This address was presented to the Catechists of the Diocese of Worcester by our own Monsignor Sullivan this past week.
First, thanks for what you're doing as educators. It's really important.
I say that as one who began my working career as a high school religion teacher in Worcester and then was a DRE in Colorado Springs. Later, as a priest, I was 5 years in our Diocesan Office of Religious Education.
So, I'm well acquainted with your challenges working with young people and their families, so thanks for your commitment to this ministry.
Today, I've been asked to think about Blessed John Henry 'Cardinal' Newman. He’s certainly a great role model for educators. I'm grateful for the opportunity.
I’ll do 3 things:
I'll share some recent reminiscences of the really interesting experiences I had just a few weeks ago at his beatification and some personal events leading up to that in the late summer.
I have a few thoughts about Pope Benedict XVI in England. It was an extraordinary visit.
But mostly I'll speak about Newman himself.
Certainly, one of the high points of my priesthood was to be able to participate in the Beatification of Cardinal Newman this past September 19th.
I can never remember a time when I hadn’t heard of Newman. The Sisters certainly spoke of him a bit when I was in grade school. My Dad did as well, around the house. But they just touched on him and didn’t know him in great depth.
I've been a fan since my seminary days but confess that even there we didn't really have the time to explore his thought too deeply. New theologians were being thrown at us so fast that it’s hard to concentrate on one.
12 years ago, I took a week-long summer course on Newman from Father Ian Ker, Newman’s greatest living biographer. And that’s where the real fire began.
Subsequently, I've read some of his important works but a fraction of his corpus of 40 books, the massive collections of his sermons, and 32 thick volumes of his letters.
Newman is a towering figure in the life of the Church. Someone even divided the ages of the Church into the age of Augustine, the age of Aquinas, and the age of Newman. He has been given that status. But he was never a remote intellectual. His concerns were always pastoral and therein lay his real greatness.
SO, MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCES...
This year I built my two vacation trips around Newman. I was in England in early August and then was able to go back in mid-September.
This past August 9th, while on vacation in England, I celebrated Mass at Newman's private altar, in his room at the Oratory in Birmingham and that was a rare privilege. In doing so, I used his chalice, which always means a lot to a priest.
At the end of Mass they carefully took it out of my hands because that was the appointed day it was sent out to be re-finished for the beatification. The next scheduled user was Pope Benedict a month later.
A few minutes after Mass the priest in charge, Father Richard Duffield, gave me 5 small, gold reliquaries containing locks of Newman's hair and bits of his clothing, and asked me to deliver them to the Sisters of the Family of the Work at Littlemore College, which Newman founded, outside Oxford, since that was my next stop a couple of hours later. The Sisters, who devote their whole lives to the memory and the work of Newman, and who have become good friends since I first went to Littlemore ten years ago, were absolutely thrilled to receive them - just as I was thrilled to be the courier.
In staying with the Sisters for a few days, I stayed in the same bedroom that Blessed Dominic Barberi used when he visited Newman on October 8 & 9, 1845, to hear his confession, which began one day and continued into the next, and receive him into the Catholic Church.
And on the last day of my vacation, August 11th - I was the celebrant and homilist of the Mass at Littlemore on the 120th Anniversary of the Cardinal's death.
A month later I went back to England for the beatification. It was the first beatification I've ever participated in.
It was my first opportunity to see Pope Benedict in person.
So, these were rare and great moments of grace for me.
There were lots of other 'firsts' associated with the beatification.
Newman is first English Catholic, who lived after the Reformation, to be beatified - so that's 500 years. And that goes to the fact that the Catholic Church in England was just decimated after Henry VIII and Elizabeth Tudor, not even a shadow of its former self.
It was the first beatification that Benedict has celebrated at all. The pope's personal protocol is that all beatifications are to be celebrated in holy person's home country - so popes don't go now to those places for these celebrations. But Benedict broke his own rule to come to England and offer the Mass - since he's always been such a fan of Newman and has read so much of what Newman wrote.
It's only the second time in history that a pope had come to England at all. John Paul visited for one day in 1982.
