SOURCE: “The Fullness of Christianity,” in Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, T&T Clark, 1993, pp. 123-45.

By 1843 Newman saw that not only was the principle of doctrinal development a persuasive hypothesis to account for the facts of Christian history, but also ‘a remarkable philosophical phenomenon, giving a character to the whole course of Christian thought’, particularly of course to Catholic thought, lending it ‘a unity and individuality’ such that ‘modern Rome was in truth ancient Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople, just as a mathematical curve has its own law and expression’. However, there was another consideration, and that was the application of the principle of development to the personal religious development of the individual, that is to say, ‘the concatenation of argument by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea’. Thus Newman concluded, as he put it in a key passage in the Apologia:

I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other. And I hold this still: I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God …¹

As the American theologian Avery Dulles has pointed out, this ‘double principle is perhaps Newman's most seminal contribution to ecumenical theology’, for ‘the formula challenged Catholics to acknowledge the salutary value of the faith of non-Catholic Christians and motivated Catholics to help those other Christians to deepen their own faith rather than renounce it’.²

The principle is to be found in Newman's other Catholic writings. Thus, in Discourses to Mixed Congregations, he preached that

when once a man has a real hold of the great doctrine that there is a God, in its true meaning and bearings, then (provided there be no disturbing cause, no peculiarities in his circumstances, involuntary ignorance, or the like), he will be led on without an effort, as by a natural continuation of that belief, to believe also in the Catholic Church as God's Messenger or Prophet, dismissing as worthless the objections which are adducible against the latter truth, as he dismisses objections adducible against the former. And I consider, on the other hand, that when a man does not believe in the Church, then (the same accidental impediments being put aside as before), there is nothing in reason to keep him from doubting the being of a God.

Just as belief, then, leads to fuller belief so too unbelief is characterised, at least in principle, by the same kind of progression, or rather decline: ‘Unlearn Catholicism, and you open the way to your becoming Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but inevitable succession …’³

The argument is developed in the Grammar of Assent, where Newman posits the case of three Protestants, one of whom becomes a Catholic, another a Unitarian, and the third an unbeliever. How is one to account for such religious changes? Newman looks immediately to the explanation from development:

The first becomes a Catholic, because he assented, as a Protestant, to the doctrine of our Lord's divinity, with a real assent and a genuine conviction, and because this certitude, taking possession of his mind, led him on to welcome the Catholic doctrines of the Real Presence and of the Theotocos, till his Protestantism fell off from him, and he submitted himself to the Church. The second became a Unitarian, because, proceeding on the principle that Scripture was the rule of faith and that a man's private judgment was its rule of interpretation, and finding that the doctrine of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds did not follow by logical necessity from the text of Scripture … nothing was left for him but to profess what he considered primitive Christianity, and to become a Humanitarian. The third gradually subsided into infidelity, because he started with the Protestant dogma … that a priesthood was a corruption of the simplicity of the Gospel. First, then, he would protest against the sacrifice of the Mass; next he gave up baptismal regeneration, and the sacramental principle; then he asked himself whether dogmas were not a restraint on Christian liberty as well as sacraments; then came the question, what after all was the use of teachers of religion? why should any one stand between him and his Maker? After a time it struck him, that this obvious question had to be answered by the Apostles, as well as by the Anglican clergy; so he came to the conclusion that the true and only revelation of God to man is that which is written on the heart. This did for a time, and he remained a Deist. But then it occurred to him that this inward moral law was there within the breast, whether there was a God or not, and that it was a roundabout way of enforcing that law, to say that it came from God, and simply unnecessary, considering it carried with it its own sacred and sovereign authority, as our feelings instinctively testified; and when he turned to look at the physical world around him, he really did not see what scientific proof there was there of the Being of God at all, and it seemed to him as if all things would go on quite as well as at present, without that hypothesis as with it; so he dropped it, and became [an] Atheist.

Newman gives another example, this time of a convert to Catholicism who returns to Protestantism, ‘because he has never believed in the Church's infallibility; in her doctrinal truth he has believed, but in her infallibility, no.’ How could this be? The case, as Newman diagnoses it, is by no means purely fanciful.

He was asked, before he was received, whether he held all that the Church taught, he replied he did; but he understood the question to mean, whether he held those particular doctrines ‘which at that time the Church in matter of fact formally taught’, whereas it really meant ‘whatever the Church then or at any future time should teach’. Thus, he never had the indispensable and elementary faith of a Catholic, and was simply no subject for reception into the fold of the Church.⁴

Of course, Newman was only too well aware that human beings are not altogether consistent, so that the kind of development he describes does not in fact by any means always take place: certain premises, which in turn depend upon certain first principles, do not necessarily lead in practice to the conclusions to which they ought logically to lead. But logically (in an informal sense) there is ‘a certain ethical character, one and the same, a system of first principles, sentiments, and tastes, a mode of viewing the question and of arguing … which would lead the mind by an infallible succession from the rejection of atheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity, and from Christianity to Evangelical Religion, and from these to Catholicity’.⁵

