Tag Archives: Newman

The silent God?

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman, poetry, Prayers

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“Thus religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, which forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines and isolated masses.”

Religion without dogma made no sense to Newman; without that it was “mere sentiment” – and that was a foundation of sand. But he was well aware of the limits of humanity and acknowledged that the application of the intellect to religious matters might well produce a diminution of faith. It was, he commented, as though it was assumed that theologians were “too intellectual to be spiritual” and thus “more occupied with the truths of doctrine than with its reality.”

For Catholics the Church is the rock upon which dogma rests; we accept the historical reality of the Revelation it transmits to us. But intellect alone will not suffice; that is where prayer and devotional practices are needed; we do not worship by brain-power. For Newman,“Revealed religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.” Prose was inadequate to convey the Truth of revealed religion, but, without an Authority to pronounce on revelation and tradition, private judgement would simply lead to the sort of chaos he came to discern within the Church of England in his own day. Thus, the mixture of light and dark in the quotation which heads up this essay.

Although we are each the subject of our own experiences, and whilst Christ came to save each of us, our egos are but a vehicle when it comes to understanding that Christ Himself is at the centre of our Faith. The central truth of the Christian Faith is the Incarnation. God became man and died that we should have eternal life. And yet knowing this, we can, nonetheless, in times such as this lose sight of this and, in despair, wonder why God is silent in the face of our prayers for healing and safety.

Much prose has been given over to the problem of why God allows mankind to suffer – the technical term is theodicy. But the intervention which speaks most to my heart is the poem, “Denaill” by George Herbert:

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder

This is no intellectual exercise, it is the heart-felt anguish of the poet who agonises at what he feels is God’s refusal of his prayerful requests. He feels abandoned, as though his soul has no mooring. It is only in close reading that we see that the poet is, himself, in “denial”. Each stanza concludes with a last line which does not rhyme – except for the last one which concludes:

 O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhym

Which, of course, is a rhyme. God has answered, it is the poet who has been in denial. God’s answer may not be the one we expect; it maybe that we are not listening.

We are made in God’s image; but we are not God. How much we long for a God whom we can understand, as well as worship, how often we think that God is absent; but how often to we think that it is we who are absent, we who are deaf?

T.S. Eliot, as so often, expresses it best in the first part of Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

We have to put away our worldly concerns. Our intellects can rest secure on the rock of the dogma proclaimed by the Church. What should concern us is prayer, and even the best of prayers is but the antechamber to our encounter with God. We intersect with the past and the present, the living and dead, and above all with Him whose Kingdom shall have no end.

God is not silent; we lack the ears with which to hear Him if we think so.

Newman defends Papal Infallibility

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman

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It was well-known that Newman had lively doubts about the wisdom of pronouncing on Papal Infallibility, so there was some surprise when, in his response to Gladstone’s critique, he did just that.

Newman’s defence of Infallibility deserves to be read in full, as it remains one of the best I know. That those who were making extreme claims for the dogma were as dissatisfied with it as those who disliked it; but as time has shown, Newman had it about right.

Gladstone had claimed that since the Pope was infallible in matters concerning faith and morals, and since there was no area of life which did not involve at least one of these, he was, in practice, able to command the civic and public allegiance of his subjects: ‘therefore Catholics are moral and metal slaves, and every convert and member of the Pope’s Church places his loyalty and civic duty at the mercy of another.’[iv] Far from shying away from the duty of obedience to those set in ecclesiastical authority, Newman, in the best Protestant style, cited the relevant passage from St. Paul (Hebrews 13: 17) enjoining submission to those placed in positions of authority and challenged Gladstone directly: ‘Is there any liberalistic reading of this Scripture passage?’[v] Catholics held that the Pope was the successor of St. Peter; that being so the obedience paid to him was only that demanded by Holy Scripture itself – and Newman denied utterly that obedience to that authority amounted to ‘slavery’. He drew an analogy between divine and human law. The Law, he argued, was ‘supreme’ and those under it were bound to follow its direction, but no one would claim it ‘interferes either with our comfort or our conscience.’ Newman attempted to correct the English obsession with the power of the Pope. Catholic consciences, like those of any Christian, were regulated by an ancient system of moral theology deriving from sources common to all: the Ten Commandments; the Pauline injunctions of Faith, Hope and Charity; and the practices of fasting, sabbatarianism and tithing; the Pope had little, if anything, to do with these matters. The Pope’s jurisdiction lay in matters ecclesiastical, not in civil affairs; Gladstone’s evident confusion of the two was, Newman commented wryly, the origin of his alarm.

