St. John Henry Newman on The Laity

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. Paul says to the Ephesians, For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places (Eph 6:12).

Today we contemplate the greatness of a seminal figure of English-speaking Catholicism, a man who was, simply put, a religious genius, and that person is John Henry Newman. He was canonized by Pope Francis in 2019.

One of his favorite aspirations was a “Lead on, kindly light, out of the darkness into the light.”

We're told in St. John that Christ is the light, and that light led John Henry Newman from Protestantism to Anglicanism to Catholicism. He sought after that light and saw that God was leading him gently, slowly, but very clearly, to the Catholic Church.

He ended up becoming a cardinal and was eventually canonized. His personal motto was Cor ad cor loquitor, heart speaks to the heart.

He was very prominent in the Oxford movement, which was a movement of high church members of the Church of England in the mid-1800s, which eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. Its main goal was to bring renewal to the Church of England, in particular by reviving certain Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals that Anglicans had dropped during the struggles of the Protestant Reformation.

This was initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, particularly Oriel College, largely as a response to threats to the established Church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, and Whig and Radical politicians, who seemed poised to subjugate or even abolish the established Church.

This led Newman, among others, to a deeper study of the Church Fathers, the early Church writers, and that led him to a slow, progressive conversion to the Catholic faith.

He's a historical precursor of St. Josemaría Escrivá. A very interesting investigation would be a comparison of the life and work, contrasts and similarities of these two great men of the Church of the last two centuries, whose thought played such an important role in the development of the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

Father George Rutler, an American priest and convert himself, was a Newman expert. He once named Newman as the invisible expert of the Council, and St. Josemaría as the invisible or the anonymous expert.

Included in that investigation could be the role of Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II, who had a great appreciation for both St. John Newman and also for St. Josemaría, and who as a young bishop participated in that very Council.

Newman is quoted four times in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and once in Veritatis Splendor, the Splendor of Truth, one of the great encyclicals of John Paul II. This tends to highlight the current high regard in which Newman is held, not only by John Paul II, but also by the whole Church.

The importance of Newman's thought and life for today's world is underlined when we see how clearly Newman, in his prophetic role, foresaw the showdown between the forces of God and the fallen world, between Catholicism and atheism. In one of his writings, he says:

“And yet in spite of this universal world which we see, there is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, and more wonderful; another world all around us, though we see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see, for this reason, if for no other, that we do not see it. All around us are numberless objects, coming and going, watching, working, or waiting, which we see not: this is that other world, which the eyes reach not unto, but faith only.” (John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, no.13)

At the heart of Newman's ideas for both the laity and the priesthood is holiness; that is to say, union with Christ through an exact following of the specific vocation to which each person is called.

An awful lot has been written about Newman and the laity, indeed whole volumes. And a hundred years later, one of the key, if not the key message, of the Second Vatican Council, was to be the universal call to holiness, particularly focusing on the laity.

Newman expresses all his ideas very clearly, but like all the saints, from the very beginning of his public life, he was subject to all sorts of erroneous interpretations, because the things he said about the laity in the very clerical world at the time seemed like heresy.

In his personal life, he was not an extrovert. He had a rather shy, retiring nature. But he wasn't monastic. He lived very much in the world but was not of the world. He had an extraordinary gift for friendship.

There are many volumes of his letters and diaries, and also autobiographical works, that testify to this. He was profoundly religious by temperament, and he speaks of his religious views from a very early age.

Many of his contemporaries in the Oxford movement came from a long line of clergymen, but that's not the case with Newman. During his university years, he felt a call to clerical life and even to celibacy, which was not at all common at the time.

He studied classics and history during his undergraduate years. He had a keen interest in the world of music, of literature, and politics, all of which are evidenced by his letters and diaries.

He even chose the wine for his college. He played the violin, a hobby to which he returned later in life, and he exercised vigorously by very long walks and enjoyed the fresh air of the sea while sailing.

He was a poet, a novelist, and a Latinist of the highest order. The Curia officials of the Vatican were astonished by the high level of his classical Latin in their correspondence with him. He was able to express in a paragraph what sometimes took them a page. He was also arguably the greatest master of English prose style of the 19th century.

