Rome, May 2011
Dear Newman Friends,
Last year we experienced the long awaited beatification of John Henry Newman. What can we learn from this new Beatus? Why was he beatified? What is his particular meaning for our times?
To this question one could give many answers. During the Mass of beatification on the 19th of September 2010 in Cofton Park, Birmingham, Pope Benedict spoke in his homily of Newman as an exemplary man of prayer, an educator and a pastor. At Hyde Park in London, the Holy Father encouraged the almost 100,000 people gathered for the vigil to learn from Newman’s passion for truth and his desire to live a life of witness through faith. During his Christmas audience with the Roman Curia, in which the Pope usually reflects upon an impor tant event of the past year, he spoke of Newman’s beatification. To highlight Newman’s prophetic meaning for the challenges of our times, he underlined two fundamental aspects of his life.
The Pope spoke first of Newman’s way of conversion, in particular “the first conversion: to faith in the living God. Until that moment, Newman thought like the average men of his time and indeed like the average men of today, who do not simply exclude the existence of God, but consider it as something uncertain, something with no essential role to play in their lives. What appeared genuinely real to him, as to the men of his and our day, is the empirical matter that can be grasped. This is the ‘reality’ according to which one finds one’s bearings. The ‘real’ is what can be grasped, it is the things that can be calculated and taken in one’s hand. In his conversion, Newman recognized that it is exactly the other way around: that God and the soul, man’s spiritual identity, constitute what is genuinely real, what counts. These are much more real than objects that can be grasped. This conversion was a Copernican revolution. What had previously seemed unreal and secondary was now revealed to be the genuinely de cisive element. Where such a conversion takes place, it is not just a person’s theory that changes: the fundamental shape of life changes. We are all in constant need of such conver sion: then we are on the right path” (L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English, 22-29 December 2010, p. 14).
For Newman, life in God’s presence is the very centre of Christian existence. In one of his sermons he speaks of the “true Christian”: One “who has a ruling sense of God’s presence within him. As none but justified persons have that privilege, so none but the justified have that practical perception of it. A true Christian, … is a person who has faith in Him, and lives in the thought that He is present with him,-present not externally, not in nature merely, or in providence, but in his innermost heart, or in his conscience. A man is justified whose con science is illuminated by God, so that he habitually realizes that all his thoughts, all the first springs of his moral life, all his motives and his wishes, are open to Almighty God” (PPS V, 265-266).
This very same subject was the theme of the International Symposium on “The Primacy of God in the Life and Writings of Blessed John Henry Newman” which our Newman Centre in Rome organised in collaboration with the Theological Faculty of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on the 22nd and 23rd of November 2010. The papers of the symposium will be published this autumn in the periodical Louvain Studies.
In his address to the Roman Curia Pope Benedict named a second aspect which highlights Newman’s particular affinity to our times, namely that of conscience. As the Pope explains, the word conscience has come to signify in contemporary thought: “that for moral and religious questions, it is the subjective dimension, the individual, that constitutes the final authority for decision. … Newman’s understanding of conscience is diametrically opposed to this. For him, ‘conscience’ means man’s capacity for truth: the capacity to recognize precisely in the decision-making areas of his life – religion and morals – a truth, the truth. At the same time, conscience – man’s capacity to recognize truth – thereby imposes on him the obligation to set out along the path towards truth, to seek it and to submit to it wherever he finds it. Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart. The path of Newman’s conversions is a path of conscience – not a path of self-asserting subjectivity but, on the contrary, a path of obedience to the truth that was gradually opening up to him” (L’Osservatore Romano).
Enclosed you will find an article which represents a study on the theme “Conscience and truth in the writings of blessed John Henry Newman”. Using the Beatus’s own life and teaching as a point of departure, the article sums up some of the most important aspects of this question. Because of his beatification more people have come to learn of Newman’s life. We have experienced this particularly in the many requests which have been directed to our Newman Centres. In order to respond to these demands we have decided to expand our Newman homepage. Also we see it necessary to send our Newsletter electronically in the future. We would therefore ask you to contact us with your email address if you wish to continue to receive the Newman Newsletter and other information of our Newman work and studies.
We rejoice in the interest which you and so many other people continue to show for the extraordinary life of Cardinal Newman. We trust in the help and intercession of the new Beatus. We would also ask you for your assistance – with prayers or donations – for our continued work in this field.
On behalf of the International Centre of Newman Friends,
Fr. Hermann Geissler FSO