Nor did Newman shy away from Gladstone’s attempt to link Infallibility and the Syllabus. He denied that any of the Pope’s words could be construed as releasing subjects from their allegiance to the State, or as condemning either freedom of the press or of conscience. Failing to anticipate where arguments for the latter would lead, Newman asserted that that no one would say that everything should be published, or that people had the right to unrestricted liberty; every State provided, in its laws, for limits to these things; it was the abuse of such liberty, not the liberties themselves, which the Pope condemned. It was the ‘liberty of self-will’ which was being anathematised, not liberty per se. The Syllabus was, Newman reminded Gladstone, a collection of propositions already condemned in the writings of previous Popes; it had been sent by Pius IX to his bishops, and could only be properly understood in that context; it contained no new matter by the Pope. None of this justified Gladstone’s equating the Syllabus with ex cathedra pronouncements of the Holy See: ‘Utterances which must be received as coming from an Infallible Voice, are not made every day, indeed they are very rare; and those which are by some persons affirmed or assumed to be such, do not always turn out what they are said to be.’ Patience was the ‘sine qua non’ when it came to the interpretation of documents emanating from Rome. It was quite untenable, in Newman’s view, to attribute Infallibility to the Syllabus; from this came all Gladstone’s errors.

Newman’s words are as wise and relevant now as they were then, treading a line between the claims of the Ultramontanes and the liberals. Understood aright, Infallibility is the guard against Christ’s Church teaching error; no more, no less.

[iv] Ibid., p. 39

[v] Ibid., p. 40.

Vaticanism

15 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Anti Catholic, Newman

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On Tuesday I began what is going to turn into a series of posts about Catholicism and intellectual freedom. The locus classicus of this discussion for me is the debate between Gladstone and Newman caused by the former’s attack on what he called ‘Vaticanism’. For Gladstone, as for many Englishmen, Rome was the home of the a black legend of persecution and intellectual slavery. High Churchman though he was, Gladstone was never tempted to follow Newman or Manning across the Tiber; he was inoculated from their ‘Roman fever’ by his view of history. English history was the tale of moving from the darkness of feudal Catholicism to the light of Anglican constitutional government. He was no democrat, regarded it as a debased form of government where the mob might rule at the whim of a populist dictator. He was, he said, an ‘out and out inegalitarian’. If American democracy was at one end of the spectrum, the Vatican was at the other end. In his eyes what happened in Rome in 1871 was the revival of the old enemy of Papal absolutism. The dispute between Gladstone and Newman has to be seen against the background of the First Vatican Council (as it began to be called after its successor).

The Vatican Decrees of 1871 were controversial before and after the Council.  Many Catholics, Newman included, had considered it inopportune to make any declaration about Papal Infallibility.  Newman had aroused some controversy at the time when the contents of what was meant to be a private letter to Bishop Ullathorne were leaked the press. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘should an aggressive and insolent faction be allowed to make the heart of the just sad, whom the Lord had not made sorrowful?’[i] Newman had not meant the letter for publication, but when it got into the press, he refused to retract his remarks, preferring instead to resort to his characteristic device of explaining with precision whom he had not meant by the offending comments. Many had supposed him to be referring to Manning and his Ultramontane colleagues; this Newman refused to confirm – or quite deny.  By 1874 the controversy caused by the Decrees had quietened down, at least in the UK.  But in November of that year Gladstone, who had lost power in the General Election six months earlier, published a pamphlet which poured petrol on the smouldering embers.