This emphasizes that while Newman was eminently religious, he was not monastic. He had a keen appreciation for the world in all its positive aspects and enjoyed the company and friendship of many laymen.

His choice of the Oratory as the best setting for him and his followers to live the priesthood was predicated in part on the idea that the life of the Oratory was the most suited for men from university backgrounds who chose to live their dedication more clearly in the world.

His views on the laity were not simply theoretical but based on lived experience and observation.

One of the keys to understanding Newman is to realize how wonderfully well he lived that vocation to which God calls all of his children: the apostolate of friendship.

As has been mentioned in the writings of St. Josemaría, friendship is one of the most effective means by which we can share our love of God with our fellow human beings. This is true of the clergy as well as for laymen, for whom it's often the most effective means.

What made him such a good friend and so good at making friends? Well, his own personal motto gives us a clue: cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to the heart.

He understood the centrality of the need to make a sincere gift of self to others. Notice how frequently in his writings, John Paul II talked about the sincere gift of self and how love is characterized by that gesture to reach out in love, to share one's faith through friendship.

Friendship is such a powerful means of evangelization precisely because it's so personal. You let down the drawbridge of your heart and you let other people see what it is that makes you tick.

Then hopefully they look into your heart and they see things that they don't have. And they let down the drawbridge of their heart.

This personal form of evangelization complemented his more public means of outreach, his writing, and his preaching, for which he was also quite famous.

He was a great friend because he realized the transcendent purpose of friendship. He recognized that without faith and grace, the human virtues which make true friendship possible count for nothing towards one's salvation.

He enjoyed faith and grace in abundance. He encouraged them in his friends, and that included all the people who sought him for spiritual direction. How can a Christian love truly a friend and not be interested in his eternal salvation?

For Newman, the great enemy was not so much the world, the flesh and the devil in its classical form. But more often, his main thrust was against religious indifferentism, which was often called liberalism.

For him, it was a lifelong struggle. He tells us at the end of his life:

“I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth. Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another. … It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. … Liberalism holds that revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. …” (John Henry Newman Biglietto Speech)

For those of us living in the 21st century, all of this sounds immensely relevant. One of the great thrusts of Newman was a call for a devout, well-educated Catholic laity.

He prophetically saw the absolute necessity of holy laypersons in the world, not only as a good in itself, but also in order not to let the world fall completely along the path of religious indifferentism.

He would have felt very much at home fighting the battle of the 21st century. He had foreseen all of this. He battled very much against the clericalism of his time. He was a real enemy of what we call clericalism.

Clericalism has been defined by Russell Shaw, a famous writer in the States. He says, ‘Clericalism assumes that clerics not only are but are also meant to be the active, dominant elite in the Church, and laymen the passive, subservient mass. As a result, the laity are discouraged from taking seriously their responsibility for the Church's mission, and evangelization is neglected. So are efforts to influence the structures of secular society on behalf of the values of the gospel—the evangelization of culture as it is called. …

‘Clericalism deepens the confusion about lay and clerical identity … perhaps as the most serious of all, clericalism tends to discourage laymen from cultivating a spirituality that arises above a rather low level of fervor and intensity. As the clerical mentality sees it, the serious pursuit of sanctity is the business of priests and religious. Minimalistic religious practice and legalistic morality are all that are asked of laymen and all many ask of themselves. …’ (Russell Shaw, To Hunt, to Shoot, to Entertain—Clericalism and the Catholic Laity, 1993).

Well, if you're familiar with the writings of St. Josemaría, you'll recognize very similar traits there. Newman had a deep knowledge of and love for the early Church Fathers. He liked to look back very much to the early Christians

St. Josemaría also had great devotion to the early Christians, both for the martyrs and also the confessors whom he so highly revered, but also for the untold millions who lived out their everyday lives bearing witness to Christ through their family and professional lives.

These people spoke very loudly to Newman and to Escrivá. These very people were responsible, with the help of God's grace, for the gradual but sure spread of the Church throughout the Roman Empire during the course of the first three centuries up to the year 313, the Edict of Milan.

