Theology and Culture in Newman's Defense of the Immaculate Conception: An Essay in Commemoration of the Canonization of Saint John Henry Newman

Introduction

Following the announcement of the date for Newman's canonization this fall, the Cardinal Archbishop of England and Wales, Vincent Nichols, commented that, "for me the truly remarkable nature of this moment is that this is an English parish priest being declared a saint."¹ It is not just Newman as an English priest which is worthy of comment, but also Newman as an English theologian. This warrants attention, because Newman himself was concerned with establishing a sense of what a distinctively "English" theology might involve. This is most apparent during the Oxford Movement period, of course, when he sought to foster "a religious attitude in a highly cultured society."² In a letter to Samuel Rickards from as early as 1826, he suggests that Rickards writes a book on the Caroline Divines, to discover which distinctive doctrine holds them all together. He hopes this will provide some basis for outlining what is distinctive about English Christianity. These divines must be approached, he says, as "a corpus theologicum et ecclesiasticum, the English Church."³

The same impulse re-emerges after his conversion too, for "among his Catholic co-religionists, the same problem of harmonizing religion and culture appeared with a different emphasis."⁴ Obvious examples here include the differences in "style" between the London and Birmingham Oratories, with the former being associated with Ultramontane convictions. At Birmingham, however, Newman "deliberately assumed the position of leader of the moderate and conciliatory section of Catholic theologians in countering the Ultramontanism of the Manning-Ward group."⁵ The well-known flashpoint of this tension surrounds papal infallibility, toward which the general English disposition is well summarized by comments by Prime Minister William Gladstone, that now "no one can … convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another."⁶ As another commentator notes, Victorian writings "often contrasted servile Roman Catholics with 'free born Englishmen.'"⁷ Newman's concern was to defend infallibility in this climate, with his conviction that "to influence public opinion at all strongly," the new Catholics "would have to rise to the level of national culture and make contact with the intellectual currents of the time."⁸ This was important, because in the centuries following the Reformation the national culture had become more-or-less indistinguishable from what Thackeray called "the decorous pieties of Church-of-Englandism."⁹ The vilification of Newman in the English popular press shows how deeply the conviction that Catholicism is "profoundly un-English"¹⁰ had taken root in the decades before his conversion.

The common pejorative flung at Catholic texts and their devotees during this period is "Italianate."¹¹ There was thought to be an overly emotional, naively affective character to Catholic devotionalism, combined (paradoxically) with an overbearingly totalitarian scholasticism which bound the faithful to precise statements of belief often evincing little relation to Scripture and/or early tradition. In the nineteenth century, this is most apparent in matters pertaining to Marian devotion and dogma. The devotional writer most frequently dismissed as "Italianate" in this period is St Alphonsus de Ligouri, whose devotional writings Newman said were "suitable for Italy, but … not suitable for England."¹² In terms of dogmatic theology, this was the era following the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus, which many in the Oxford Movement had felt was the final nail on the coffin of any claim to Rome as a center of authentically developing Christianity. After all, the formal statement put a distance between Catholicism and the East, not just the Protestantism of the West.

But notwithstanding Newman's avowed concern to bring Catholic devotion and theology into some sort of appropriately "English" form, and his position as "leader of the moderate and conciliatory section of Catholic theologians" in the Second Spring, he himself practiced a marked personal devotion to the Mary as immaculately conceived. He was convinced of this dogma prior to his conversion in 1845, and had the Birmingham Oratory dedicated to it in 1851. He then...