Reflection / Sean Gallagher

A new doctor of the Church, St. John Newman joined faith and learning

I was delighted when I learned on the morning of July 31 that Pope Leo XIV had approved the naming of St. John Henry Newman as a doctor of the Church.

The title “doctor of the Church” has been given through the centuries to only 38 saints (including Newman) who are judged to have made significant contributions to growth in the understanding of the faith.

For me, Newman embodied two important aspects of the person I strive to be. Like him, I desire to keep learning until the day I die. I also seek, like Newman, to apply this learning to growing in my relationship with Christ and the Church, in my faith and how, with the help of God’s grace, I strive to live it out in daily life in the vocation to which God has called me.

Newman was born in England in 1801 and died in 1890. In the middle of his life, in 1845, he was received into the full communion of the Church after a long journey of faith.

He had been a noted priest and scholar in the Church of England, helping to lead a renewal movement in the 1830s and early 1840s by encouraging the restoration of its ties to the writings and spirituality of the early Church fathers.

Newman was convinced at the time that the Church of England ran a middle course between what he saw as the excesses and errors of Catholicism and the Lutheran, Calvinist and other forms of Protestantism.

But as he studied the early Church fathers more and more, Newman became convinced that the beliefs of the Catholic Church of his time were a natural (or, rather, supernatural) development from the beliefs of the fathers.

That led him to write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and, ultimately, to be received into the Catholic Church. He was later ordained an Oratorian priest and was named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

Newman not only sought to apply his lifelong learning to his own life of faith. He also strove to help his students do the same. This happened both when he was an Anglican priest and scholar at Oxford University, and later as a Catholic priest and educator in Ireland and in Birmingham, England.

His goal as an educator wasn’t simply to impart knowledge, but to form hearts through a mutual seeking of the truth with his students.

Newman chose “Cor ad cor loquitur” as his motto when he was named a cardinal. It is Latin for “heart speaks to heart” and represented the approach to learning and faith that had shaped his life.

But there was for Newman a prior “heart speaking to heart” that deepened and strengthened the hearts of student and teacher speaking to each other. That was the hearts of the student and the teacher speaking to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

He knew from his life of faith that this encounter with the heart of Jesus happened most profoundly in the Eucharist. In a prayer he wrote, Newman asked God that, “when thou dost condescend to suffer me to receive thee, to eat and drink thee, and thou for a while takest up thy abode within me, O make my heart beat with thy heart.”

Pope Francis quoted this prayer of Newman in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart “Dilexit nos” (“He loved us”) issued last October.

May St. John Henry Newman, now a doctor of the Church, intercede for all of God’s sons and daughters so that we all may be drawn more fully into the heart of Jesus in coming to know him more fully in this life and completely in the next.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter for The Criterion.) †