Gladstone’s The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation was a sizeable publication of seventy two pages.  In it, he denounced ‘Vaticanism’ and all the works of Pius IX. In highly inflammatory language, he argued that henceforth no Roman Catholic could be considered a loyal subject of the Queen.

The pamphlet was a best-seller, twenty five thousand copies were bought in the month after its publication in January 1874; by the end of the year 145,000 copies had been printed. Gladstone acknowledged that his language had been a little ‘rough’, but justified it by the seriousness of the matters under review, chief amongst which was ‘the question whether a handful of the clergy are or not engaged  in an utterly hopeless and visionary attempt to Romanise the Church and people of England.’[ii] This, clearly, was aimed as much at the Tractarians in the Anglican Church as it was at Rome.

Not since ‘the bloody reign of Mary’ had such an enterprise been possible, he declared, but this was especially true now, because Rome had substituted ‘for the proud boast of simper eadem, a policy of violence and change in faith,’ and had ‘refurbished and paraded anew, every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused,’ and when ‘no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she had equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history’[iii]

He listed eighteen propositions from the Syllabus to prove his last point, denying that his words were aimed at ‘Roman Catholics generally’; his target was ‘the Papal Chair’ and ‘its advisers and abettors’. The only fault of individual Catholics lay in their submission to such a tyranny, which rejected ‘the old historic, scientific and moderate school’ of Catholics epitomised in the contents of Newman’s letter to Ullathorne. In citing Newman, Gladstone was trying to ‘strengthen and hearten’ the moderate Catholic party generally.[iv] His way of going about this was, to say the least, most unfortunate; nothing was less liable to achieve such an aim than quoting Newman’s letter.

Gladstone’s pamphlet was welcomed by the Protestant world, not least by those Anglicans who had been pressing the Disraeli Government to pass legislation against Ritualism in the Church of England.  Given the fact that Gladstone was himself a High Anglican, and that he had said little about Papal Infallibility at the time, despite the fact he had been Prime Minister then, the timing of his publication needs explaining before moving on to the question of why he mentioned Newman’s letter to Ullathorne.

[i] C.S. Dessain and T. Gornall, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, volume XXV, (Oxford, 1975), pp. 18-20, letter to Ullathorne, 28 January 1870.

[ii] W.E. Gladstone, The Vatican Decrees ion their bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Politicanal Exposulation (1874), pp. 4-5.

[iii] Op. Cit. p. 6.

[iv] Ramm,  Gladstone, Granville Corr. volume II WEG to Granville, 7 December 1874, p. 461.

Catholicism and intellectual freedom

11 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Faith, Newman, Politics, Pope

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The charge has often been, and sometimes still is made that Catholics cannot be fully loyal citizens of any nation or Empire – or even a secular organization, because their primary loyalty lies elsewhere. In modern times we saw it with John F Kennedy when he stood for the Presidency of the USA in 1960, but perhaps the classic statement of it came in 1874. Writing three years after the Vatican Council which had declared the Pope infallible, the British former Prime Minister, Gladstone, wrote (1):

That no one can now become her [the Catholic Church] convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.

In expressing this view, he was saying out loud, so to say, what many British people thought. Embedded deep into the national psyche, not least by two hundred years worth of anti-Catholic black propaganda, was the idea that to be a Roman Catholic was profoundly un-English. Edward Norman has eloquently described the potent, and toxic, mix of patriotism, prurience and Protestantism which made up the mental image of the Catholic for the average Englishman. All of this Gladstone now evoked. At the very least, he demanded, Catholics should give some kind of oath of fealty that they would not vote as their priests told them to.

