HEART TO HEART: Newman on the Laity

By George Rutler

NO CATHOLIC FIGURE SINCE ST. THOMAS AQUINAS HAS MATCHED THE CREATIVE
MIND OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. BUT IF HE IS RESPECTED FOR THAT TODAY, HE
IS REVERED FOR HIS MIND'S IDENTITY WITH HIS HEART, AND A HEART SO
GREAT THAT HIS HEROIC VIRTUES HAVE BEEN RECOGNIZED. HE IS, AS OF
1991, THE VENERABLE JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, AND WE MAY RIGHTLY ASK HIS
HEAVENLY INTERCESSION IN EVIDENCE OF HIS MOTTO WHICH HE TOOK FROM A
PHRASE OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES- <COR AD COR LOQUITUR>-HEART SPEAKS TO
HEART.

Permit me to indulge one of my most gratifying hobbies, by letting me
anticipate the judgment of the Holy See: Unfettered by required
authority, I can say that Newman is a saint. And as a truly great and
legitimate authority has said that we are living in a culture of
death, I look to Newman for a transfusion of life, just as he gave
life to his own dying culture. His life spanned, and is nearly a
symbol for, the entire spiritual struggle of the nineteenth century,
quite as St. Thomas More was for his own magnificent and troubled
time.

Newman has already helped us out quite a bit. When John XXIII
announced his hopes for the new Council in the encyclical <Ad petri
cathedram>, in tones which have a melancholy ring at the
shell-shocked end of the century, Newman was the only modern voice
quoted among all the apologists, evangelists, Fathers, and popes.
Paul VI called Newman's spiritual journey the greatest of modern
times.  John Paul II began his pontificate saying that Newman's
genius spoke to him "of deep intellectual honesty, fidelity to
conscience and grace, piety and priestly zeal, devotion to Christ's
Church and love of her doctrine, unconditional trust in divine
providence and absolute obedience to the will of God."

Newman predicted a "Second Spring" of the Church. He was a prophet
but not a weatherman. Given the supernatural guarantees of Holy
Church, it was a sure prophecy; it was less problematic than the
Second Vatican Council's anticipation of a "New Pentecost." But we
must resist the temptation to say bouncily that this Spring has come.
Those who detect it in the midst of present clouds, may be in the
category of those who have announced simultaneously a global warming
and a nuclear winter. All we can say for certain is that a Second
Spring means there has been a Second Winter; and it may just be that
our present time is not even the Second Winter but the <tristesse> of
a Second Autumn.

Toward the end of his life, Newman had that kind of face, and Oscar
Wilde called it "that wreck of awful beauty." If Newman could cast a
glance of that face our way, I think he would summon his earthiest
Norman English to say that the Church is in a mess. And it would stir
his soul, for he relished any opportunity to strike historical
parallels.

Springtime is of the saints who have had long winters. So says the
almanac of heroic virtue. Holiness is the evidence of virtue lived to
the heroic degree as Benedict XIV defined it: "with uncommon
promptitude, ease, and pleasure, from supernatural motives and
without human reasoning, with self-abnegation and full control over
natural inclinations." It moves virtue beyond that modest state which
a secular society tends to think is the most that can be expected.

In <The Idea of a University>, Newman describes the man living on the
natural level of virtue; this gentleman is more worthy than that
Hegelian aesthete, or aboriginal "Yuppie," whom Kierkegaard detested,
but he is not the aesthete's perfect opposite. "It is almost the
definition of a gentleman that he never inflicts pain....  From a
long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he one
day were to be our friend." And so on. But not necessarily on to
heaven; for this kind of fellow will be the model alumnus of the
Catholic university typical of our day, but he will not yet be God's
model of a man. He will be all for peace, for comity, and kindliness
to endangered animals.

You might say that what distinguishes Newman's gentleman from
Newman's saint is the mystical ingredient of grace that marks the
suburban sentiments of some of the "Glory and Praise" hymnal off from
the <Te Deum and Dies Irae>. For a parable in stone, it is the
difference between the academic gothic of the National Cathedral in
Washington and the high fabric of Chartres. If you cannot define it,
you can sense it in the contrast between the noble pagan and the
noble Christian, between the jogger and the ascetic, between Earth
Day and Easter, between Al Gore of Washington and Francis of Assisi.

This is the year commemorative of Newman's conversion, and the
spiritual myopia of those days has not improved much into our own.
You need only look at what has been done to the liturgy to see that.
Clericalism has filled the sanctuaries with lay people performing all
sorts of roles contradictory to their baptismal dignity, in a clumsy
ballet of amateurish sacerdotalism.