As we have seen, what Newman is describing in theory actually took place in his own life, at least in his development from Bible Christianity to Catholicism. It remains to consider in what ways, if Catholicism is the fullness of Christianity, the Catholic Church herself must contain all the positive elements of the various less-than-full varieties of Christianity, which the individual believer, far from rejecting, adds to by developing their further implications. We have already seen that Newman thought the Catholic Church in his own time should herself change in order to attract converts. Since the actual historical Church, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, is always, humanly speaking, in need of reform, there may always be ways in which she can benefit and learn from other Christian communities, even though they lack the fullness of the Christian faith.⁶ In the light of Newman's own experience, then, and of his critiques of the different varieties of Christianity, what kind of contribution do today's non-Catholic traditions have still to offer to the more perfect realisation of the fullness of Christianity to be found in the unity of the Catholic Church? In what ways and to what extent has the Second Vatican Council fulfilled Newman's hopes for a renewal of Catholicism? Are there new problems in the contemporary Church which that Council did not adequately address? Clearly the reforms and teachings of Vatican II, which after all was intended to be a Council particularly concerned with Christian reunion, overlap with the kind of positive elements in non-Catholic Christianity which the post-Tridentine Church had neglected or obscured. So I shall first summarise the ways in which Newman anticipated the theology of Vatican II, before turning to the present postconciliar period.

Newman⁷ has often been called the ‘Father of the Second Vatican Council’. It is true that according to the late Bishop B. C. Butler, his direct influence on the proceedings of the Council was not ‘deep or determinative’.⁸ And yet he was undoubtedly a great pioneering figure towering in the background, of whom the principal theologians at Vatican II were very well aware. There is certainly no doubt that Vatican II upheld and vindicated those controversial positions which he espoused in his own time and so often at his own personal cost.

First and most important is the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the corner-stone of Vatican II. It was the absence of the wider ecclesiological context in which the doctrine of the papacy needed to be placed that Newman had deplored at the time of the First Vatican Council. As he argued then, the definition of papal infallibility had not come in the right ‘order—it would have come to us very differently, if those preliminaries about the Church's power had first been passed, which … were intended’. He had hoped that the Council—which broke up, as a result of the invasion of Rome by Garibaldi's troops—would reassemble and ‘occupy itself in other points’ which would ‘have the effect of qualifying and guarding the dogma’ of papal infallibility. This was not to be, but, unlike those who supposed that the definition would render future Councils superfluous, Newman remained serenely confident that far from being the last Council, Vatican I would be completed and modified by a future Council, as had happened before in the history of the Church. Indeed, the history of the early Church showed how ‘the Church moved on to the perfect truth by various successive declarations, alternately in contrary directions, and thus perfecting, completing, supplying each other’. The definition of papal infallibility needed not so much to be ‘undone, as to be completed’. Faced with the exaggerations of the extreme Ultramontanes, he advised: ‘Let us be patient, let us have faith, and a new Pope, and a re-assembled Council may trim the boat.’⁹ The prophecy would take nearly a hundred years to be fulfilled, but fulfilled it was in the magnificently comprehensive teaching of Lumen Gentium which reaffirmed the doctrine of papal infallibility, but this time explained the primacy of the pope as the headship of the whole college of bishops.

Newman had remarked at the time of the First Vatican Council that the definition of papal infallibility would result in ‘an alteration of the elementary constitution of the Church’, because it would encourage the pope to act alone without the bishops.¹⁰ It was ‘the gravest innovation possible’, for ‘it is a change in the hitherto recognised basis of the Church’.¹¹ The phenomenon of so-called ‘creeping infallibility’ that occurred between the two Councils would have been no surprise to Newman.

The constitution begins not with a description of the hierarchical structure of the Church but by defining the Church as a mystery before describing it in terms of the whole People of God. This new emphasis was, of course, picked up in the new insistence on the role of the laity. Newman's own constant concern as a Catholic with the failure of the hierarchy to take proper account of the lay people who constitute easily the largest part of the Church is well summed up in the famous remark to his own bishop that ‘the Church would look foolish without them’.¹² (The separate decree on the apostolate of the laity would have been especially welcome to him.) Finally, the chapter in Lumen Gentium devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary can be said to vindicate fully the balanced Mariology of Newman's “Letter to Pusey,” which, in its close adherence to Scripture and the Fathers, is also a pioneering example of ecumenical theology at its best.

