The Primacy of the Heart

Michiel Peeters - NEWMAN/ The primacy of the heart that binds him to Augustine, de Lubac, and Giussani.
Pope Leo XIV will declare Cardinal John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church. The cornerstones of the thought and teaching of a master of the faith.

On July 31, the Holy See announced that Pope Leo XIV will declare John Henry Newman (1801–1890) a Doctor of the Church. A Doctor of the Church is a saint whose works present Catholic doctrine in a reliable and orthodox manner that is at the same time new and exceptional. Believers are invited to learn from such a theologian what the Church believes and lives.

Newman thus joins the select group—38 in total—which includes Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Leo the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux. The last to be added was Irenaeus of Lyons in 2022.

This first great gesture by Leo XIV recalls the decision of his predecessor, Leo XIII, to appoint Newman in 1879 as the first cardinal of his pontificate, after the English priest had had to endure much mistrust and opposition during the previous one.

When Newman converted to Catholicism in 1845, he was welcomed with all honors in Rome. He had been the most important figure in the Oxford Movement, an attempt to revive the Anglican Church by renewing its doctrine and life through a return to the Church of the Fathers.

But it was precisely his patristic studies that led Newman to realize that Christian dogma had been preserved and developed in an organic way (“to remain oneself, one must change,” Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine) in communion with the bishop of Rome and not in the communities that had separated from it.

This discovery, which led to his conversion (which, for Newman, in Giussani’s paraphrase, “is nothing more than the deepest and most authentic discovery of what one believed before”), cost him his positions at Oxford University, his reputation, and many friends, except for a few who followed him.

In Rome, where he became an Oratorian and was ordained a Catholic priest, he was negatively impressed by the rigid scholastic theology and clericalism. This strengthened his conviction that his vocation was in education, that is, to help the baptized become conscious and free Christians, in order to make the Church present in new environments as an attractive reality.

He sought to do this as a pastor, preacher, and publicist and, from 1851, as founder and first rector of the Catholic University of Dublin (which gave rise to his important book The Idea of a University).

However, conflicts with the Irish bishops—who wanted above all a breeding ground for new priests, while Newman wanted a free academic institution where Catholics, including laypeople, could be educated in the broadest sense—led him to resign in 1858.

In 1859, the bishop of Birmingham asked him to edit The Rambler, a magazine published by some Oxford converts and considered too critical of the hierarchy. Newman accepted and wrote an article entitled “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.”

In it, he explained that the truths of the faith are alive in the Church as a whole, not only in the ecclesia docens. Indeed, historically it had happened (with Arianism) that most of the bishops professed a heretical doctrine, while the people were orthodox. Therefore, in order to teach Catholic doctrine, the hierarchy willingly listens to what lives in the Christian people (a thought also present in The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 3, and in the method of the “school of community”).

This essay proved to be “an act of political suicide,” after which Newman’s ecclesiastical career never fully recovered (John Coulson).

Envious people found in it an opportunity to defame him before the Holy See. They sent it, in an approximate Latin translation, to Rome, accompanied by a formal accusation of heresy by the bishop of Newport. The Pope expressed his personal regret and sorrow at Newman’s statements. In one fell swoop, his reputation was destroyed; from that moment on, Rome considered him “the most dangerous man in England.”

Newman requested a list of the disputed passages, a copy of the Latin translation, and a list of the dogmatic propositions he was alleged to have violated. In return, he undertook to accept and profess these propositions, to explain his argument in strict conformity with them, and to give reasons why they were absolutely consistent with the English text.

Propaganda Fide provided the requested list, but the Cardinal of London did not forward it to Newman. It is not clear why Newman was not allowed to respond at that time. In any case, this episode marked the beginning of a period of silence for Newman. Until his Apologia pro vita sua (1864), he published nothing more.

In 1875, he returned once again to the relationship between authority and the faithful. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, he explained that nature and revelation are made for each other. “The Pope, who comes from Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.” The authority of the Church does not prevail over the conscience of the individual believer, but arouses, strengthens, completes, reaffirms, emanates, embodies, and interprets it.

If, on the other hand, the Pope were to speak against personal conscience, “he would commit an act of suicide. He would cut off his own legs. Both his theoretical authority and his effective power are founded on the law of conscience and its sacredness.” Newman spoke of conscience, but it is not difficult to see that the same applies to what St. Augustine (Confessions), Henri de Lubac (Supernatural), and Luigi Giussani (The Religious Sense) call the “heart”: the “voice” within us of the One who created us, listening to which we can recognize the presence of that from which and for which we are made.

Giussani—who loved Newman very much since high school, considering him, along with Romano Guardini, one of our two “most sensitive partners”—explained the question this way: “What awakened your heart in the beginning is a historical fact that brought you into another historical fact, which is companionship with authority […]. Accepting [the] comparison [with it] is the tool, the natural path for development […]. If this comparison with authority does not increase your reason, does not ‘establish’ you, does not make your heart more stable, then there is a danger, and you must return, in that case, as soon as you can, to those people, to that person, to that human context that aroused your initial input, your initial impetus.”

“That is to say, we are bound to company and authority, we accept company and authority, but freely. Freely is not a superficial or mechanical word: it means that I adhere to authority as much as it helps me. And if it doesn’t help me at this moment, then I turn to the people who do help me. But the people who help me really help me if they throw me back into comparison with the company and with authority, if they don’t let me skip anything, so that maybe two days later I understand what had scandalized me two days before.”

Giussani was also viewed with suspicion because of the credit he gave to human experience, but at a certain point, even the Church recognized his “pedagogical and theological genius” (Pope Francis, October 15, 2022).

Another important aspect of Newman’s thought that deserves further study is the concept of “personal influence” (cf. his sermon of January 22, 1832).

Truth is not defended in debates, nor is it spread through commissions and plans and works organized from the top down, but through the change it brings about in the person who recognizes it—a change that will be perceptible to those around them. His most theoretical text, The Grammar of Assent, bears as its motto a phrase from St. Ambrose: “It pleased God to save his people not through dialectic.” In his motto as cardinal, he sealed this conviction: Cor ad cor loquitur.

The Church is the community that wants the truth, so sooner or later it will recognize all the truth that man is given to discover. At the end of his life, Newman wrote: “Time has been my best friend and supporter: and I entrust myself to the future with love and much resignation to its judgment.” The Church now invites us to verify in our own experience what Newman learned in his.