Newman loved the Mass, and with great reverence he explained: "The
Mass must not be said without a Missal under the priest's eye; nor in
any language but that in which it has come down to us from the early
hierarchs of the Western Church. But, when it is over, and the
celebrant has resigned the vestments proper to it, then he resumes
himself, and comes to us in the gifts and associations which attach
to his person." It was all part of a sacred and solemn dance, not
inflating to the priest nor condescending to the people. His lips
would have frozen if required to utter the ICEL translation of the
<Novus Ordo>.

Far worse than the triviality of its language and didacticism, our
new clerical servitude of the laity, paraded as a promethean
empowerment of the people of God, and its confusion of the
anthropology of the sexes, would have made him weep more holy tears
than he shed in his own years. For he knew that the music of hell is
not dissonance but banality, and he was certain that the politics of
hell is not inequality but androgyny.

The heroism of holiness cannot be exotic, for mystery is not
mystification. This was a point that Newman never quite succeeded in
getting across to neurasthenics like Father Faber who promoted a
baroque kind of "in your face" Catholicism which only confirmed his
countrymen in their suspicion that his religion was as un-English as
it was unworldly. Exoticism is false heroism. It may get attention,
as did Mani of the Manichaeans and the guru of the Beatles, but it is
not the way of the Son of God who was disdained for belonging to the
house of a carpenter. Thus Newman writes in his "Prayers, Verses and
Devotions" a clear definition of perfection outside the exotic notion
of true heroism:

We must bear in mind what is meant by perfection. It does not mean
any extraordinary service, anything out of the way, or especially
heroic not all have the opportunity of heroic acts, of sufferings-but
it means what the word perfection ordinarily means. By perfect we
mean that which has no flaw in it, that which is complete, that which
is consistent, that which is sound-we mean the opposite to
imperfect.... He then is perfect who does the work of the day
perfectly, and we need not go beyond this to seek perfection. You
need not go out of the 'round' of the day.... If you ask me what you
are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first-Do not lie in bed
beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make
a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat
and drink to God's glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep
out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself
daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.

There is a gentleness in this that surpasses gentility. Newman opens
up a domesticity born of familiarity with holy things. So it is
important to remember that while he worked hard and was well ordered
in his daily regimen, and was certainly a strong man within a natural
etheralness, he was appalled by the Evangelicals' "muscular
Christianity" and would have used the term "hearty" as a pejorative,
and indeed thought enthusiasm vulgar. The good Tory in him might have
been amenable to the advertised moral principles of what journalists
call the "Religious Right"; but if he had to hold hands during the
Our Father, or attend a Congressional Prayer Breakfast, he would have
fainted.

Notoriously, his truly Catholic economy of witness got him into
trouble, especially when he spoke "On Consulting the Faithful in
Matters of Doctrine." The lay call to holiness means among other
things a summons to the baptized faithful to be faithful to the
sacred tradition, and by that faithfulness to show more clearly
generation to generation the meaning of the faith once for all
delivered to the saints. I do not know if it is ever adequately
understood that Newman presumes holiness in the faithful who are
consulted. The sacred deposit of the faith is not a pile; it is an
endowment which, while the same for all time, bears new interest with
each passing generation.  Consultation of the faithful does not
consist in Mr. Gallup asking their opinion and coming up with a
compromise on difficulty subjects; it is the examination not of
whether the faithful believe true things but how they manifest that
belief. The faithful are, after all, faithful.

Another of his misunderstood teachings, the development of doctrine,
requires "faithfulness to type." Which is why any encyclical is not a
vehicle for mere opinion; and an opinion, even if that of the pope,
is accountable to the tradition. And we know that the tradition is
sterner and more commanding than nostalgia, for nostalgia is only an
affection for the parts of the past you happen to like.

So, too, with conscience, which is a gift more attractive than H.L.
Mencken's definition: he called conscience a mother-in-law whose
visit never ends. If obedience to conscience comes even before duty
to the pope, it is part of that duty; it comes first in precedence
rather than priority; conscience cannot liberate from duty, for only
in duty is there true freedom of conscience. The pope's own duty to
his grace of state cannot contradict a conscience that is true to the
Holy Spirit. In the famous words of his "Letter to the Duke of
Norfolk": "Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this
age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and
freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a
Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations."

The right use of conscience prevents us masquerading selfishness as
authentic personalism; conscience exercised conscientiously prohibits
the Heavenly Banquet from degenerating into Cafeteria Catholicism.
But that right use is the product of a disciplined interior life
Self-discipline in cooperation with grace saves the self from the
indignity of selfishness.