Newman supported early ecumenical initiatives as an Anglican, and later as a Catholic he hoped for a reconciliation of Anglo-Catholics with Rome, which he thought should be prepared to make concessions. As in general in theological matters, he was cautious but open: he did not see his way to joining the ‘Association of the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom’, but he deplored its harsh condemnation by the Roman authorities; unlike some enthusiastic Catholic ecumenists, he was highly sceptical about the foreseeable possibility of the reunion of Canterbury and Rome, but he deplored the bigotry of so many Catholics who, he felt, considerably underestimated the possibility of ‘invincible ignorance’ among non-Catholics. Again, the radical statement that ‘all other truths and acts of religion are included’ in repentance and faith in Christ,¹³ must be balanced against Newman's inability to accept that the Church of England was a church at all; he would have been surprised, albeit pleasantly so, by the degree of ecclesial reality that the decree on ecumenism attributes to the Christian bodies that derive from the Reformation. Nevertheless there was no doubting his commitment to the first faint stirrings of the ecumenical movement; and he was pleased by the successful sales of a new edition of his Parochial and Plain Sermons among Protestants: ‘Whatever tends to create a unity of heart between men of different communions, lays the ground for advances towards a restoration of that visible unity, the absence of which among Christians is so great a triumph, and so great an advantage to the enemies of the Cross.’¹⁴

There are three other major conciliar documents which Newman also anticipated. The dogmatic constitution on Revelation insists on the intimate connection of Scripture and tradition, refusing to endorse the post-Tridentine ‘two sources’ theory. As an Anglican, Newman had assumed the inseparability of Scripture and tradition, and later as a Catholic he held that the disagreement on this point between Anglicans and Catholics is a purely verbal one, since Scripture requires tradition for its interpretation and tradition needs the authority of Scripture. The constitution's teaching that the inspiration of Scripture extends only to ‘that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation’¹⁵ vindicates Newman's own tentative approach in the article he wrote in the last years of his life ‘On the Inspiration of Scripture’ (1884).

The possibility of religious truth outside the Christian revelation is explicitly allowed for not in this constitution but in the decrees on non-Christian religions and on the Church's missionary activity. Newman himself in his first book had boldly affirmed, ‘There never was a time when God had not spoken to man’, for although it was true that ‘the Church of God ever has had, and the rest of mankind never have had, authoritative documents of truth, and appointed channels of communication with Him’, still ‘all men have had more or less the guidance of Tradition, in addition to those internal notions of right and wrong which the Spirit has put into the heart of each individual’. Calling this ‘vague and uncertain family of religious truths, originally from God … the Dispensation of Paganism’, Newman came to what was then the radical conclusion that the Christian apologist or missionary should, ‘after St. Paul's manner, seek some points in the existing superstitions as the basis of his own instructions, instead of indiscriminately condemning and discarding the whole assemblage of heathen opinions and practices', thus ‘recovering and purifying, rather than reversing the essential principles of their belief’.¹⁶

The pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, encouraged exactly that creative and positive engagement with the secular world that Newman so vainly desiderated in his own time, and particularly with those intellectual problems raised by scientific progress and secularisation. Newman has often been criticised for his lack of involvement in pressing contemporary social questions; he himself noted at the end of his life, ‘It has never been my line to take up political or social questions, unless they come close to me as matters of personal duty.’¹⁷ But there was one political idea, quite radical then, which he embraced from the beginning of the Oxford Movement and to which he continued to adhere as a Catholic—with, it should be said, much greater hope of its practical realisation: I refer to his conviction that the Church, as in the first centuries, must once again become a popular Church, a Church of the people. I think that there can be no question that the emergence of the Church as a popular institution in countries like the Philippines and in Latin America would have delighted Newman. Deeply shocked as he was by what he called the ‘great scandal’ of Pius IX being ‘protected against his own people by foreign bayonets’,¹⁸ Newman surely would have rejoiced at the sight of John Paul II personally upholding the rights of the poor and oppressed in so many Third World countries. Long before it happened, Newman had seen that the establishment of Catholicism was not only anachronistic but also in practice ultimately harmful to the interests of the Church. The disengagement or distancing of the Church from the state in so many Catholic countries since the end of the Second Vatican Council Newman would have seen as inevitable and in the long term thoroughly beneficial. In 1864 he wrote:

I am not at all sure that it would not be better for the Catholic religion every where, if it had no very different status from that which it has in England. There is so much corruption, so much deadness, so much hypocrisy, so much infidelity, when a dogmatic faith is imposed on a nation by law, that I like freedom better. I think Italy will be more religious, that is, there will be more true religion in it, when the Church has to fight for its supremacy, than when that supremacy depends on the provisions of courts, and police …

He also saw very clearly that the refusal to grant religious freedom to non-Catholics in Catholic countries, however justifiable (as it then seemed) on the abstract ground of the truth of the Catholic religion, was utterly impractical and self-defeating in a modern, pluralist world. Catholicism had to be defended ‘by reason, not by force’.¹⁹ The declaration, in fact, on religious freedom would have been seen by him not only as a useful practical measure but also as an example of the development of doctrine, called for by the times.

After that brief survey of the ways in which Newman anticipated the teachings of Vatican II, it is time to consider how the different varieties of Christianity that contributed to his own personal religious development may still have positive elements which can help contemporary Catholicism reveal more manifestly the fullness of Christianity. It is perhaps not surprising that the most attention will be given to Evangelicalism, which is clearly the most vibrant form of Christianity today, apart from Catholicism to which it presents a very serious challenge, not only on the practical level in certain parts of the world (particularly Latin America), but also in terms of its methods of evangelism.