Finally, it was 'an official state visit' - a very rare moment indeed. In this case, Her Majesty's Government hosted a good deal of the trip and the Government welcomed the Holy Father as a head of state and paid for a good deal of the tab. So, on television, you may have seen the Queen and Prince Philip welcoming Benedict in Edinburgh, Scotland, where the 4 days began.
In those 4 days it was fascinating to witness the transformation of the media and the people - from so much open hostility...to acceptance and praise.
On Day 2 - there was the pope standing in Westminster Hall, on the exact spot where St. Thomas More was condemned to death in 1535 - standing there with 4 living Prime Ministers, all the Members of Parliament, the Dukes, Lords, and entire ruling aristocracy - making his address to Civil Society - praising the British for their work in ending slavery and their heroism in World War II's 'Battle of Britain' - and challenging their secular society with vital questions about how we should live. It's hard to imagine a time when you're more proud of your Holy Father than that moment. And, they went crazy for him.
Following the papal visit, some of the British media even apologized for their attacks on the Holy Father. He had clearly won over many English hearts.
There were 3 great public Masses - in Glasgow, at Westminster Cathedral in London, and at Birmingham for the actual beatification.
You really got a sense of how Benedict is a universal pastor.
John Henry Newman was the reason for the visit!
Newman lived from 1801 to 1890 - so essentially the whole century.
Think about it this way. Newman was born just about a year after George Washington died. And he died a few months after Dwight Eisenhower was born. That's a lot of living.
The first half of his life he was an Anglican.
His formation began, really began, when he was 15 years old. He had a very compelling conversion though he was already a practicing Christian.
He became what we would call today an 'evangelical.' (Not that he was living an immoral life before - but he had some doubts.) Now, he was 'born again.' If he were alive today - at 15 - he'd say, "Jesus Christ is my personal savior."
Had a profound interest in the Scripture. Read the Bible cover to cover.
At 15 - he also made a commitment to live his life as a celibate and he was accepted into Oxford University at that age. Unheard of! So, from the beginning we're talking about someone who is really extraordinary.
He went on to become a great student at Trinity College, and professor at Oriel College in Oxford, a 'don' and the preacher at the most distinguished pulpit in country, St. Mary the Virgin Church at Oxford University. And droves of students came to hear his preaching. (600/1000) (Easter, St. Paul's, London, 1800, 6 people at the main service - Newman was bringing in 600.
With others he led 'The Oxford Movement' - an attempt to both revivify and some would say 'Catholicize' the Anglican Church, strengthening its teaching and its sacramental life. Whatever vitality remains in the somewhat fractured Anglican Church in England is probably due to him.
But he couldn't stay as an Anglican.
The chief factors:
His study of Church history
His disappointment at what he called 'liberalism in religion' (laxity)
And Anglicanism's 'disconnect' with the papacy led him into the Catholic Church.
In 1845 - at the exact mid-point of his life - he's received.
So, the first half of his life he's Oxford's most famous don and Anglicanism's most famous preacher.
The second half of his life he's England's most prominent Catholic priest.
It's hard to think of someone else like that.
He was also England's greatest prose writer in the Victorian age, a magnificent stylist with thoughts beautifully expressed.
Greatest intellectual in the Catholic Church in England in the second part of the 19th century...yet at his core a parish priest...worked hard at confessions, visiting sick and poor, running an elementary school for poor Irish Catholics that he founded in Birmingham.
His scholarship was a major factor in the establishment of the 2nd Vatican Council roughly 70 years after his death. How that happened is that all of the great European theologians of the first half of the 20th century - particularly the French - were reading Newman.
People like the Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, the Dominicans, Yves Congar and M.D. Chenu. Their work was called 'nouvelle theologie' and they were the ones who laid the immediate groundwork for the Council. So was the young Joseph Ratzinger reading Newman.
But what had Newman read - that they were ingesting? The Fathers - Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, John Damascene, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa. So he combines his early love for scripture with patristics and the development of dogma in the early Church.
This is why the Documents of the Second Vatican Council have such a foundation in scripture and patristics.
He said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant."
He was a poet, prose writer, founder of the Oratorians in England, violinist (though not an especially good one), novelist, university rector in Dublin, and always the educator par excellence.
I encourage you to read Newman.
2 novels, Callista and Loss & Gain (a very thinly disguised autobiography) might be places to start.
'The Second Spring' Sermon of 1851. (Restoration, Hierarchy, 1850)
'The Biglietto Speech' when he received the cardinal's hat in 1879.
More ambitious is his most celebrated book, 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua,' which is the story of his conversion to Catholicism. One person calls it "the autobiography of a brain."
So as we celebrate Newman today, we could ask ourselves how he might be a model for us, especially since he felt education to be his particular concern.
Motto: 'Heart speaks to Heart'
- Christians are made one by one
- conversion = one person to another
- education = one person to another - relationships, one to another.
His students were important to him as individuals.
And then...
there are 4 themes which you see over and over in his works. They are the keys to his thinking.
I. The first was the importance of Revelation.
Devotion to the cause of revealed religion was what gave Newman’s life its unity. In a late work, Newman himself described revelation as ‘the initial and essential idea of Christianity’ (Via Media). There has been much written about the theology of revelation, but the crucial point to grasp is that what has been revealed is a gift to us. It is not of our making. What we believe is not something that we have somehow managed to construct for ourselves. It's a gift.
II. A second key theme was the Church.
However wonderful the message of revelation is, it may as well not exist if it can't be received. We’ve all had the experience of talking on our cell phone and losing the signal. You're cut off.
Well, for Newman: If there was no reception, there was no revelation. Revelation is received by the community of faith, the Church. And when you consider Newman’s life – from his early evangelical conversion, through his days as an Oxford don, to the Oxford Movement, until he comes to be received into the Catholic Church in 1845 – you can read it as a perpetual search for the Church.
Where the Body of Christ, the community of faith, is to be found most fully is where revelation will be received most perfectly. Love the Church and teach the importance of the Church as the locus of both truth and revelation.
III. His third major theme was with dogma. In the 'Apologia' he called dogma "the fundamental principle of my religion."
He used to say that in a perfect world the Church would simply have received the Scriptures. But the world isn't perfect. Scripture is unsystematic. Disputes in the Church arise. So what has been revealed and received needs to be articulated. This is where his great personal study comes in again. The teaching of the Church, built upon the lessons of the past, really helps us to deal with issues that we're living with today. This is why the Church has always emphasized the importance of both 'Tradition' and 'Scripture.'
IV. His final key theme was with education.
What has been revealed and received and articulated, needs to be communicated. It has to be passed on. It's not a private possession.
He wasn’t just talking about classroom teaching: he wanted people to craft better arguments by engaging with contemporary culture, broadening and maturing their minds. (He read everything!)
What has been revealed, received, and articulated, is passed on and this should happen in a personal way.
When he went as a young curate to the parish of St. Clement’s in Oxford, just beyond Magdalen Bridge, he was still to some extent under the influence of the evangelical conversion that had so affected him as a boy of fifteen. Its dictates declared that most people were damned. Few were saved. But the young Newman, as he met the many good people in his parish, found he could no longer believe that most of them were condemned to hell for all eternity.
Then, as a tutor at Oriel College in Oxford, he was dissatisfied with a system that required him to teach his pupils, but would not allow him to offer them moral and pastoral support. It had to be strictly academic.
Later, as vicar of St. Mary the Virgin Church, he developed a style of preaching in which he spoke to his congregation in a way that he hoped would move them to what he would later come to call ‘real assent.’
He had no interest in moving their minds without touching their hearts.
And then in Dublin, while working in the University he founded there, he said: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic system; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else." It was always the same message: education is never merely a matter of learning; it involves a care for the person as well.
Newman was an active parish priest in Birmingham. He also had, so to speak, a "day job." He had founded and was largely responsible for much of the day-to-day running of the Oratory School. As an old man Newman personally gave a high award to the young Hilaire Belloc. J.R.R. Tolkein went to the same school for a while, about ten years after Newman died.
Newman had set out to establish a school that offered the kind of high quality academic education that was available to those who went to the famous schools like Eton and Harrow. When it came to pastoral care of students, those schools fell short, however.
In so many ways education was Newman’s line. He cared for standards, for academic excellence, but never forgot the person. So, he can be a real inspiration for teachers and educators.
We should think about those who taught us and inspired us and think about how they did. And "Can we do the same?"
Thanks.
Monsignor Thomas Sullivan
Chancellor
Diocese of Worcester