Gladstone was appealing to feelings which, as recently as 1851, had resulted in a wave of pubic hostility against the restoration by Rome of a diocesan structure in England and Wales, described by the then Prime Minister, Lord John Russell as ‘Papal Aggression’. When Newman converted in 1845, he knew that he would be considered as though he were dead by many of his old friends; indeed, for some of them, death would have been preferable to crossing the Tiber and surrendering his mental faculties to a celibate old Italian bigot.

Newman’s response to Gladstone, which took the form of a letter to the leading English Catholic layman, the Duke of Norfolk still deserves reading as the best, and most reasoned example to a line of argumentation (it would be doing it too much honour to call it an argument) which is not unfamiliar to readers of this site.

Newman first reminded Gladstone that States had ever sought to bring Christianity under their control and, from Britain through to the lands of the East had largely succeeded in either subduing or massacring Christians:

Such is the actual fact that, whereas it is the very mission of Christianity to bear witness to the Creed and Ten Commandments in a world which is averse to them, Rome is now the one faithful representative, and thereby is heir and successor, of that free-spoken dauntless Church of old, whose political and social traditions Mr. Gladstone says the said Rome has repudiated.

Rome, and it alone, stood out against the ‘spirit of the age’, as it always had and must, as Christ’s Church, always do. Where Anglicans:

do not believe that Christ set up a visible society, or rather kingdom, for the propagation and maintenance of His religion, for a necessary home and a refuge for His people

Catholics did; it was their Church, which alone resembled that of Rome of old. But did that, as Gladstone alleged, mean that Catholics could not vote according to their own consciences? Were they, as British politicians had urged since the days of Elizabeth, spies and agents of a foreign power which was hostile to the freedom which was the heir of every Englishman?

The main point of Gladstone’s Pamphlet was that, since the Pope claims infallibility in faith and morals, and since there were no “departments and functions of human life which do not and cannot fall within the domain of morals,”(2) and since “the domain of all that concerns the government and discipline of the Church,” were his, and he “claims the power of determining the limits of those domains,” and “does not sever them, by any acknowledged or intelligible line from the domains of civil duty and allegiance,” therefore Catholics are moral and mental slaves, and “every convert and member of the Pope’s Church places his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another.

These things, Newman declared, were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Church and of its relationship to society. He saw clearly what many still fail to see, that the secular had their own agenda and were either blind to that, or motivated by hostility to religion. We shall turn, tomorrow, the Newman’s anser.

Change and development in the early Church

10 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith, Heresies

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It is, as Newman commented long ago, plain enough that there are differences between the Church as we see it when it is legalised in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, and what is described in the Acts of the Apostles. This occasions no surprise to any historically-aware person; across that range of time and cultures it would have been astonishing if things had not changed. Some changes were relatively painless but undocumented – no one insisted that every successor to the Apostles should be a Jew, although there was a consensus that elders/bishops should be male; others were painful and documented – Gentiles did not, as it turned out, have to be circumcised or obey kosher laws. The transfer of the sabbath from the Jewish Saturday to Sunday was an especially painful change, as there were many who insisted that it must remain where the Apostles had it; but the Church decided otherwise. However, for many years, there were those who refused to accept this and who alleged it showed that the Church had turned away from the right path; no doubt the ‘men from James’ felt the same.  In short, there has always been change and always been those who objected to it.

Nor was this change confined to what one might call the ‘accidents’ of the faith. In many posts here on the Trinity (just enter the term in the search panel and you will find more than I can list here) we have seen that the attempt to understand what St John meant by writing that the ‘Word’ was ‘in the beginning with God’ and ‘was God’ took pious and intelligent Christians in different directions. The Arians thought that because Jesus was the Son, and the Son came after the Father, that Jesus was the first-born of all creation. When Arius formulated that view, supported by many Scriptural quotations, it was not heretical because the Church had not actually come to a fixed view; in fact it was Arius’ teaching of a view which clearly made Jesus ‘a creature’ which forced other Christians to think very clearly about the issue.