Newman had read all the Church Fathers, all in their original Greek and Latin, and found many treasures there. He could well be figured as the precursor of the going back to the Church Fathers as sources for theological investigation. This has been a characteristic of some of the giants of the 20th century, the great thinkers De Lubac, Van Balthasar, Congar. Many people have tread that same path.

He says: “It [the Church] has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men as we have seen, who are at once teachers and patterns of it. … But after all, say they are few, such Christians; and what follows? They are enough to carry on God's noiseless work. … These communicate their light to a number of lesser luminaries, by whom, in its turn, it is distributed. … A few endowed men will rescue the world for centuries to come.” (John Henry Newman, University Sermons)

In the 1990s, John Paul II in the document called Christifideles Laici, The Lay Members of Christ’s Faithful People wrote things that were very similar.

He says, “The eyes of faith behold a wonderful scene: that of a countless number of lay people, both women and men, busy at work in their daily life and activity, oftentimes far from view and quite unacclaimed by the world, unknown to the world's great personages but nonetheless looked upon in love by the Father, untiring laborers who work in the Lord's vineyard. Confident and steadfast through the power of God's grace, these are the humble yet great builders of the Kingdom of God in history.” (John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, 17)

Many things written by Newman sound very familiar to us now, but they sounded very strange in the ears of Catholics of the Victorian era, many of whom were illiterate Irish immigrants with only a small number of descendants of Englishmen who remained faithful to the Church through the long centuries of Catholic persecution.

The story of the English persecution of the Catholic Church and the English martyrs is a very glorious one that needs to be told more, and known more, in the world.

At the time of Newman, the Church had just recently regained its hierarchical status. There was a lot of controversy. The number of educated Catholic laymen in either a theological or secular sense was sparse.

You can see how the Cardinal's ideal of the educated layman was very relevant. He saw him as an unreservedly loyal person, unreservedly loyal to the Magisterium of the Church.

He insisted, above all, that the educated laymen “keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and to be saved.”

Would that we could whisper those words into the ears of every surgeon, every obstetrician, every lawyer, every businessman, every policeman...

Only in this way could a “unity of life” be found, so that the Catholic layman could make his influence on greater surroundings. Personal holiness was always at the heart of what some people have called the Newmanian project: the glory of God and salvation of souls.

“Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences, nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.” (John Henry Newman, Other Sermons)

For Newman, the road to holiness was above all a work of grace. At the same time, he was no quietist. He encouraged laypeople through his preaching and spiritual direction to pursue holiness through the ordinary: their family and professional circumstances united to a life of devotion.

Although it cannot be said that he had a well-developed theology of work, he certainly did not see it as an obstacle to sanctity or unduly encourage laymen to flee the world, as though the world was something wrong or was incompatible with holiness.

If we wish to be perfect, we need do nothing more than perform the ordinary duties well. The short road to perfection is there in those ordinary things. A short road, but not necessarily an easy road.

Perfection doesn't mean extraordinary service, anything out of the way, or especially heroic. Not everyone has the opportunity for heroic actions or heroic suffering.

But by perfect we mean that which has no flaw in it, that which is complete, that which is finished well, done well—the opposite of imperfect.

“He, then,” he says, “is perfect who does the work of the day perfectly, and we need not go beyond this to seek perfection. You need not go out of the round of the day. I insist on this because I think it will simplify our views and fix our exertions on a definite aim. If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first—Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat and drink to God's glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.” (John Henry Newman, Prayers, Verses, and Devotions)

We can use the feast of St. John Henry Newman to go deeper into these seminal ideas that he gave to a world that was very estranged from these ideas at that particular time.

But we find his voice coming down to us through the centuries and through the decades. We could ask that we might put into practice his example that has come to us packaged in a new way, through the teachings of St. Josemaría and those of the Second Vatican Council.

Give thanks to God when we see Him working in the minds of these great and holy men. We could turn to Our Lady and ask her that she might help us to take very seriously this challenge of being an educated layperson so that we can be an educated apostle and a more effective apostle.

Mary, Queen of all the Saints, pray for us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW