Saint John Henry Newman
10 reasons why Cardinal Newman is relevant today
- Newman is a providential figure for the Church today. It is a time of many divisions, tensions, and polarizations. Newman is, to put it simply, neither traditionalist nor liberal, neither left nor right. He belongs to Christ. His spirituality is that of Christ dwelling in the soul through grace. It is Christocentric and Trinitarian. It helps to affirm the core of Christian preaching and to be more flexible with the rest.
- Newman fue un apóstol entre los universitarios de clase alta de Oxford, y entre los obreros irlandeses de Birmingham. Unió dos mundos en su apostolado. Fue, como bien nos mostro Cavaller, un pastor de almas.
- He was a seeker of truth. From the shadows to the truth. He was a defender of dogma, in the sense that the Christian faith is about “facts,” about a concrete, decisive, and definitive event, such as the Incarnation and Easter. God and man. That is why I love the Creeds, which in a few words define and defend the content of our faith. Today we turn our gaze to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed... to the Apostles' Creed... this is what we believe. On the other hand, he described how faith grows and develops harmoniously, and gave criteria for this. His Christology was ‘high’. He studied the subject of Arianism in depth, as well as the Christological definitions of the early centuries, and explained the development and growth of Christology in the Church. That was one of the reasons that led him to convert.
- He was an educator. An advocate of classical and liberal education. He believed that the best way to prepare lay people for the world was to give them a classical education. Philosophy, theology, literature, mathematics... the freer the education, in Piper's sense, the better prepared they would be. He was a pioneer of lay theology.
- Cor ad Cor. Personal influence in the apostolate. He believed that this method would save the Church (and the world) from the attacks he saw coming. Today, this teaching is more relevant than ever. It is not a time for huge crowds, but for forming disciples.
- In his preaching, he appeals to intelligence, emotions, and imagination; to the head and the heart. He seeks genuine agreement. He gives examples. He uses images. They say that when he preached, you could hear a pin drop. He preached from the Word of God, impressively quoting the Bible explicitly and implicitly. It is biblical preaching.
- He was an apologist. He gave reasons, discussed the issues of the day, and was not afraid to debate.
- A man of profound faith in Providence, in the invisible world, in the reality of heaven, in the necessity of holiness, in the sanctity of the Eucharist, in the transforming power of grace.
- His teaching embodies Christian humanism. Reading, for example, his letters to the Oratorians, or his descriptions of the gentleman who is the fruit of a university education, the ideal of Christian humanism takes on image, color, and flavor. He was a cultivator of friendship.
- His appreciation for the liturgy, for the mystery of the Holy Mass, for beauty in worship, and for vocal prayer. He loved vocal prayers because they teach us to pray spontaneously. He believed that the prayers composed by the saints are like a pattern and a guide on which to model our spontaneous prayer. And so he did, composing many prayers himself.
Cor ad Cor Loquitur and the New Evangelization by Bishop James Conley
Cor ad Cor Loquitur and the New Evangelization
By Bishop James Conley
When Newman was made a cardinal, he borrowed the motto of St. Francis de Sales, the holy bishop of Geneva. When I was made a bishop in 2008, I borrowed it too!
The motto is cor ad cor loquitur—heart speaks to heart. Newman wanted, above all, to be an evangelist of the heart.
Newman was brilliant: he was trained in logic and rhetoric, and he used those tools to analyze complex issues with precision. But Newman was convinced that logical arguments could clarify and instruct, but they could not, on their own, convert and win souls for Christ.
“The heart is commonly reached,” he wrote, "not by reason, but by imagination, through direct impressions, through the testimony of facts and events, through history, through description. People influence us, voices melt us, looks subjugate us, actions inflame us. Many men will live and die for a dogma: no one will be a martyr for a conclusion."
Instead, Newman believed that souls are won to Christ through the heart by “personal influence”—that love for Jesus Christ precedes knowledge, and that love, and love alone, makes knowledge meaningful. Hearts long for Christ, Newman knew, because they were made for Christ. Revealing Christ to the heart, and to its longings, would bring souls into communion with God.
Newman wrote that "man is not sufficient for his own happiness; he is not happy unless the Presence of God is with him. When he was created, God breathed into him that supernatural life of the Spirit which is his true happiness; and when he fell, he lost the divine gift, and with it also his happiness. Since then he has been unhappy; since then he has had a void within him that needs to be filled, and he does not know how to fill it."
Christ, and Christ alone, could fill the void, the longing, the unhappiness that Newman found in so many of his contemporaries. He wrote that “there is a voice within us that assures us that there is something higher than the earth. We cannot analyze, define, or contemplate what it is that whispers to us in this way... And this longing of our nature is fulfilled and sustained, finds an object on which to rest, when it hears of the existence of an Almighty, Omnipotent, and gracious Creator.”
His solution was to preach Christ. He worked hard to eliminate misconceptions and stereotypes about Christ; he knew that many people felt they knew who Jesus was, without ever encountering him as the Suffering Servant, the man who was the incarnate Son of the Father.
His divinity and humanity, Newman knew, were attractive: he preached the authority of Christ, who could bring order to the disorder of broken lives. He preached the power of Christ, who could heal and transform what was broken. And he preached the mercy of Christ, who called sinners. Somewhere, Newman knew, sinners know the emptiness of sinfulness. They long for mercy, and they long for a Savior who will pull them from emptiness to fullness, even along a narrow and difficult path.
Newman also knew that the sacraments could touch hearts because they were concrete and objective encounters with Christ. Newman explained sacramental life in a personal way—as encounters with Jesus Christ, the person, Himself. He spoke of them as participation in life in Christ and the Holy Spirit, and emphasized the personal, transforming nature of sacramental life. And he celebrated the sacraments with deep reverence, and encouraged their beautiful celebration, knowing that the tangible and mysterious encounters would dispose the faithful to appreciate the objective reality of sacramental life.
Newman's definitive biographer, Father Ian Ker, put it this way: the secret of Christian propagation “is summed up in Newman's words: the keen, vivid, and restrictive gaze of the face of Christ.” This is not a philosophical or theological abstraction, but rather the “penetrating and submissive gaze of the Son of Man,” which satisfies the otherwise insatiable human longing for an “object of life.” The new evangelization, Newman would insist, must not preach Christianity but rather the person of Jesus Christ.
Newman was a great advocate of the role of the laity in the life of the Church. His studies of history had shown him that a well-catechized and faithful laity would do more to shape Catholic culture than any clerical initiative.
Newman advocated for an educated laity, a well-formed and conscious laity, that could contribute to the well-being of the Church and the formation of Catholic culture.
“It was mainly through the faithful people,” Newman wrote, “that paganism was overthrown; it was through the faithful people, under the leadership of Athanasius and the Egyptian bishops, and in some places with the support of their bishops and priests, that the worst of heresies was resisted.”
“In all ages,” Newman said, “the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit.”
In our time, the secularism we face will be overcome if lay people—parents, students, politicians, doctors—are able to inform their own spheres with the spirit of the Gospel. And the lay aptitude and obligation for evangelization should not be underestimated.
Newman had no desire to interfere with the role of pastoral leadership. But Newman understood what we too must understand: the Holy Spirit moves, speaks, and stirs every heart. We must help Catholics discern the Holy Spirit, and offer guidance, and even correction, when necessary.
In 2013 in Mexico City, Archbishop Charles Chaput commented that “we need to understand that the ‘new’ evangelization is ultimately very much like the ‘old’ evangelization. We need to understand the hopes and fears of today's world, and especially of young adults. And we need to master new technologies and methods to reach people where they are today. But programs and techniques do not convert the human heart. Only the witness of other people can do that."
The new evangelization is, in fact, very similar to the old evangelization—evangelization that leads people to encounter Christ, to be zealous for the Gospel, to seek heroism in ordinary Christian life.
The Church today faces serious challenges. Newman faced them, and so must we. Evangelization will bring the world back to Christ. Evangelization must be in collaboration with a faithful and well-formed laity. We must be evangelists by forming disciples of Jesus Christ through “personal influence.” And we must be evangelists cor ad cor cor—speaking from our hearts to all hearts, revealing the mercy, love, and power of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.