This is brought out well in one of my favourite books by Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century. Now, had Arius not been free to enunciate his views, no doubt a good deal of pain would have been averted, but the result of his boldness was to make Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers think carefully about why Arius was wrong. Their long argument with Arianism and its variants were the whetstone on which the doctrine of the Trinity was sharpened. Those who still refuse to accept the Trinity rarely show any acquaintanceship with the Cappadocian Fathers or with Athanasius, and, indeed, some do not know that they are Arians and that their arguments were exploded long ago. To lack a sense of history is to risk repeating what was once not heresy, but is now and will be for ever more.

However, for there to be heresy, there has to be an authority which declare orthodoxy, and for Catholics, this is what Jesus provided for when he gave the powers of binding and loosing to St Peter and his successors. For Orthodox Christians, this power lies with the successors of the Apostles and the Councils, a position which the Catholic Church regards as not going quite far enough as it does not recognise the special place of Rome. But without some authority, who is to say what changes, what developments are orthodox and which are not?

Liberalism?

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman

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Liberalism is a much abused word. In some American contexts it seems almost to be a synonym for socialism, and in Christians contexts it is usually synonymous with unorthodoxy if not downright heresy. The latest incarnation of this phenomenon is its attachment to the word ‘elite’, in, for example, the liberal elite lost Brexit and Trump’s triumph is a revolt against the ‘liberal elite’. Our new Prime Minister, Mrs May, has joined in attacking the ‘smug liberal elite’ who sneered at those who voted for Brexit. In her case one wonders if she was referring to her immediate predecessor and his good friend the Chancellor; she is clearly not referring to herself or her hedge fund manager husband who, whilst most certainly part of the elite, and almost certainly voting against Brexit, clearly do not consider themselves liberals. There is an oddness in this. It most certainly was not a conservative instinct which led to the formation of democratic forms of government, nor was it one which advocated universal education, women’s rights, equal rights for coloured people, or, come to think of it, almost any reform you can name. Indeed, in British politics, the area I know best, where it was a Conservative who pushed some reform or other, it was usually one with a prefix ‘liberal’ such as Peel or Disraeli. One might expect liberalism to have a somewhat better reputation than it has. But perhaps it only has a bad one in conservative circles?

In Christian circles it is perhaps more understandable that those who favour reform should come under suspicion; quite often their motives, like their objectives, appear to be to replace orthodoxy with an ‘anything goes’ version of the ‘faith once given’. Yet, reform is a constant necessity. Newman’s definition of liberalism bears repeating: ‘Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.’ This, to his way of thinking, was untrue. Either the Catholic Church and what it taught was the Church founded by Jesus, in which case its dogma were the expression of immutable truths, or they were not, in which case it really didn’t matter very much because there was no solid foundation from truth.

This was one reason Newman thought that the emphasis on the Bible alone as the foundation of your faith was misguided. Long before the later Victorian obsession with religious scepticism and source criticism of the Bible, Newman was aware, via his friend Pusey, of the work of German Bible scholars in Gottingen who were querying everything from the notion that the world was made in six days, through to the dimensions of the ark and the physics of resurrection. He knew that literal readings of Scripture were coming under question, and he looked for the remedy to the organisation which gave the world the Bible in the first place – the Church. 1900 years of the Church and of men (and a few women) reflecting on the Good News provided a rich resource for understanding the Bible in context – what Newman’s later admirer, Pope Benedict XVI called ‘the hermeneutic of continuity’. Newman distinguished between reform and development. Doctrines developed. So, the Trinity, though not called such anywhere in Scripture, is there, and the Nicene Creed reflects the long discussion within Christendom about how to read Scripture on the subject. That being so, it was not up for renegotiation in some process by which it became something else. That was one of the main reasons he crossed the Tiber. Many of us followed suite for similar reasons.