We have seen how Newman's own theology and spirituality were first formed by his deep knowledge of the Scriptures, and he would of course have greatly welcomed the post-conciliar emphasis on the Bible, although this did not, as earlier noted, mean that Church and tradition are in any way superseded or can be dispensed with. Moreover, Newman condemned as leading to heresay a merely ‘literal and critical’ interpretation that ignores what he called the ‘mystical’ or ‘allegorical’ sense.²⁰ But apart from this kind of Biblicism so characteristic of contemporary Catholic Biblical exegesis and theology, Newman would be highly critical of the selective and unbalanced approach of much modern Catholic spirituality towards the Scriptures. The actual selection of texts often shows a marked indifference to the wholeness of Scripture and the need to keep a balance between the different emphases. This one-sidedness is reinforced by, and in turn encourages, a secularising interpretation, in which the tenor and tone of the Biblical passages in question are made to reflect the priorities and values of a latent liberal humanism.

A Christian spirituality really steeped in Scripture will, in particular, maintain a balance between crucifixion and resurrection, and therefore between sorrow and joy. If pre-Vatican II Catholicism tended to be gloomy and guilt-laden, it could certainly be argued that the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. As an Anglican, Newman preached that ‘we must fear and be in sorrow, before we can rejoice. The Gospel must be a burden before it comforts and brings us peace.’²¹ Without severity, love itself will be a sentimental counterfeit: ‘I wish I saw any prospect of this element of zeal and holy sternness springing up among us, to temper and give character to the languid, unmeaning benevolence which we misname Christian love.’ To speak only of God's love and never of his just wrath is spiritually debilitating. Instead, Newman urges, it is necessary to ‘condense’ one's ‘feelings by a secure discipline’ and to be ‘loving in the midst of firmness, strictness, and holiness’.²² Unfortunately, people ‘find a difficulty in conceiving how Christians can have … sorrow and pain without gloom … how they can believe that in one sense they are in the light of God's countenance, and that in another sense they have forfeited it’.²³ Given the fallen state of human nature, Newman has no doubt that what tends to be the neglected side of Christianity needs particularly emphasis—so much so that he is even prepared to say that those ‘who seem only to fear, or to have very little joy in religion … are in a more hopeful state than those who only joy and do not fear at all’—although, admittedly, the latter ‘are not altogether in a right state’.²⁴

As a Catholic, he did not feel the same need to stress the severe side of the gospel. But while he would have rejoiced at a contemporary Catholicism which has recovered a sense of the resurrection and of pentecost, he would lament that such a gain should be at the expense of a spirituality of the cross. A true Scripture-based faith is instead ‘always sorrowing’ with Christ in his death, ‘while it rejoices’ in his resurrection.²⁵ This explains why ‘none rejoice in Easter-tide less than those who have not grieved in Lent’. For it is our own ‘previous humiliation’ which ‘sobers our joy’ and ‘alone secures it to us’.²⁶ Again, it is the ‘duty of fearing’ that ‘does but perfect our joy; that joy alone is true Christian joy, which is informed and quickened by fear, and made thereby sober and reverent’. The ‘paradox’ of combining two such opposite emotions is only really ‘fulfilled in the case of men of advanced holiness’.²⁷ For such a union of contradictory feelings can only arise out of a deep sense of the mystery of redemption:

Christ's going to the Father is at once a source of sorrow, because it involves His absence; and of joy, because it involves His presence. And out of the doctrine of His resurrection and ascension, spring those Christian paradoxes, often spoken of in Scripture, that we are sorrowing, yet always rejoicing; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.²⁸

Another instance of the same kind of imbalance is the current obsession in popular Catholic spirituality with self-affirmation, itself a reaction against an excessively condemnatory and guilt-centred spirituality. It is true, of course, that Jesus, for example, teaches that we must love our enemies as we love ourselves; but he also tells us that we must hate our own life, lose our life in order to save it—an admonition which does not seem to be properly reflected in a spirituality of self-fulfilment. Not that such imbalances are wholly due to reactions against imbalances on the other side: there is always the spirit of the age to be taken into account. It was clear to Newman that the ‘world’ always ‘chooses some one or other peculiarity of the Gospel as the badge of its particular fashion for the time being’. The hallmark of the modern world is its concern for human rights and social justice: ‘There is a steady regard for the rights of individuals … for the interest of the poorer classes.’ Highly commendable in itself, there is always, however, the danger of any special emphasis producing an imbalance: what his time lacked, Newman thought, was ‘firmness, manliness, godly severity’. Of course he was to find, as a Catholic, only too much firmness, insensitivity, and severity in the church of his adoption. Perhaps, though, he might find in the ‘caring’ post-Vatican II Church the same kind of deficiency as he had complained about as an Anglican in the philanthropic religious culture of Victorian England. The perennial problem for the Christian, he said, is ‘the reconciling in our conduct opposite virtues’, whereas it is comparatively easy ‘to cultivate single virtues’ like compassion.²⁹ The antidote lay in knowing the New Testament, not selectively, but as a whole in all its spiritual dimensions, with the cross and the resurrection as the two polar points of reference. Newman's complaint as an Anglican that Evangelicals both misused Scripture as a teaching authority and quoted selectively and misleadingly from the Biblical texts is a charge that can be levelled against certain contemporary Catholic teachers. The answer for Newman was not to downplay Scripture, since it was precisely a closer and deeper understanding of the Bible that revealed both the importance in the New Testament of Church as well as tradition and also the gospel of Christ in all its various aspects and fullness.

