Newman on Vatican II by Ian Ker (review)

John Henry Newman has frequently been characterized as the “Father of Vatican II” – a designation corroborated by a recent Google search that produced 168,000 results. Nonetheless, one is hard-pressed to find the Council actually citing Newman, although one can certainly find numerous echoes of his writings in many conciliar documents and identify both prelates and periti – official advisors at the Council – whose theological viewpoint was similar to Newman’s and in some cases dependent on his thought.

The participants at Vatican II were divided into two camps – conservatives and liberals – the former led by many curial officials who not unexpectedly wanted to preserve the ecclesiastical status quo and the latter by numerous diocesan bishops who espoused aggiornamento, the pastoral “updating” advocated by Pope John XXIII. Which side would Newman have favored? If a conservative is a person who wants doctrine chiseled in stone and a liberal is one who considers doctrine as circumstantially contingent, then he was neither: “he was a highly complex and subtle thinker who refused to see issues in black and white alternatives. He was both radical and conservative, a reformer but also a traditionalist” (3).

1. The Conservative Radical

Ker categorizes Newman as “the Conservative Radical.” His conservative side was epitomized in his biglietto speech in Rome on 12 May 1879, when he received the “letter” officially informing him of his appointment as a cardinal and used the occasion for a broadside against “the spirit of liberalism in religion” – “the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion but that one creed is as good as another.”² In this speech, Newman claimed that his rejection of “liberalism as the great enemy” (7) dated back “thirty, forty, fifty years” – a claim which Ker appropriately substantiates by selected quotations ranging over a half-century. Of Newman’s many criticisms of Liberalism, perhaps his most pithy comment appeared in Tract LXXXV: “Why should God speak, unless He meant to say something?”³

Newman’s conviction that divine communications are enshrined in the dogmatic teaching of the Church stemmed from his teen-age conversion in 1816, when: “I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma.”⁴ Yet, his understanding of “dogma” developed; he came to espouse a via media: while agreeing with conservatives that dogmas are absolutely necessary, he simultaneously realized that “they cannot fully comprehend the mystery”; while agreeing with liberals that dogmas are inherently liable to “the limitations of language,” he strenuously disagreed that dogmatic expressions are arbitrary or artificial (12).

Perhaps unavoidably, Newman found himself caught “between two fires” (23) over his ecclesiology. On the one hand were Roman theologians who myopically envisioned the church as a societas perfecta, which could never err; on the other hand were church historians who delightfully compiled an ever-lengthening list of papal mistakes and misconduct. Historically speaking, Newman was painfully aware of ecclesiastical malfeasance – he had been its repeated victim.⁵ Theologically, he was more idealistic: “From his study of the Greek Fathers Newman had learned that the Church is primarily the communion of those who have received the gift of the Holy Spirit in baptism” (25).

For Newman, the tension between the ecclesial ideal and the ecclesiastical real exploded in 1859, when his publication of what quickly became a controversial essay about the role of the laity in the Church resulted in his denunciation to Rome.⁶ A century and a half later, controversy about Newman’s ecclesiology continues; on the one hand, “The idea that “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ is a kind of tract vindicating the rights of the laity in a clericalized Church is simply not supported by the text” (26); on the other hand, “On Consulting” “shows that Newman’s ecclesiology is a great deal more radical than that nineteenth-century ecclesiology, which ironically is shared by modern liberal Catholics, that defines the...