Catholic higher education (2)

26 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Education, Faith, Newman

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It would be a legitimate question to ask whether one could in all seriousness write about Catholic higher education in the UK? In the USA there are dozens of Catholic colleges, and however much some might query the aptness of the name in some cases, there is a large Catholic sector to American higher education. The UK, by contrast, has four Catholic Universities (and other ‘institutes’ and ‘colleges’), in order of foundation, St Mary’s, Twickenham, Newman, Birmingham, Leeds Trinity, and St Mary’s Belfast. All were (and Belfast still is), until recently, ‘University Colleges’ and all have distinguished histories in terms of training teachers for Catholic schools, but together, they account for no more than about 0.5% of UK undergraduates. All of them talk about their ‘Catholic ethos’, and for those in this very secular society who, seeing the word ‘Catholic’, freak out, what they say should act as some reassurance.

St Mary’s, Belfast speaks for them all when its website says:

“Wherever it is found throughout the world Catholic Higher Education seeks to integrate intellectual, personal, ethical, and religious formation; and to unite high academic achievement with service to others.”

The mission is, at one level, that of every good university, to provide excellent teaching and to do good research, but where secular universities can stop there, a Catholic one needs to go further. We have to help meet the teaching and the pastoral needs of our students in the light of the Church’s faith in Jesus Christ. So we are responsible, in part, for passing on our Catholic heritage to the next generation, not as something set in aspic, or as a museum piece to be admired but disregarded, but rather as part of a living faith engaging with the trends and fashions of the academic world. But where, perhaps, others pay obeisance to the modern faith in relativism, we do that thing academics ought to do, we approach it with a proper scepticism. We do believe in the search for truth, and though we acknowledge that search cannot be completed in this world, we know that it exists. Newman saw Catholic education as developing the following attributes: freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom. A Catholic university is charged with developing a learning community which inculcates such values, and should strive to help form its students in such a way; but it also needs to engage its students actively in this process – there is no room for ‘safe spaces’ or for students to be merely passive receivers (even if such students existed and wanted to come to a university with a Catholic ethos).

A Catholic university places itself, Newman wrote, at the service of revealed truth (Idea of a University, Discourse 4). That gives us the immense task of trying to harmonise the spiritual, cultural and personal worlds within which we live, with a view to producing students who are not only well-educated in a secular sense, but whose spiritual needs (even if they are not Catholics) are being met, and who see an horizon wider than that of contemporary utilitarianism. Such students will go on, in whatever walk of life they follow, to be good citizens of this world, and we pray, through Grace, to reach their destiny in the next.

Whilst fulfilling all the intellectual needs students have, a Catholic university also values each one of them as a unique individual with a God-given destiny, and our job is to work with them to help them realise it. In addition to the ubiquitous ‘performance indicators’ of grades and exam success, a Catholic university will keep its eyes fixed on the wider purpose of education, and it will not neglect the spiritual yearnings of people. It is an impoverished vision of education which narrows it down to the acquisition of knowledge and worldly success; these things matter, but they are only a part of education, not its ultimate objectives. Education is not a commodity, even if the Government insists it operates in a ‘market’. A Catholic model of a university begins with the heart of the Church, and it teaches from there. Each person is made in the image of God, and we emphasise the inalienable dignity of each of us, and as God loves us, so, too must we love one another. A Catholic university is a community where teamwork consists not only of interaction between staff and students, but between both groups and the Church in the parish, the diocese and the wider world. We are, even in the modern, secular UK, part of a wider, global Catholic community. That, too, is the mark of a Catholic university. Whatever the politics of ‘Brexit’, no university in this country has, or could afford to have, an insular outlook. Where Catholic universities here have an advantage, is that although there may be few of them here in the UK, there is a global Catholic community of which we are already part. Cooperation between us offers students and staff opportunities which we need to take advantage of – not least at this point in history.

The Creeds and the early Church

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Early Church, Faith, Newman

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Every now and then one reads that x is a Christian but does not believe in dogma and Creeds. This is a strange phenomenon, as for the early Church, belief in the Creeds was the hall-mark of being an orthodox Christian. This passage, from the second chapter of Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century expresses it well, and seems a suitable piece for Sunday reading.