It is time to look at the kind of challenge that the rise of Evangelicalism in parts of the world presents to the postconciliar Catholic Church. Evangelical Christianity is likely to continue as the only vital and growing form of Protestantism, since the closing of the Counter-Reformation at the Second Vatican Council poses a very serious question to all those churches born out of the protest of the Reformers against the Catholicism of the 16th century. The fact that the Catholic Church in the 20th century has now recognised and conceded so many of the legitimate complaints of Protestantism inevitably raises a question mark over the justifications of Christians to continue in separation from the Church presided over by the successor of St. Peter, the senior Apostle. An Evangelical may reasonably claim that only that type of Protestantism which has remained faithful to the fundamental tenets of the Reformation concerning justification by faith alone and Scripture as the sole teaching authority deserves to remain in existence.

Evangelicalism challenges Catholicism in two different parts of the world in two different ways. First, it has been making serious inroads into the more cultic than practised religion of Latin America where sects from the United States preaching an extremely narrow and fundamentalist version of Evangelicalism have drawn away millions of barely instructed, nominal Catholics. The explanation for this phenomenal development in recent years largely lies in the desperate political and social conditions in many parts of the sub-continent, which on the one hand offer fertile ground for a revivalist kind of Christianity (with many material inducements on offer) and on the other hand have understandably led the Catholic Church to concentrate on issues of justice and peace at the expense of other aspects of the gospel. Secondly, it is this same failure to evangelise that has, at least in English-speaking countries, given the widespread impression that only Evangelicals are seriously interested in converting people to Christianity. Even allowing for the obvious retort that Catholics cannot participate in the kind of proselytising activities favoured by militant Evangelicals, it is still arguable that the pre-conciliar apologetics designed to prove that the Catholic Church was the true Church have hardly been replaced in any very effective way by a serious commitment to preaching the fullness of the Christian faith to a society increasingly more pagan than Protestant. A particular problem, indeed, lies in the very area of preaching homilies: Evangelicals have never been hesitant about delivering lengthy sermons which of course concentrate heavily on the atonement and justification by faith; whereas, although the homily is now seen as an integral part of the eucharist, Catholic priests, directed by Vatican II's constitution on the liturgy to draw their inspiration from the Scripture readings, have tended not to include much doctrinal teaching in their liturgical preaching, which often degenerates into mere moralising. Here Newman's example as an Anglican preacher could be a wonderful stimulus, for in those classic sermons preached at St. Mary's, Oxford we find an extraordinarily powerful fusion of the doctrinal, liturgical, moral, and spiritual, all within the framework of a reflection on a text from Scripture.

It seems to be true that while Vatican II gave the Church in missionary countries, such as in Africa, a new freedom from alien cultural forms so that she could preach the gospel more effectively, in W. Europe and N. America the effect of the Council was rather the opposite as ecclesiastical energy was consumed in ecumenism, social action, and in the reform of internal church structures. It was Pope Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi (1974) that marked a new beginning, but a serious realisation of the need for a Catholic re-evangelisation of the West has been slow to mature. In English-speaking countries the Catholic Church's traditional role of defending and promoting Catholicism against Protestantism was replaced after the Council by a flurry of intense, often naively optimistic, sometimes irresponsible ecumenism, which has now slowed down in the face of a more realistic awareness. But the realisation that the Catholic Church, now the largest practising Christian church, in Britain, the United States, and the older Commonwealth countries, has now the primary responsibility for preaching the fullness of the Gospel in the face of the increasingly vocal voice of a narrow Evangelicalism is only just beginning to dawn.

The fastest-growing Evangelicalism is now to be found where there is in fact a strong ecclesial dimension in the restricted sense of a cohesive local community. Where this is combined with charismatic worship, as in the so-called Community Church, we find the fastest-growing variety of Christianity, in Britain at any rate. It is true that the post-conciliar Catholic Church has made great efforts to build up a sense of community, but all too often this has not been combined with a similar energy in preaching the gospel, or with a sufficient understanding that the Church is a community only because of the presence of the Holy Spirit. In other words, a supernatural conception of the Church has all too often been replaced by an excessively social understanding.

An evangelical body like the Community Church naturally equates the ‘church’ with the local congregation. But, while the post-conciliar Catholic Church has laid great stress on the role of the laity, this has tended to be regarded by the hierarchy and clergy in too clerical a light. Many lay people have welcomed this because they see the issue as primarily one of power within the institution. However, a glance at the teaching of Vatican II on the people of God shows how superficial this approach is. In fact, the real understanding of the true Christian power of the baptised that Newman in his own time possessed and that the French theologian Yves Congar developed in his classic study Lay People in the Church: A study for a Theology of the Laity (English tr. 1957), has come not from the episcopally-inspired committees of the official Church, but rather from those lay people who constitute the rapidly growing lay movements and communities that are the most striking, and surely the most hopeful phenomenon in the contemporary Church. It is to this remarkable development that we must look to find an adequate Catholic response to the Evangelical discovery of ‘people power’.

The Catholic charismatic renewal movement, for example, has led to the growth of new communities of varying degrees of commitment to the full religious life, ranging from families living in close proximity to each other to celibate male and female community houses. Charismatic renewal has also stimulated new evangelistic initiatives in the United States, especially among college students, while in France it has produced many of the vocations to the priesthood as well as recent nominations to the episcopate. Again, the fast-growing Italian lay movement, Communione e Liberazione, which has now spread to other countries, is particularly strong among university students and presents a Catholic counterpart to the Evangelical Christian Union in British universities or the Crusade for Christ on U.S. campuses The fact that some of the new (or not so new) lay movements are highly controversial should not surprise us: it was the same with older religious orders and communities. Criticism partly arises out of suspicion of whatever if unfamiliar, but also partly is no doubt sometimes provoked by excessive or misguided zeal. However, it is worth noting that the movements vary from the uncontroversial Focolare movement to the equally controversial Communione e Liberazione. Some of these basically lay movements, such as the Neo-Catechumenate, are now ordaining priests for the movement.

Newman's own theology of the laity has regularly been trivialised in terms of the kind of ‘consultation’ that is characteristic of secular institutions concerned with the exercise of power. This is not to say that Newman was not well aware of the importance of this kind of human power in the Church, which, as we have seen, he realised very clearly was undeniably an institution from one point of view. He had after all himself written in the original passage in the Rambler which had begun the controversy, that the Catholic bishops should ‘really desire to know the opinion of the laity on subjects in which the laity are especially concerned’.³⁰ But, as we have seen, there was also a much deeper sense in which Newman thought the bishops must consult the lay people, and that is because they are, largely speaking, the Church. What is so interesting to realise in retrospect is how Newman anticipated the rise of the 20th century lay movements, which many observers see today as the contemporary equivalent of the early monks or the medieval friars or the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation, in both renewing the Church herself and in evangelising the world.³¹

The fact is that Newman's thinking about the laity began in the very early stages of the Oxford Movement, when he wondered whether the time had not come for the Church of England, threatened by state interference from a reforming parliament, to become what he called a ‘popular’ church. After all, he pointed out, the ‘early Church threw itself on the people’. His own first public act as a Tractarian was to write the first of a series of articles ‘called the “Church of the Fathers” … on the principle of popularity as an element of Church power’.³² It looked as if political pressures would dictate such a change, but ‘what may become necessary in time to come, is a more religious state of things also’, and in practice ‘the Church, when purest and most powerful, has depended for its influence on its consideration with the many’,³³ being ‘in most ages … based on a popular power’.³⁴ Indeed, the Western Church ‘rose to power, not by the favour of princes, but of people’, and, although it was not ‘developed upon its original idea’ of ‘appealing to the people’, still ‘what we do see from the first … is, religion throwing itself upon the people’.³⁵ Even after the definition of papal infallibility when Ultramontane authoritarianism and clericalism were at their peak, Newman was still hopeful that ‘the Catholic Church may at length come out unexpectedly as a popular power’.³⁶ At least the papacy, however, was no longer encumbered with the papal states, and Newman looked forward to the disestablishment of the Church in Catholic countries where the imposition of the faith by law was becoming increasingly counter-productive. The Church could only be effective to the extent that it was really constituted by the people.

Not only did Newman want a popular Church; he also anticipated the modern phenomenon of the lay movement. He was after all the leader of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, and initiated the Tracts for the Times that he insisted should be written by individuals, not least by laymen, and distributed by personal contacts—‘Living movements do not come of committees.’³⁷ Literary as well as theological propaganda was needed, and Newman encouraged his friend Maria Giberne and his sister-in-law Anne Mozley to write ‘Apostolical stories’ for children.³⁸ When he looked back at such prominent precursors of the Movement as Alexander Knox, the Irish theologian, and the poet Coleridge, he was struck by the fact that they were both ‘laymen and this is very remarkable’, as was Dr. Johnson, ‘another striking instance’.³⁹ Many of the leading members of the Movement were lay, including prominent public figures like Gladstone.

When the Roman Catholic hierarchy was restored to England in 1850, storm of anti-Popery erupted in the face of this so-called ‘Papal Aggression’. Newman's response to the publicly orchestrated campaign against Catholics is very interesting. He thought it could be profitably exploited by making it an excuse for ‘getting up a great organisation, going round the towns giving lectures, or making speeches, … starting a paper, a review etc.’ He recommended gathering laymen to speak at public meetings in the big towns. Young Catholics particularly, he felt, should band together as the Tractarians had. In other words he saw the possibility of another ‘movement’, although this time he seems to have seen it as much more lay than clerical. He seems to have sensed that here was the potential beginning of another movement like Tractarianism, the occasion being again the persecution of the Church, although this time a different Church. But he was disgusted that the Catholic bishops had not bothered nor did they intend to consult the laity on the best course of action to take. His own bishop, he was convinced, ‘has a terror of laymen, and I am sure they may be made in this day the strength of the Church’.⁴⁰

Newman himself embarked on a series of public lectures in June 1851, which were intended to counteract the traditional English prejudice against Catholicism. They were published in book form as Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England: Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory. These ‘Brothers of the Oratory’ constituted the so-called ‘Little Oratory’, which was the confraternity of laymen traditionally attached to an Oratory. Of all the Oratorian activities and works, Newman considered this as ‘more important than anything else’.⁴¹ The Oratory, after all, had started in Rome as a kind of lay community led by St. Philip Neri, the so-called ‘Apostle of Rome’. It had not been intended to be another congregation or order of priests. The first ‘Oratory’ was simply the group of laymen that gathered for discussion and prayer and study with St. Philip. Full community life came later when an inner or ‘core’ group began to live together, three of whose members were ordained to the priesthood. We can see from Newman's surviving Oratory papers⁴² that he was very conscious of the original lay basis of what eventually developed into the Congregation of the Oratory, in which the few lay members would be subordinated to the priestly majority. In recognising the ‘Little Oratory’ as indispensably attached to the Oratory, Newman was consciously or unconsciously adverting to the Oratory's essentially lay antecedents. Not content with the traditional ‘Little Oratory’ of laymen, Newman in 1856 proposed to the Pope ‘the formation of a female [little] Oratory’.⁴³ Of course a ‘Little Oratory’ only consisted of a relatively small number of lay people closely associated with the local Oratory. But when we take into account Newman's hope that the Oratory would spread through the cities and towns in England, we can see how such an extended ‘Little Oratory’ would in fact have formed a kind of widespread lay movement, although it would be as loosely knit as would the individual autonomous Oratories. Needless to say, Newman's dream was never fulfilled.

Turning to the third of our varieties of Christianity, we do not need to say more of the dangers posed by the liberal spirit to the contemporary Catholic Church. If an anti-dogmatic liberalism is always a temptation to the fallen human mind which seeks to make itself the judge of all things, then the Church is bound to be especially prey to it in a time of confusion after a Council. As for Newman's liberal Catholicism, all that needs to be said here is that his attempt to maintain a balance between the demands of the magisterium and those of theologians affords us today a valuable example of a truly authentic comprehensiveness. At a time when Catholics are wont to take up either conservative or liberal positions, it is well to remind ourselves that it is possible to do justice to both sides without loss of integrity. One can accept and welcome the essentially negative vigilance of Rome in protecting discipline and doctrine, without at the same time denying the right of theologians to explore in a critical spirit. But just as authority must be tempered with tolerance, so originality requires a sense of loyalty and responsibility. Newman's approach to these vexed questions also shows how impossible it is to lay down exact lines of demarcation between two different principles which complement even as they oppose each other in a potentially creative conflict.

The theology and spirituality that Newman learned from the Greek Fathers should certainly not be out of place in the Church of the Second Vatican Council, as they were bound to seem in the scholastic Church of the 19th century. But when people complain that those who speak airily of the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ do not always seem particularly well acquainted with what the Council actually taught, essentially what they are saying is that the mystery of the Church, so splendidly evoked in Lumen Gentium, has been secularised and trivialised. The so-called abuses of the post-conciliar period are all part and parcel of a desacralisation which stems from a more or less secular model of the church. And this in turn is no doubt at least partly the result of a low christology which stresses the humanity of Christ as much as an older Catholicism emphasised his divinity, with the same disastrous result that the two natures of Christ become separated in a way that, as we have seen, the East has always avoided. There is no doubt that the distortions of the Council's teachings would have appalled Newman, but not surprised him particularly: the violent reaction against the old ossified system he predicted; but revolutions are in the habit of replacing one evil with another, often disquietingly similar, evil. If the old model of the Church had its roots in a feudal, hierarchical society, the new model often seems to owe more to the sociology of an egalitarian society than to the New Testament or the Fathers—or Vatican II. Not surprisingly, the cut-and-dried abstractions of a scholasticism which often seem to have lost touch with Scripture, the Fathers, and St. Thomas Aquinas himself, and the rigidities of Roman juridicalism, have all too often been replaced by horizontalism, neologism, and the casual permissiveness of a pluralist society. Thus in the liturgy, which expresses so concretely our understanding of the nature of the Church, mechanical formalism has been replaced by a studied (but no less clerical) informality, and legalistic rubricism by popular gimmicks. Similarly, the sacraments, no longer viewed as conveying automatic ‘packets’ of grace (itself seen as an abstract quality of the soul), are now often practically reduced to the level of community ‘celebrations’. A consumer culture has little interest in the past, so history and tradition are neglected in today's Church, for example in the scant attention paid to the saints, with an impoverishing effect on spirituality. A materialistic, welfare society has as little time for sin, as it has for suffering, and so in today's Church penance is minimised, while a popular psychology confuses repentance with guilt. At the same time a culture which values so highly what it calls self-fulfilment cannot tolerate the sacrifice involved in the ideal of virginity (so often again admittedly impoverished in the old pre-Vatican II Church by negative and purely pragmatic considerations).

