently in vogue. Even its language traces to Kant, and remotely to Platonic errors. Philosophical pluralism is claimed, to put them on a par with the thought of St. Thomas, with a view to eventually replacing him, in the Hegelian manner.”
“Through no fault of their own” is perhaps being generous, but how culpable Newman may or may not have been is hardly the point: unsound philosophy is still dangerous, even if it is brought forward in good faith. How is it dangerous? So that we do not fill another twenty pages with a discussion of Plato and Aristotle, let us take just one fairly obvious example, that of “conscience.” Here is a neat little summary from the officially website for Newman’s 2019 Novus Ordo “canonisation”:
Quote:“The great gift, which Newman saw could safely steer a person through all this controversy, is conscience. Conscience – the ‘aboriginal vicar of Christ’ – is that faculty every human being has to know what is right. It is the voice of God Himself
speaking in our soul.”
This concept is not Catholic, it is a novelty, but it is not the word “conscience” itself which is novel, rather the meaning being attached to it. For St. Thomas Aquinas, “conscience” is a thing which one does, much as we might say “knowing” or “understanding” (which is the Latin root of the word); it is not an “aboriginal conscience” which informs us of right and wrong and how we ought to act: that honour belongs to the virtue of Prudence. Prudence, being one of the four cardinal virtues, is not a thing one does so much as a thing which one has, which one possesses (which is the Latin root of the word “habit” - a “habitus,” a thing which is had).
This concept of “a conscience” as a faculty which each of us possesses, the aboriginal voice of God within us and all the rest, is not new and wasn’t even in Newman’s day. How then can it be that Newman is given the credit for it? The answer is that it was new within the Catholic Church, because it is a Protestant idea and the fact that many Catholics have in some degree fallen for it in the years since does not change that fact. Newman himself as good as admitted that his concept of “conscience” was essentially Protestant:
Quote:“When Anglicans, Wesleyans, the various Presbyterian sects in Scotland, and other denominations among us, speak of conscience, they mean what we mean, the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...”
(Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p.247)
Very well, but what difference does this make in practice? Well, as we have already seen above, Newman admitted to “thinking it highly injudicious, indiscreet, wanton, to interfere with” Anglicans by urging their conversion. Yes, that could be attributed to a lingering sympathy for the (false) religion which formed him, a nostalgia, Anglican baggage, and so forth - but how can an intelligent man justify it to himself? It is because these Anglicans must follow their conscience, even if what it says is wrong, even leads to them being in error:
Quote:“...still he must act according to that error, while he is in it, because he in full sincerity thinks the error to be truth.”
(Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p.259)
It is no coincidence that liberalism as a phenomenon grew up in Protestant countries long before it began to take root inside Catholic ones. It is, after all, a fruit of the so-called Protestant “reformation”. It is also not hard to see where this leads, the link between a mistaken view of obeying one’s “conscience,” the “Religious Liberty” of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae and the dismantling of so many Catholic states in the years after, where everyone has a right to follow his conscience, whatever his religion may be. Is that what Newman intended all along? Almost certainly not, but as the modernist George Tyrrell so neatly puts it: “Newman might have shuddered at his progeny, but it is nonetheless his.”
And yet, had Newman simply been more ready to listen to the Popes of his own day, perhaps this could have been avoided. How he deals with the fact that both Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos and Pius IX in Quanta Cura condemn (or “scoff at” to use Newman’s exact words) “liberty of conscience” we will leave to the reader who has sufficient curiosity, leisure and patience to go beyond this article. For our purposes, it is enough to show that when Newman is accused of having brought foreign, un-Catholic ideas with him into the Church, that is not an unfair or fanciful charge.
And “conscience” is not the only example of his unsound thinking. Newman’s ideas about probability he owed to having read the works of Anglican “bishop” Joseph Butler, as he himself admitted; his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” was viewed as highly suspect by eminent Catholics then and since; and his article for The Rambler, “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine,” so controversial that he had it published anonymously, was denounced to Rome as heretical by the Catholic bishop of Newport and even Newman’s own ordinary, Bishop Ullathorne, intervened and told him to stop writing for that magazine.
Final Verdict?
