ST JOHN HENRY NEWMAN is to be declared a Doctor of the Church, the Pope has announced, in an acknowledgement of the importance of Newman’s teaching.
The announcement, on Thursday, was welcomed by the Archbishop of York, who wrote on social media that Newman was a “profound teacher each to Anglicans & Catholics, spiritual guide, and model of holiness”.
Roman Catholic churchmen in England also welcomed the announcement. The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, said: “This recognition that the writings of St John Henry Newman are a real expression of the religion of the Church is of big encouragement to all who appreciate not only his great learning but in addition his heroic sanctity in following the decision of God in his journey of religion, which he described as ‘heart speaking unto heart’.”
The RC Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Revd Bernard Longley, said: “It is remarkable that his writings, first as an Anglican after which as a Roman Catholic, but regarded as one entire corpus of written work, have led to him being declared a Doctor of the Church.”
Newman was canonised in 2019 (News, 25 October 2019).
Born in 1801, he was a priest within the Church of England and one in every of the leaders of the Oxford Movement or the Tractarians, along with John Keble and E. B. Pusey. His authorship of Tract XC, concerning the potential of a Catholic interpretation of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, within the Tractarians’ series Tracts for the Times, received episcopal denunciation, the series was ended and he withdrew to a small community in Littlemore, just outside Oxford.
After his secession in 1845, he joined the Birmingham Oratory and was later created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. A outstanding figure within the RC Church in England and Ireland, he promoted university education for Roman Catholics in Ireland, and opposed the proposal to define papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council. He is remembered as writing that he would drink “to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards”.
There have long been calls for Newman to be made a Doctor of the Church. At the time of his canonisation, the RC Archbishop of Sydney, essentially the most Revd Anthony Fisher, said that the honour needs to be bestowed (News, 18 October 2019).
Newman is the thirty eighth Doctor of the Church recognised by the Vatican, and the third of them to be related to England, after the Venerable Bede and St Anselm of Canterbury.
The Provost of Oriel College, Lord Mendoza, said that he was delighted by the announcement. In a press release, he paid tribute to the “profound impact Newman made as a Fellow of Oriel College from 1822 until 1845, on the study of theology, on the university and on day by day academic life here and across Oxford”.
