It may seem a little coarse to speculate but if Paddy Power ever
opens a book on who will be the next Doctor of the Church Blessed John
Henry Newman may have the shortest odds. Newman’s reputation is growing all the time and now that he has been beatified his canonisation is increasingly likely owing to an increased volume of prayer to him.
That is certainly the view of Father Ian Ker, the greatest living authority on the man Pope Benedict came to beatify in person on that memorable day in Birmingham in September 2010.
He has no doubt that such is Cardinal Newman’s stature as “the Father of the Second Vatican Council” and the most significant convert since the Reformation that he will be declared Doctor of the Church when he is eventually canonised.
Dr Ker spoke to The Irish Catholic a couple of weeks ago after he delivered an extremely well attended lecture on Newman in the parish of St Brigid’s in Belfast. The audience included Bishop Noel Treanor, retired Bishop Patrick Walsh, parish priest Father Edward O’Donnell and Northern Ireland Attorney General, John Larkin QC, a parishioner.
He was invited by long-time Newman admirer, Brett Lockhart, QC, chairperson of
St Brigid’s pastoral council whose own conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism has echoes of Newman’s journey to Rome in the 19th Century.
Mr Lockhart, a former Presbyterian elder, recalls being introduced to Newman while reading Meriol Trevor’s two-volume biography in the ‘80s before going on to read Father Ker’s more recent definitive biography and much of Newman’s own writings.
He says: “I was impressed by the breadth of Newman’s thinking and particularly by the way he dealt with the development of doctrine.”
Brett Lockhart, who is married to Aine and has four sons, says Newman had “a seminal influence” on his road to Rome.
He adds: “Newman dealt with some of the issues and concerns I had in my own journey of faith where I could never get over the general fissiparousness of Protestantism where a disagreement often leads to a new manifestation of the Church.”
Interestingly Ian Ker, parish priest of Burford, Oxfordshire, came to Newman through his first love, literature rather than through theology, while reading for a PhD in English literature at Cambridge University. He says the first stirrings of his vocation came one day at evening Mass several years later while reflecting on an encyclical of Pope John XXIII.
He was now in his late 20s and teaching English literature at the University of York.
He has written or edited more than 20 books on Newman including that magisterial personal, intellectual and literary biography republished in paperback by Oxford University Press in time for the beatification. He edited the Penguin Classics edition of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman’s famous reply to an attack by Charles Kingsley, which has been reprinted numerous times since it first appeared in 1994.
His early fascination stemmed not from Newman’s theological views but by his brilliance as a writer of Victorian prose. “He was so much more interesting and intelligent than people like Matthew Arnold, Carlyle and even Ruskin.”
Assessing Newman’s contemporary importance to the life of the Church Father Ker says he is “very significant but not as important as I would like him to be”.
He believes his importance will only reach its proper level when, as he expects, a future Saint John Henry Newman is declared a Doctor of the Church. There can, of course, be no knowing when that will happen as another miracle will have to be documented but he thinks the increase in the level of prayer to his hero could make it happen within 10 years.
“A lot of people are going to be praying to him and I believe God answers these prayers, the prayers of intercession Newman is very strong on,” he says.
Father Ker has reason to appreciate the power of prayer more than most. He points out Jack Sullivan, the Massachusetts deacon whose cure from a spinal disorder provided the requisite miracle for the beatification, says he started praying to Newman after watching Father Ker talk about him on the Catholic TV channel EWTN.
He recalls that prior to that Sullivan had known very little about Newman apart from him being a convert, a cardinal and a great theologian. “He just started praying to him,” he says.
While Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s admiration for Newman is well known, (exceptionally he presided at his beatification) and as a cardinal read Ker’s biography, he points out that Pope Paul VI wanted him canonised and described Vatican II as “Newman’s Council”.
This is because Newman anticipated and would have supported the reforms of Vatican II, Father Ker says.
“The fact that he is described as the ‘Father of the Council’ makes him very significant – both wings of the Catholic Church, the left and the right, like to claim him,” he says.
Father Ker then points out that in his writings he has sought to place Newman “where he really is” and that is as “a radical conservative or a conservative reformer”.
It would be “a falsification of Newman” to put him in any one camp because he stood firmly with tradition, what Benedict XVI called “the hermeneutic of continuity”. He would have seen Vatican II not as “a revolutionary event but as something certainly changing the Church but always in continuity with the tradition of the past”.
Father Ker says Newman influenced and inspired French ressourcement theologians like Yves Congar and Henry de Lubac by “returning to the sources, Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers, retrieving the sources is a better more dynamic phrase”.
Elaborating, he says 100 years before the so-called French ressourcement movement of the 1930s Newman and the Tractarians in the Oxford Movement were trying to go back to the roots in the Scriptures and in the Fathers “to rediscover or invent the Catholicity of the Church of England”.
The Fathers that had most influenced him were not from the Latin Church but from the East, e.g. Athanasius and John Chrysostom.
Dr Ker says Newman’s theology “clearly anticipated” the Conciliar Constitutions on the Church and on Divine Revelation, Lumen Gentium and Dei Verbum, the “two most central theological documents of the Council” and could, therefore, be considered “the grandfather of the post-Conciliar Church”.
Referring to Newman’s conversion to Rome Dr Ker says it is hard to appreciate today the sensation it caused in England which was a deeply Protestant country at that time.
“Someone of his stature had never converted before. It was considered more than theological madness. Here he was joining this Church full of Celts and Latins who were considered inferior races because they were dominated by the Roman Catholic priesthood and what was considered their superstitious religion. Today we would regard such sentiments as racist.”
A recent biographer of G.K. Chesterton, Kerr recalls that Chesterton said the publication of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua “exploded the myth of England being superior to Catholic Irish peasants”.
Such was the prejudice against Newman and indeed fellow converts that they were called perverts and many believed Newman had been a Jesuit spy in the Church of England.
However, he does see a paradox in Newman, who grew up a Bible Protestant coming into a Catholic Church where the laity were discouraged from reading Scripture.
He thinks if Newman were around today he would be “appalled that Catholic politicians could vote for abortion”.
Reflecting on Ian Ker’s stimulating lecture which dealt mainly with Newman’s influence on Vatican II, Brett Lockhart can’t help thanking Blessed John Henry for the role he played in his faith journey.
While acknowledging the huge influence on his life of “wonderful saints in the Presbyterian Church like John Dunlop, David Lapsley and Ray Davey”, he adds: “But I think I was on a longer journey. Ultimately I came to the strong view that what Newman was saying was true.”