Newman’s Challenge (review)

Newman's Challenge. By Stanley L. Jaki. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2000. Pp. viii, 323. $20.00 paperback.)

This is a collection of separate essays, largely written within the past decade, designed to refute the growing misperception that John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-90) was a liberal, the "father" of Vatican Council II. Stanley L. Jaki, the much-published Distinguished University Professor at Seton Hall University, argues persuasively, in a dazzling display of scholarship, that Newman was above all, and at all times, a supernaturalist. While not a mystic, Newman left Anglicanism in pursuit of the supernatural. Once in the Church, according to Jaki, he fully embraced the Church's dogmas as bulwarks against the rational and secular assumptions about reality he had fled, and he reveled in the otherworldliness offered to him. "Newman would say that heaven, angels and devils form one indivisible whole on the landscape of the supernatural."

The author, reflecting Newman's post-1845 views, has harsh things to say about the Church of England, and often quotes Newman's Anglican Difficulties. He is certainly correct in his assessment of the extremely minimal impact the Oxford Movement had on that Protestant body and of the sad state of this once proud State Church.

The Second Vatican Council receives even harsher treatment, being described as having "unintentionally opened the gates to vagueness, ambiguity, and indecision (all, of course, in the disguise of 'pastoral' solutions) that do not cease to take a heavy toll on Catholic life--priestly, religious, and lay." Paul VI "knew whereof he spoke when, shortly after Vatican II, he bitterly deplored those who tried to protestantize the Church from within." Newman, Jaki asserts, would have been appalled to see the watering down of the faith that has occurred in recent decades, and shocked that his name would be associated with such activity. The cardinal, in Jaki's judgment, would have been a champion of Humanae Vitae and the enemy of the glorification of private conscience that almost always accompanies resistance to this papal decree.

The best chapters are on original sin, miracles, angels, Anglo-Catholics, and the Papacy. Jaki knows the Newman manuscripts as well as the printed works, and uses both effectively. There is much repetition, however, and the extended analysis of Newman's very difficult Grammar of Assent is at times tedious. On the whole, this should be required reading of all who delight in reading, quoting, and often misquoting the great cardinal. Those Anglo-Catholics who have not yet gone to Rome (there are still a few) will also profit.

Thomas C. Reeves
University of Wisconsin-Parkside

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