 

The idea of disbelieving, or criticising the great doctrines of the faith, from the nature of the case, would scarcely occur to the primitive Christians. These doctrines were the subject of an Apostolical Tradition; they were the very truths which had been lately revealed to mankind. They had been committed to the Church’s keeping, and were dispensed by her to those who sought them, as a favour. They were facts, not opinions. To come to the Church was all one with expressing a readiness to receive her teaching; to hesitate to believe, after coming for the sake of believing, would be an inconsistency too rare to require a special provision against the chance of it.

It was sufficient to meet the evil as it arose: the power of excommunication and deposition was in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, and, as in the case of Paulus, was used impartially. Yet, in the matter of fact, such instances of contumacy were comparatively rare; and the Ante-Nicene heresies were in many instances the innovations of those who had never been in the Church, or who had already been expelled from it.

We have some difficulty in putting ourselves into the situation of Christians in those times, from the circumstance that the Holy Scriptures are now our sole means of satisfying ourselves on points of doctrine. Thus, every one who comes to the Church considers himself entitled to judge and decide individually upon its creed. But in that primitive age, the Apostolical Tradition, that is, the Creed, was practically the chief source of instruction, especially considering the obscurities of Scripture; and being withdrawn from public view, it could not be subjected to the degradation of a comparison, on the part of inquirers and half-Christians, with those written documents which are vouchsafed to us from the same inspired authorities.

As for the baptized and incorporate members of the Church, they of course had the privilege of comparing the written and the oral tradition, and might exercise it as profitably as in comparing and harmonizing Scripture with itself. But before baptism, the systematic knowledge was withheld; and without it, Scripture, instead of being the source of instruction on the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, was scarcely more than a sealed book, needing an interpretation, amply and powerfully as it served the purpose of proving those doctrines, when they were once disclosed.

And so much on the reluctance of the primitive Fathers to publish creeds, on the ground that the knowledge of Christian doctrines was a privilege reserved for those who were baptized, and in no sense a subject of hesitation and dispute.—It may be added, that the very love of power, which in every age will sway the bulk of those who are exposed to the temptation of it, and ecclesiastics in the number, would indispose them to innovate upon a principle which made themselves the especial guardians of revealed truth.

Their backwardness proceeded also from a profound reverence for the sacred mysteries of which they were the dispensers. Here they present us with the true exhibition of that pious sensitiveness which the heathen had conceived, but could not justly execute. The latter had their mysteries, but their rude attempts were superseded by the divine discipline of the Gospel, which here acted in the office which is peculiarly its own, rectifying, combining, and completing the inventions of uninstructed nature. If the early Church regarded the very knowledge of the truth as a fearful privilege, much more did it regard that truth itself as glorious and awful; and scarcely conversing about it to her children, shrank from the impiety of subjecting it to the hard gaze of the multitude.

 

A Catholic (higher) education?

08 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Education, Faith, Newman

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I have recently been asked, rather frequently, what it means to say you are at a ‘University with a Catholic ethos’? Sometimes it is in a tone of voice which implies that one’s interlocutor is under the distinct impression that one is setting up a Madrassa; sometimes it is in a tone which implies that one’s interlocutor would rather like that, but suspects you of being lukewarm on the idea; and sometimes it is a tone of simple bewilderment. In answering such questions, I have gone along a line I want to share with readers here.