Newman would certainly have been satisfied for example, with the way
the encyclical <Humanae vitae> gracefully indicates the practical
application of the development of doctrine, for it makes clear what
was always true but which had to be declared true more explicitly.
But I expect that he would also have been greatly saddened by the
confused way this document was presented, the failure to teach it
consistently after it came out, and the neglect of discipline
necessary to protect the faithful from misrepresentations of it.

The use of an eclectic commission of advisors was not what Newman
meant by consulting the faithful; and the unsteady application of the
authentic teaching was not what he expected of the Church's ordained
prophets. Bishops are obliged to represent the economy of tradition
as a <pastorum et fidelium conspiratio>, a breathing together of the
shepherds and the faithful; "conspiratio" is not a conspiracy in the
idiomatic sense. It is evidence of a common sense of the faith which
is a property shared by the laity by baptismal right and not
delegated by the hierarchy.

The relationship is similar to the right of a government to establish
the tranquillity of order by punishing offenders, which right is
given by God to the state and not delegated by permission of the
Church, though the Church has the complimentary right to offer
prudential counsel. All this breaks down into party strivings,
divisions, and legalism when it is divorced from the duty to
holiness. For then all we are left with is, not rights, but the
pedantic and proud crowing for "empowerments." In his <Letters and
Diaries> the same Newman who is so often misrepresented as the
champion of dissent wrote, "It is no trouble to believe, when the
Church has spoken; the real trouble is when a number of little Popes
start up, laymen often, and preach against Bishops and Priests, and
make their own opinions the faith, and frighten simple-minded devout
people and drive back inquirers."

Newman dreaded this deconstruction of the great economy of life in
the Church. If the Church is not supernatural, she need not exist. As
she is supernatural, she requires a behavior beyond the ways of the
world, not to deny the world but to transfigure it in glory.

Newman spoke down to no one, not even from his great mental height.
Although he is associated with universities most of his teachings was
to ordinary people: the shopkeepers of Oxford town, the mothers of
Littlemore whom he instructed rather improbably in the correct method
of bathing infants, immigrants in Birmingham, lads in the Oratory
school. He was largely shut out of the great places when he became
politically correct.

I met a woman whose father had been taught by him in the Oratory
school at Birmingham; the boys called him "Jack" behind his back, but
they knew it was a great man who sometimes wept when reading to them
from Virgil, who edited their school plays, adapting Tacitus for them
to recite with the bawdy bits cut out, who ordered the coal and
filled out their report cards. There was indeed greatness manifest,
not hidden, in all that, and his greatness would have looked
incredulously at most of our schools which are so cynical about the
potential of the mind and the demands of the heart. In one of his
"Sermons Preached on Various Occasions" he says most decidedly:
"Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the science, nor is
science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an
ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to
be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual."

Sad to say, even Cardinal Manning did not trust the application of
that, even when he materially assented to it. At least he thwarted
Newman's dream of a Catholic presence in Oxford University, and the
world was impoverished for it. Most tragic was the defeat of Newman's
vision in Ireland where the local bishops implicated themselves in
the failure of his plans for what might have become the greatest
Catholic university in the world. He wanted scholars from the nations
to teach there, like Orestes Brownson all the way from New York. But
the local hierarchy were not altogether comfortable with a man who
thought young laymen might be allowed to smoke and play at billiards
and become saints.

But on the whole, the bishops wanted to think that because their land
had once been a harbor of saints and scholars, it still was. They
were un-consoled by Newman's sharp eye staring through their
parochial veil, and his patience and constancy with them were
interpreted as manufactured insults. Though Newman was, in some ways,
more devoted to Irish nationalism than some of the Irish bishops
themselves, and faulted Gerard Manley Hopkins for being less so, he
did not enchant the shepherds by suggesting to them that their flocks
were wandering on the hills; when he came as a missionary to a land
of missionaries, he was not welcomed as such; and his insistence on
the universal call to holiness was the horn of an alien invader in an
island where inoculation against sin risked insulation from sanctity.