The right response to all these and other distortions and misunderstandings is not to attempt to retreat into the preconciliar Church but to recover a vision of that mystery of the Spirit-filled Church that we find in the New Testament, the Fathers, Newman, and Vatican II. One obvious reason why this has not happened is that so many of the leaders of the Church, who were educated in the old manual theology, understandably threw away their manuals in the 1960s, and are now virtually without any real theology at all. The Catholic charismatic renewal began in the United States as a reaction against the secularism of the immediate post-conciliar period. It was a sign of the times: a sign not that everybody should become ‘charismatics’ but that the Church must once again start believing in the third person of the Trinity, the person, as we have seen, that the East has never neglected or confused with the other persons. But the Holy Spirit is not the spirit of the times, as liberal Catholics sometimes seem to imply. Newman's Anglican writings on the Holy Spirit provide a magnificent inspiration for a renewed theology of the Church, which would remedy so many of the defects of contemporary Catholicism and correct so many distortions of the Second Vatican Council. To see the Church sacramentally as the communion of believers baptised in the Spirit is to avoid the trap of viewing the Church in terms of a secular model of society. To understand the sacraments in the light of the same Spirit who alone makes them possible is to ensure that they are seen as essentially personal encounters with the living Christ, and as conveying grace because in them God gives us the gift of himself through his Son Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. To appreciate the profound implications of the divinisation of the flesh by the Spirit, which is the incarnation, is to avoid that pervasive contemporary gnosticism which has seeped into the Catholic Church and so stresses the spiritual at the expense of the fleshly that even the virginal conception and the bodily resurrection are now being doubted by some Catholic teachers, for whom they have ceased to have any real significance for faith.

It is the contention of this [essay] that Newman, through his appropriation of the positive elements and through his criticism of the negative elements in the main varieties of Christianity, offers not only a unique approach to the fullness of Christianity in Catholicism, but also an invaluable critique of the present state of the Catholic Church.

Notes

1. Apo. [Apologia pro Vita Sua] 179-80.

2. Avery Dulles, SJ, ‘Newman, Conversion, and Ecumenism’, Theological Studies, 51 (1990), 725.

3. Mix. [Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations] 260-1, 282.

4. GA [An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent] 160-2.

5. GA 321.

6. Lumen Gentium 8; Unitatis Redintegratio 4.

7. See Ian Ker, ‘Newman and the Postconciliar Church’, in Stanley L. Jaki (ed.), Newman Today (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 121-41.

8. B. C. Butler, ‘Newman and the Second Vatican Council’, in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds.), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London: Steed and Ward, 1967), 245. Cit. by Nicholas Lash, ‘Newman Since Vatican II’, in Ker and Hill (eds.), Newman After a Hundred Years, 449.

9. LD [The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman] xxv. 278, 310.

10. LD xxiv. 377-8.

11. LD xxv. 100.

12. LD xix. 140.

13. LD xx. 172.

14. LD xxiv. 22.

15. Dei Verbum II.

16. Ari. [The Arians of the Fourth Century] 80-1, 84.

17. LD xxx. 209.

18. LD xxv. 217.

19. LD xx. 477.

20. Ari. 404-5

21. PS [Parochial and Plain Sermons] i. 24.

22. PS ii. 286, 289-90.

23. PS iv. 121.

24. PS iv. 134.

25. PS iv. 324.

26. PS iv. 337-8.

27. PS v. 66-7.

28. PS vi. 121.

29. PS ii. 279-80, 282.

30. Cit. in LD xix. 129.

31. See Paul Joseph Cordes, Charisms and New Evangelisations, Eng. trans. (Middlegreen, Slough; St. Paul Publications, 1992).

32. LD iv. 14, 18.

33. HS [Historical Sketches] i. 341-2.

34. LD iv. 35.

35. Ess. [Essays Critical and Historical] i. 150-1.

36. LD xxv. 442.

37. Apo. 46.

38. LD v. 387.

39. LD v. 27.

40. LD xiv. 214, 252.

41. LD xiv. 274.

42. NO. [Newman the Oration: His Unpublished Oratory Papers]

43. LD xvii. 137.

Abbreviations

Apo.: Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)

Ari.: The Arians of the Fourth Century

Ess. i, ii: Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols.

GA: An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)

HS i, ii, iii: Historical Sketches, 3 vols.

Idea: The Idea of a University, ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)

LD i-vi, xi-xxxi: The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain et al., vols. i-vi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-84), xi-xxii (London: Nelson, 1961-72), xxiii-xxxi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-77)

Mix.: Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations

NO: Newman the Oratorian: His unpublished Oratory Papers, ed. Placid Murray, OSB (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1969)

PS i-viii: Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols.