Edinburgh Newman Association
(Promoting open discussion and greater understanding in today’s Church.)
The next meeting of the Edinburgh Newman Association is on Wednesday evening, May 13th.
Our guest speaker will be Dr. Naomi Hayes who is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science whose area of special interest is the intersection between religion and political economy.
The title of her talk will be:
Understanding Christian Nationalism: An Anthropologist’s Perspective.
Our meeting will take place at 7.40pm at our usual venue,
Mayfield Salisbury Church of Scotland, (now retitled Newington Trinity),
18 West Mayfield, Edinburgh EH9 1TQ.
This is a cordial invitation to attend the meeting and please convey this invitation to anyone you think would wish to attend.
Paddy Ferry (Chair)
I am not in a position to provide a script of Mgr. Rod Strange’s talk on Newman at our previous meeting last month but one point I can share is Rod’s view that Newman has been to the church of this era what Augustine was to the early church and Thomas Aquinas was to the church of the Middle Ages.
Joe, Sean (or anyone else,)
I would be interested to hear your view of Newman.
I would say that the reception of Newman has failed him by its theological superficiality. There is a lot of sectarianism in it, for which JHN himself bears some responsibility. Why did the ceremony making him a Doctor Ecclesiae not mention his Essay on Development (still offensive to Vatican ears?) or The Idea of a University, but instead highlight a fictitious book on the BVM and the 1838 Lectures on Justification? The latter is not much read (though it absolutely deserves to be read and studied) and I suspect it is mentioned only to resist too friendly attitudes to Luther. Newman read Luther through the prism of St Robert Bellarmine, which is a highly polemic context. Charles Wesley, the great hymnist, who broke painfully with his brother because he did not want a schism with the Church of England, urged Anglicans to remember that Luther was part of their heritage (via the Homilies and the 39 Articles) but Newman regularly denounced Luther, Calvin, and Methodists (such as Selena, Countess of Huntingdon) as heretics. He deepened the gulf between the Evangelical and High Church sides of the Church of England, and he did much less than he could have done to bring to the Catholic Church the riches of Protestant theology, piety, and culture. He wanted to squeeze Anglicanism into the mould of Trent, and he left because he found it did not fit. Perhaps there will be a creative critical retrieval in the future.
I read Newman’s ‘Apologia’ as a student and remember being entranced by its sheer literacy – the meticulous and inexorable and yet measured pursuit of Charles Kingsley’s every imputation of dishonesty to himself, and, by implication, to Catholics more generally. As for the Catechism of the Catholic Church, its inclusion of Newman’s contention that conscience is the ‘aboriginal vicar of Christ’ almost absolves it of its worst glitches, such as article 615 on Atonement and its literal take on the historicity of the Fall, as related in Genesis.
Sophie Scholl, Lutheran martyr to the Gestapo in 1943, was greatly influenced by what she had read of Newman’s. Was it his insistence on the primacy of conscience? If so, does that help to balance what Joe sees as his blinkered ‘take’ on Luther, Calvin et al? It surprises me to read that emphasis, as I had always thought of Newman as ecumenical. He was still a huge influence in UCD during Vatican II – and I shall always be grateful for ‘The Idea of a University’.
Isn’t it for his supposed influence on Vatican II and liberal Catholicism that Newman is loathed and pilloried by the US Catholic right, with his strong male friendships receiving an opportunistic sexual interpretation? That too impels me towards cherishing him instead and makes me wonder if Joe has maybe separated the detail of his anti-Protestant critiques from his actual influence, which may have stemmed more from his insistence on the primacy of conscience and on the role of the laity in the development of doctrine?
Copilot summarises Cardinal Newman’s influence on Sophie Scholl as follows:
“Sophie Scholl’s engagement with Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons and his theology of conscience provided her with a spiritual and intellectual framework for resisting Nazism. Newman taught her that conscience is God’s voice, that truth demands obedience even unto death, and that Christians must resist moral evil. This influence is documented in her correspondence, in her statements to the Gestapo, and in the moral vocabulary of the White Rose.”
Given the symbolic importance of Sophie and the White Rose protest in the post World War II German search for an alternative historical thread to Nazism, isn’t this important also in the historical evaluation of Newman, confirming his importance as a harbinger of Vatican II – as well as an ongoing inspiration in all moral dilemmas? (The Gestapo were surely not the last terrifying agency of racist tyranny that history would see.)
Mustn’t we suppose that Newman gave Sophie something she had not received from her Lutheran influences, including Luther himself – despite his own conscientious stand against ecclesiastical censure and the real possibility of execution, remembering Jan Huss?
Rod Strange’s comparison of Newman with Augustine and Aquinas is over the top. It’s as if one compared some composer with Bach and Mozart — and I suppose such a comparison would fall flat even if applied to a great name such as Brahms. Or as if one were to say that T. S. Eliot plays the same role in modern literature as Shakespeare and Milton in the past.
‘Newman is loathed and pilloried by the US Catholic right, with his strong male friendships receiving an opportunistic sexual interpretation?’ I find that the US Catholic right invokes Newman more than anyone else, with strong focus on his biglietto speech in which he denounced Liberalism. And it is liberals who have underlined the gay quality of Newman’s friendships with R. H. Froude and Ambrose St-John, while the right have denounced them for doing so. The mainstream take on Newman in the church today is tinged in a rightward direction, and the late Ian Ker, his most prolific biographer and commentator, has insisted that Newman was a manly man and has treated any appeal to him for a gay cause as an insult.
The editor of the National Catholic Register (which I would see as representing the Catholic right) comments that “Different camps are taking the English convert’s teaching on doctrinal development in different directions, with big implications for contested issues…. ”
“We thus need to explain Newman’s theory of development of doctrine clearly,” said Father Juan Vélez, an Opus Dei priest and Newman scholar, who worries that some are using the saint’s thought to push for changes that Newman would have never condoned.
What’s more, the Newman debates are also linked to something else: the Second Vatican Council. Although he died 72 years before the Council began in 1962, Newman is considered to be a “Father of Vatican II.” He addressed many of the challenges of modernity taken up by the Council, such as secularism and the rise of historical consciousness, and his views were influential on the Council’s teaching on development, conscience and the laity. Therefore, debates over Newman are in many ways debates about what Vatican II really taught and how to apply it today.
Newman didn’t come up with the concept of developmental doctrine. Theologians before him, like Vincent of Lerins and St. Bonaventure, had already touched on the reality. [This take implies that there is no real change or evolution in doctrinal development.]
Newman cited the Trinitarian definitions taught at Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381) as genuine developments, instances of something implicit being made explicit through debate, contemplation and authoritative teaching. [No big deal you might say, but when the idea was first put forward by Denys Petau, SJ, it prompted a massive response by Bishop George Bull, and on the Catholic side a similar refusal is associated with Bossuet.]
Not all theologians look to Newman as a guide today. Some progressives, like German theologian Michael Seewald, see the Englishman as an important historical figure but downplay his relevance to current debates. Some traditionalists, on the other hand, avoid Newman out of concern that he is being used as a Trojan horse.
Matthew Levering [who is a bulwark of the Catholic right], a Mundelein Seminary theologian and author of Newman on Doctrinal Corruption, [exemplifies] the more conservative use of Newman. On the other hand, he suggested American theologian Shaun Blanchard, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame Australia, as someone who employs a more proactive approach to doctrinal development.
Blanchard, for instance, has written approvingly of Pope Francis’ appeal to Newman “as a vanguard in justification” of some of the late pope’s controversial reforms and has argued that Newman’s thought on the laity’s role in doctrinal development can serve as a key building block for establishing synodal forms of “theological discernment.”
Levering, meanwhile, has emphasized that Newman’s theology of development should not be used as a prescriptive tool for doctrinal innovation and that the English theologian’s consideration of the importance of lay consultation should not be employed to overturn “solemnly taught doctrine of prior eras.”
Levering has warned against interpreting Newman along “religiously liberal lines” that seek to justify change, while Blanchard has critiqued what he calls a view of “rigid continuity” — concerns that are echoed elsewhere among Newman scholars.
Andrew Meszaros, who holds the newly created St. John Henry Newman chair at the Angelicum in Rome, suggests that that the key distinction between the camps’ approaches lies in the weight placed on a pivotal Newmanian concept: “the dogmatic principle.”
This principle holds that supernatural truths can be imperfectly but reliably communicated in human words and authoritatively taught by the Church. In other words, the Church’s propositional teaching from past eras articulates claims that remain true today and cannot be contradicted without undermining doctrinal integrity.
Meszaros said that Newman scholars who emphasize the centrality of the dogmatic principle tend to underscore the need for authentic development to be consistent with previously articulated principles in Scripture and tradition. But those who emphasize other factors, such as Newman’s appreciation for the role that history plays in shaping the Christian tradition and the Church’s “power of assimilation” (one of Newman’s notes), “might be more happy to appeal to contemporary experience, context, or exigency to justify a development.”
“I think it’s fair to say that Newman’s thought contains both of these dimensions,” explained Meszaros. “How one orders them and relates them to each other will vary from theologian to theologian.”
Newman… was the darling of early 20th-century modernists, such as Alfred Loisy [better to cite George Tyrrell], who heretically claimed that dogma was constantly evolving, but was eventually reclaimed by more orthodox voices, like the future pope Joseph Ratzinger, who came across the English theologian as a seminarian in the 1940s. [In fact a glowing testimonial to Newman’s sound orthodoxy was penned by St Pius X in a letter to the bishop of Limerick]
But the struggle to define Newman has continued. For instance, dueling reference books from Cambridge and Oxford published in the past 16 years present differing interpretive frameworks of Newman. The Cambridge companion, edited by the late Newman expert Father Ian Kerr [recte: Ker}, frames the English saint as a faithful and perennially valuable Catholic thinker, while the Oxford version presents him as more of a historical figure than a saintly authority. [I reviewed the Oxford companion, which is far more substantial.]
”Perhaps to avoid exacerbating any tensions, Pope Leo XIV appears to be framing Newman’s elevation to doctor of the Church-status in connection with his contributions to education, not doctrinal development.”
This entire debate is NOT the cuttting edge in theology, but has a way of stalling people in the past. Conservative Catholics have made Newman their own with greater success than liberals (the name of Newman is stamped on hundreds of conservative institutions).
Newman, in the estimation of James Joyce, was the greatest master of English prose, and indeed at time he rises to a dizzying height (in the Idea of a University, or the last chapter of the Apologia), but on the topics he is acclaimed for by liberals, such as conscience, the laity, his utterances are actually quite skimpy. The Essay on Development can be read as a very conservative treatise.
By the way, Kingsley’s accusation that Newman’s way of handling historical fact is twisted has got Catholic defenders, such as P. J. Fitzpatrick.
Maybe it is good that Newman scholarship is taken out of Catholic hands, Frank M. Turner and Peter Nockles are a breath of fresh air.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-catholic-history/article/abs/current-state-of-newman-scholarship/F631DEC52544BF92BF27824A2025E336
“Mustn’t we suppose that Newman gave Sophie something she had not received from her Lutheran influences, including Luther himself – despite his own conscientious stand against ecclesiastical censure and the real possibility of execution, remembering Jan Huss?”
Copilot :
🌿 Core Lutheran Influences on Sophie Scholl
The sources show several distinct strands of Lutheran and broader Protestant influence on Scholl’s moral and spiritual formation.
1. Her father’s strict Lutheran upbringing
Sophie was raised in a home where honest communication, moral responsibility, and the power of words to confront injustice were emphasized. Her father, Robert Scholl, was a committed Lutheran who believed that “opponents to tyranny could never be created by force, only by personal experience.”
This emphasis on conscience, truth-telling, and personal responsibility is deeply rooted in Lutheran moral thought.
2. Her own Lutheran formation
Scholl was “brought up a Lutheran,” and her early education included exposure to Christian theology and the idea of the dignity of every human being, which later became central to her resistance to Nazism.
Her Lutheran background provided the framework for her belief that obedience to God supersedes obedience to the state, a theme that resonates with both Luther’s doctrine of conscience and later Protestant resistance theology.
3. Pietist influences through her mother
Her mother was “an active adherent of a small Pietist group,” which meant Sophie grew up around a spirituality emphasizing:
Personal devotion
Inner transformation
Seriousness about sin and moral responsibility
The lived experience of faith
These Pietist elements reinforced her later attraction to thinkers like Newman, whose writings also stress the interior life. [the early very protestant-biblical Newman of the Parochial and Plain Sermons predominates]
4. Protestant theological reading
Scholl spent “countless hours… reading the Confessions of St. Augustine” while sitting behind the church organ.
While Augustine is not Lutheran, his writings are central to Protestant theology, especially on:
Conscience
Interior struggle
The primacy of truth
This reading shaped her moral seriousness and her sense that truth must be lived, not merely believed.
5. Protestant anti‑totalitarian authors
The White Rose circle read widely among Protestant and Catholic anti‑Nazi thinkers, and while Newman (Catholic) was central, the group’s Protestant background meant they interpreted him through a conscience‑centered, anti‑authoritarian lens.
🧭 How Lutheranism Prepared Her for Newman
Scholl’s Lutheran and Pietist formation gave her:
A conscience‑centered moral framework
A belief in individual responsibility before God
A suspicion of state absolutism
A commitment to truth over ideology
These themes aligned closely with Newman’s writings on conscience, making her especially receptive to his thought when she encountered it through Theodor Haecker.
[Haecker was a spiritual force in his own right as well as championing Kierkegaard and Newman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Haecker ]
Thank you Sean and Joe.
All really excellent.
My first awareness of Newman was in my Leaving Cert prose— New Senior Prose, James J. Carey, BA., HDA and his essays, The Idea of a University, The Value of a University Training ( Portrait of a Gentleman) and The Isles of the North.
Like you, Sean, I was so impressed by the quality of his literacy though I didn’t know, Joe, that James Joyce regarded Newman as the greatest master of English prose.
It is also the interesting how the traditionalists in our church can also use Newman for their own ends.
Thank you both again.
I have shared your reflections with my Edinburgh Newman associates.
To Harriet Shaw Weaver he laments, in 1935: ‘As usual I am in a minority of one. If I tell people that no tenor voice like Sullivan’s has been heard in the world for 50 years or that Zaporoyetz, the Russian basso, make Chaliapin sound like a cheap whistle or that nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church they listen in silence. These names mean nothing to them. And when I have stumbled out of the room no doubt they tap their foreheads and sigh.’ (Letters 1.365). Inside James Joyce is a UCD student, an ardent Newmanite, struggling to be heard as the Joyceans celebrate him as a militant atheist. See my debate with Geert Lernout in “Irreducible Ireland” (Nagoya: Chisokudo, 2024). Joyce said to Jacques Mercanton: “The Church will surely decide to make a saint of him, if only for the numerous conversions that have followed in the wake of his own.”