Saturday, October 19, 2019

Church still lags behind Newman


17 October 2019, The Tablet

Church still lags behind Newman


The joyful celebrations of the extraordinary life and work of England’s newly canonised saint, John Henry Newman, need to be followed by a serious response. Enough is known of his principles and values to make it fairly certain that, were he alive today, he would see much of his own mind and heart alive in the contemporary Church in England and Wales. But there would be reservations and disappointments, too. And perhaps what would concern him most is the continued absence of any systematic consultation among bishops, priests and laity on the many challenges the Church now faces.


Newman was a pragmatist, and he would have recognised that such consultations would have been difficult, and perhaps even confrontational, during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The Polish Pope brushed aside the report of the Liverpool Pastoral Congress in 1980 when its proposals were presented to him by Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Worlock. Since then there has been an absence of the sort of joined-up strategic thinking that the Congress represented. Indeed, after the rebuff in Rome, the hierarchy of the time took the view that English and Welsh Catholicism needed to keep a low profile if it was to avoid papal displeasure. That became a settled habit of aversion to risk. In the papacy of Pope Francis, this is no longer necessary or desirable. Were Newman among us, he would undoubtedly have said so.

As Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin reminded us in Rome last week, Newman wanted a laity “who know their religion, who enter into it … who know their Creed so well they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it”. With proper consultation among bishops, priests and laity would the Jesuit-run Heythrop College have been allowed to go under? It closely modelled Newman’s “idea of a university”, prioritising the life of the mind in an independent setting. A Heythrop that was cherished and supported could have been where an educated Catholic laity was nourished. Instead it was closed with hardly an episcopal tear being shed.

Newman would have welcomed the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and its preferred model of church government, balancing the principle of a universal primacy with the principle of synodality – in other words, letting the sensus fidelium find its voice through discussion and debate involving clergy, Religious and lay women and men.

The nearest approach to this spirit of synodality seen in recent years came in the preparations for the first synod on family life called by Pope Francis in 2014. The faithful were indeed consulted, as Newman would have liked, though the result of the consultation was kept secret, which he would not. A second synod led to the papal exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, which reflected the inclusive view of family life that emerged from the synods and raised the possibility, among other things, of divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Holy Communion in some circumstances. What Newman would have thought of this we cannot know, but he would have been deeply disappointed by the lack of any response at all from the hierarchy.

The celebrations this weekend were a refreshment for the Catholic Church in England and Wales. But it still has not caught up with Newman. Until it does, we should not spend too long basking in his glory.

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