Much of this is spelled out by way of conscious or unconscious cipher
in the essays on the Northmen and Normans in England and Ireland, in
the <Historical Sketches>. For Newman pictured his "campaign" in
Ireland like that of the role of the Normans sent to Ireland to
re-Christianize a land tortured by the conflict between the Danes of
Dublin and the Celts of Armagh. In Newman's instance, the Danes and
the Celts were the Irish bishops at odds with themselves, and united
only in their opposition to a classically educated laity. Given the
pitiful circumstances around them, they understandably wanted to
educate the educatable in practical skills, for scientists and
physicians were needed where the soil was sullen and the people were
sick; Newman encouraged this, and his medical school remains. It was
the bishops' misfortune to think that cultivation of the imaginative
intellect would be at the expense of the cultivation of the land, or
that the enlargement of the mind need be a spiritual malignancy.
God's holy elect betrayed themselves when they settled on the word
"elitist" as a pejorative. They wanted the university to be a
seminary adapted to the routine of laymen, and although it would be
for the entire English-speaking world, they were cautious about lay
initiatives from abroad or domestic. Such clericalism is disastrous
for clerics and laity alike.

While a systematic clericalism may be effective in the short run for
providing a political alternative to an oppressive secular
government, it sets smoldering a discontent that takes over when
political conditions change. Then the Church has to offer more
profound spiritual projects than cultural habits when confronted by
philosophical secularism. So, in the contemporary case of Poland, for
one example, the number of seminarians has dropped by one third in
the few years since its liberation; and Ireland now has the lowest
per capita rate of ordinations of all the European nations. As with
nations, so with the schools of nations; and a Catholic university
that pompously proclaims itself "Catholic in ethos" is only signaling
that it has lost heart for being Catholic in fact. In the United
States, such institutions now are elaborate mausoleums for those who
have died in the cultural war.

We cannot rue the lost opportunities of Newman's campaign without
acknowledging their parallels now: the forfeiting of great
institutions by those too weak to be their leaders, the naive
confidence in bureaucracies and structures as substitutes for the
virtue of faith, the clerical suspicion of lay movements moved by
prophets, the confusion of vocations with careers, and the nervous
refusal to be honest about the looming disaster.

Newman had thought that his campaign in England should be his
campaign in Ireland as a beacon for a campaign in all corridors of
culture, planting learning and piety once again in apostolic roots
deeper than the instincts of counties and clans. His voice today
confuses many Catholic leaders in the United States as it did in
Ireland, and in his own England. For in England the old-line
Catholics, the Recusants, were unsettled by the prospect of
disrupting the compromise they had made with the social
establishment, not altogether unlike the Kennedy-Camelot compromise
of the 1960s, whose illusory romance continues to delude some. Even
Newman's generous friend, the largely self- tutored Bishop Ullathorne
of Birmingham, asked him with puzzlement: "Who are the laity?" To
which Newman made reply with coruscating bemusement that the Church
would look odd without them. For an efficient guide to Newman's
thought on the matter of what an unfoolish Church should look like,
Newman directs us to his patron, St. Philip Neri.

He chose Neri's Oratory for himself, because he did not have a
vocation to strictly religious vows. His poverty would not be that of
the formally religious kind, and he wanted certain freedoms outside
consecrated vows so that he might be more accessible to the culture
of the self-consciously independent Victorians. Above all, he
venerated St. Philip's exaltation of holy friendship. We have seen
that very concept of friendship disappear in a decaying civilization
whose associations are divided almost exclusively between
acquaintances and lovers. His private altar at Birmingham is
surrounded by pictures of his friends, and the conclusion of the
<Apologia> is almost a liturgical litany of friendship.

Holiness he learned from friends, and holiness he spread among them.
It was at the heart of his soul's naturalness, and he insisted that
no spirituality sets a man on the road to holiness if it is not
perfectly natural and attractive. An evangelist must attract, and he
only repulses those who resist by perverted will. The hardest trials
of his life were the loss of friends; such loss was a reminder of
what it would be like to lose Christ whom he never lost.

In his deepest spiritual affliction, when he had to give up his
Anglican parish and a way of life that outwardly had no tedium, his
sermon was not "The Dark Night of the Soul" for he thought it more
encompassing to call it "The Parting of Friends." This was his
intelligence of the matter: you are not much of a saint if you are
not much of a friend; and the way to befriend others is to befriend
Christ. It is one thing to love Christ, and that we must do if we are
to be with him forever; but it is another wonderful thing to like
Christ, and that we must do if heaven is to be heavenly.

He explained this delicately to a little girl who, upon seeing him
robed in the red mantle of a cardinal, grew dazzled and asked him if
he was a saint. Breaking the embarrassed silence of the adults
standing around, he replied, "My child, cardinals are of the earth,
saints are of heaven." In that moment he made a friend of the girl,
and I expect he also made her a friend of the Lord.


This article was taken from the July, 1995 issue of "Crisis," P.O.
Box 1006, Notre Dame, IN, USA 46556 Phone: (800) 852-9962

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