I begin with the knowledge that many, if not most, of the students coming to a University in England with a Catholic ethos will not be Catholics, and that the same is true of colleagues who work there. I also do not proceed from the, to me, odd view that this situation ought not to be so, and those who do not want a ‘Catholic ethos’ should not be there; that seems to me the opposite of a true Catholic ethos, which seeks to witness to the whole world. The existing status quo, where neither students nor staff can be assumed to be Catholic, offers a wonderful opportunity to emphasise what we have in common as children of God. University education is about so much more than simply educating the intellect and producing students with great qualifications. So, whilst doing those things superbly, a University with a Catholic ethos also realises the importance of educating the whole person, body and spirit as well as intellect. A Catholic University is a partnership between the generations, dedicated to helping shape people who will make the world a better place by bearing in mind always that we are all made in the image of God, and that everyone of us is of unique value in his eyes, and so worthy of respect and love. At a time when so many of us are worried about a rise in tensions in our society, a Catholic University is a reminder that since, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, what unites us as human beings is far greater than the ephemeral things which divide us.

Our faith should so infuse the life of the University that to those of all faiths, and none, it is evident that what we are about is helping each student to realise their full potential as a human being. I never yet met a student or an academic who thought that a university education was just about getting a good degree, and you don’t have to be religious to know that there is more to life than ‘getting on’. If we want to live in a Good Society and to be part of one, we have to help build it. A University imbued with that Catholic ethos provides, amongst other things, a space in a secularised world, where one can remind people that there is more to life than this world now emphasises, and that most of the things really worth having can’t be measured ‘scientifically’. And, of course, if its results – that is the quality of the achievements of the students educated in such an ethos – can be measured and look good, then virtue will be rewarded twice over.

Rereading Newman’s Idea of a University recently in the light of my thoughts, I realised, not without pleasure, how much of what he wrote had embedded itself in my own thinking. That was a cheering thought.

Catholic education?

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Education, Faith, Newman

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What is the point of Catholic education? In the UK we have many Catholic schools, and the Church has a clear view of what they are for. In summary, it is to provide a first rate education, but to construe education as being about more than simply providing children with knowledge. Like all schools, our Catholic schools encourage high aspirations, hard work, high levels of achievement and respect for others, but for us:

“Education is integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News. First and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.” 

That is not to confuse us with Madrassas, but in a Catholic school, the Church seeks to build the foundation for our spiritual development, so our learning and teaching should reflect the fact that Christ is at the centre of our lives. That does not mean that all the children in our schools should be Catholics, but it does mean that they and their parents should be open to the idea that there is more to life than ‘getting on’ – success is not merely about getting qualifications (though they matter), it is about how you get them, it is about your relations with other people, it is about the quality of those relationships. As the Vatican put it:

they are to be the communities where the spiritual, cultural and personal worlds within which we live are harmonised to form the roots from which grow our values, motivation, aspirations and the moral imperatives that inform our choices and actions as persons.

This is well understood, although there may well be times when this is honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Less well understood is the idea of a Catholic university, especially in the UK, where the idea has been foreign since the Reformation. The Catholic Church was the original provider of higher education in this country, but its institutions were taken over by the Church of England. Since then, and until recently, we have had no university in the UK which espouses a distinctively Catholic mission. We do, however, have this definition of what a Catholic University ought to do:

A Catholic foundation in higher education is understood as “an academic institution which in a rigorous and critical fashion assists in the advancement of human dignity and cultural heritage through research, teaching and services offered to local, national and international communities.”

(Source: Ex Corde Ecclesiae 1990 para 12: quoted in The Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland The Canon Law: Letter and Spirit, p 442)

It is, perhaps, hard to see what is particularly Catholic about such aims – my own university, very definitely not a religious foundation, would sign up to these aims like a shot. In a secular, and secularised academy, such aims are, perhaps, a way of not frightening people off. It is probably best to proceed carefully with defining what a Catholic university is for. Newman was quite clear – Catholic Universities should serve the cause of Revealed Truth. But again, this is a headline statement and not an account of how we should do that.

My own view is that it should ensure that a distinctively Catholic viewpoint is represented where that is possible. Too often, in our secularised academy, faith is taken in a reductive way, as though people in the past could not have meant what they said. But faith is real, and it should not be set to one side as though it were a separate part of our experience and had no effect on anything we do. That insight, if it is one, seems a good place to start.