Cardinal John Henry Newman should be made a Doctor of the Church, Oxford University expert Fr Ian Ker, has said describing reading the English theologian's writings as like "reading the Church Fathers". Cardinal Newman took over "where St Bernard left off", Fr Ker told Zenit.
"Although Newman worked as an ordinary parish priest among the very poor in inner city Birmingham when he began the Oratory there, and later in the more salubrious suburb of Edgbaston where the Oratory was finally established and where he continued to carry out ordinary parish duties, his main work lay in his intellectual apostolate and writings," Fr Ker said.
"Benedict XVI became interested in Newman while at the seminary through the interest of one of his teachers. And, of course, he would have been aware as a theologian that Newman was a great pioneer in the renewal of theology," he said.
"Newman is more than simply a very learned and clever thinker. Indeed, it has been said that he took over where St Bernard left off."Anyone reading his writings cannot but be aware that reading Newman is like reading the great Church Fathers. In his writings we encounter a writer of profound faith.
"In the 1830s in Oxford, Newman and his fellow Tractarians launched a forerunner of the movement of "ressourcement," [which arose] in France a hundred years later.
"It was this return to the scriptural and patristic sources that made possible the theology of Vatican II.
"Newman most clearly anticipated the Council in his theory of doctrinal development and his personalist understanding of revelation (Constitution on Divine Revelation), his stress on the role of the laity and more fundamentally his understanding of the Church as communion (Constitution on the Church), his sense of the need for the Church to engage with the modern world and to abandon the siege mentality (Constitution on the Modern World), and his cautious support for ecumenism in its early days (Decree on Ecumenism).
"Cardinal Newman is most obviously misunderstood because of the common misinterpretation of his account of the relation of conscience to Church authority. Newman never envisaged so called conscientious dissent from Church teachings.
"What he did envisage was the possibility of a person conscientiously resisting an order from higher authority. His theory of development is no longer controversial but is part of mainstream theology and indeed is actually echoed in Vatican II's Constitution on Divine Revelation.
"In his own day, Newman was indeed a radical in his thinking because he was ahead of his times. But he was never a liberal in the sense in which we use the word today, but was always deeply loyal to the tradition and the teachings of the Church," Fr Ker concluded.
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(Source: CTHN)