Whether he intended it or not, there can be no doubt that John Henry Cardinal Newman was used by the enemies of the Church ultimately to bring about the revolution through which we are all living. His philosophy is Anglican and un-Thomistic; he held “low views” about the Blessed Virgin Mary; and he was at least hesitant about the need for Anglicans to abandon their heretical false religion and enter the One, True Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Like his modernist offspring, the liberal Catholic is a slippery customer. He seems to say now one thing, now another; now sound, now unsound; wholly orthodox-sounding one moment, the next, virtually heretical. For this reason he is hard to nail down, hence it is a difficult task for anyone to convict him. If he is a prolific writer it is all the harder, and Newman wrote a huge amount. For this reason, as we have already said, it makes sense not merely to look at his words in a vacuum, but to consider how they were received at that time. And it is when we look at how Newman was viewed by his contemporaries, that a clear picture begins to emerge.
Newman’s opponents, many of whom were great men in their own day, all seem to agree that his ideas were unsound and suspect: in a word, that he was a liberal. But if we look to his friends and admirers in his own day, very often liberal Catholics themselves, they too all seem to agree that Newman was a liberal. The one thing that both sides seem to agree on was that Newman was a liberal.
Newman died in 1890. In the period immediately after his death, the men who took up his banner and kept his writings alive were liberals and modernists: some of them went on to be condemned by St. Pius X even if Newman himself was not, but condemned or not, they too all seem to have regarded him as a liberal and a proto-modernist.
In our own day, the liberals and modernists claim him as one of their own and the basis for their own ideas. The picture is remarkably consistent, the only inconsistency being today’s “conservatives” - among whom are some who call themselves “Traditional” - who insist on the mistaken belief that Newman was somehow a sound Catholic, an anti-liberal, Traditional. Perhaps what is lacking is their own understanding of what those terms really mean. At any rate, Newman was not and is not; nor is he a Saint, nor is he a Doctor, nor ever will be. There is a reason that the conciliarists of today have raised him this far and seek to raise him further: they are not stupid, they know a fellow-traveller when they see him and they are doubtless hoping that their new “Doctor” will be of great use to them in the years ahead in slowly unravelling what little there remains of Traditionalist resistance to the Vatican II revolution in the Church. Let us hope that an ever greater number of Traditional Catholics will not allow themselves to be fooled.
Quote:“Hear this maxim, O you, Catholics full of temerity, who so quickly adopt the ideas and the language of your time, you who speak of reconciling the faith and of reconciling the Church with the modern spirit and with the new law. And you who accept with so much confidence the most dangerous pursuits of what our age so pridefully labels ‘Science,’ see to what extent you are straying from the program set out by the great Apostle, ‘O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words, and oppositions of knowledge falsely socalled’ (I Tim. 6:20). But take heed. With such temerities, one is soon led farther than he first had thought. And in placing themselves on the slope of profane novelties - in obeying the currents of so-called science - many have lost the Faith.
Have you not often been saddened, and taken fright, my venerable brothers, on hearing the language of certain men, who believe themselves still to be sons of the Church, men who still practice occasionally as Catholics and who often approach the Lord's Table? Do you still believe them to be sons, do you still believe them to be members of the Church, those who, wrapping themselves in such vague phrases as modern aspirations and the force of progress and civilization, proclaim the existence of a ‘consciousness of the laity,’ of a secular and political conscience opposed to the ‘conscience of the Church,’ against which they assume the right to react, for its correction and renewal?
Ah! So many passengers, and even pilots, who, believing themselves to be yet in the barque, and playing with profane novelties and the lying science of their time, have already sunk and are in the abyss.”
- Cardinal Pie, Bishop of Poitiers, 1864
Quote:“Liberal Catholicism is an error of the rich. It could never occur to a man who had lived among the people and had seen the difficulties with which the truth has to contend. … In vain have liberal Catholics denied their brothers, scorned papal bulls, and explained away or disdained encyclicals: these excesses earned them scant praise and humiliating encouragements, but no converts. […] Liberalism proclaims that … ‘as soon as we become more subtle Catholics, modified Catholics, in a word, new Catholics, we will immediately convert the world.’ This illusion consoles their mind when their heart quails; they cherish it, and their eloquence on its behalf reveals how violently, like Esau, they desire a mess of pottage.”
- Louis Veuillot, The Liberal Illusion, 1866
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre