Chapter 5: Spiritual Direction and the Roman Catholic Church

5

Spiritual Direction and the Roman Catholic Church

“ . . . it was like coming into port after a rough sea.”442

Although Newman never wrote a systematic ecclesiology, ideas about the Church permeate his thought and were the bulwark of much of his spiritual direction. For example, his conversion to Rome was accompanied by much soul-searching and anxiety, including long reflection on the nature of the Church. However, the absence of an articulated ecclesiology is not so surprising, if one recalls that the Church Fathers never wrote ecclesiologies; for the Fathers, the Church was fundamental to their thinking; it operated as a first principle and never became a direct object of study. Similarly, for Newman the Church is a given.

While the fundamental principles of his ecclesiology developed during his Anglican years, the full maturation of his thought on the Church came after his conversion.443 Both in his correspondence, and in his celebrated Apologia, he described and justified his conversion from the Church of England to the Church of Rome. His conversion meant leaving family and friends; it meant foregoing a secure and respected position in the Church of England; it meant losing a podium of influence in the Nation; it meant the possibility of scandalizing Anglicans who had followed his religious leadership; it meant entering among people whose culture was strange and new to him. His conversion cost so much in human terms that his option had to be clear and his decision compelling.

From a theological perspective, Newman’s conversion was an ecclesiological decision: Where was the Church of Christ? What should it look like? How can one be sure that this institution, rather than that, is the true Church? After his conversion, Newman had to respond to so many questions about the Church that his correspondence forms an intimate account of why he left Canterbury for Rome. His conversion placed him in a unique position to direct others in understanding both the nature of the Church and many facets of Church life.

Newman’s Conversion and the Importance of Apostolicity

Newman was often asked by his correspondents why he became a Roman Catholic or what they should look for in considering that possibility. His letters indicate what were the most important considerations which led him to accept the Roman Catholic Church as true. First, his study of the Fathers was pivotal to his thinking, as a letter written a quarter-century after his conversion clearly emphasizes. When Mrs. Houldsworth asked Newman why he had left the Anglican Church, he answered:

As to your question, suggested by your friends, it is not at all the case that I left the Anglican Church from despair—but for two reasons concurrent, as I have stated in my Apologia—first, which I felt before any strong act had been taken against the Tracts or me, namely, in 1839, that the Anglican Church now was in the position of the Arian Churches of the fourth century, and Monophysite Churches of the fifth, and this was such a shock to me that I at once made arrangements for giving up the editorship of The British Critic, and in no long time I contemplated giving up St. Mary’s. This shock was the cause of my writing Number 90 which excited so much commotion. Number 90 which roused the Protestant world against me, most likely never would have been written except for this shock. Thus you see my condemnation of the Anglican Church arose not out of despair, but, when everything was hopeful, out of my study of the Fathers. Then, as to the second cause, it began in the autumn of 1841, six months after Number 90, when the Bishops began to change against me. This brought home to me that I had no business in the Anglican Church. It was not that I despaired of the Anglican Church, but that their opposition confirmed the interpretation which I had put upon the Fathers, that they who love the Fathers, could have no place in the Church of England.444

The more that Newman read in the Church Fathers, the more he became convinced that the Patristic Church continued on in the Roman Church, not in the Anglican Church. Soon after his conversion, he wrote H. W. Banner:

Pray be quite assured that I would not have left the English Church, had I thought it possible for me to remain in God’s favor and remain a member of it. To my own mind it is as clear as light that it is a Church which the Fathers would not have acknowledged. I had no alternative but to leave it, unless I gave up the Fathers, nay all revealed religion. It would have been a gross hypocrisy in me, to profess to rule myself by the early Church, and yet to remain in a communion which resembled the Donatists, or Nestorians, or Monophysites, and not the ancient Catholic Church.445

In 1862 a correspondent sent Newman objections against Rome’s apostolicity. After noting that he himself, as an Anglican, had raised much the same objections, Newman declined to enter into controversy:

I cannot undertake that answer, both because I am at a distance from books, and because really I am too tired with controversy, to give myself to the consideration of objections, which the thought and experience of thirty years makes me feel vividly to be nothing more than objections, however plausible, not positive arguments the other way. I say to myself, if a mind can come to a solid immoveable conclusion, mine has done so—I have a clear anticipation that there is no possible argument which has a chance of interfering with my conviction that what is called the “Roman communion” is a continuation of that ecclesiastical body to which St. Cyprian belonged, and which the Apostles founded.446

The question of apostolicity also loomed large in the Essay on Development; as he wrote to his friend Henry Wilberforce:

As to my Essay, you mistake in one minor matter, it is not the argument from unity or Catholicity which immediately weighs with me (in it) but from Apostolicity. If that book is asked, why does its author join the Catholic Church? The answer is, because it is the church of St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose . . . And it is an argument natural to weigh with me, who have so many years been engaged in the meditation of early Church History—and it is as natural that the difficulties I had felt, and the difficulties I there answer should be difficulties of doctrine, since I have studied in Church History the history of doctrine more than any thing else.447

Once Newman saw Rome as the apostolic Church continuing on into the present, it became a matter of duty to join it: “For myself, I came into the Church to save my soul, which I considered I could not save by remaining in the Establishment.”448 This imperative overrode all considerations, even the pain of hurting and confusing those whom he influenced in the Anglican Church.

I felt, the question was one of personal duty in the most solemn of matters—and that, if I saw that there was one Church to which the promises were made, and that I as yet was not in it, I must join it, and leave to the Providence of God to overrule all consequences, and must act on faith that He who called me could order things better than I could, with a higher wisdom and in unknown ways—and, sad as it has been to me to see that my anticipations have been fulfilled, I have never for an instant repented of the step which gave occasion to them.449

Although the question of the Pope’s office was much discussed during the decades prior to the Vatican Council (1870), it was the apostolicity of the Church alone, not the papal function, which attracted Newman to Rome. “I was not converted by ‘the claims of the Pope,’ but by the claims of the Church—And the question seems to me to be, has the Catholic Church a claim upon us?”450 Eight years before the Council, Newman wrote:

How then do I know which is the true Church? I know it by the tokens of its unity, its apostolicity, its pretentions etc. etc. I admit that there are able men who have been led into the Church through belief in the Pope’s prerogatives. But a man need not believe in the jus divinum of the see of St. Peter in order to submit himself to the Church which is in communion with it. This was my own case. I did not distinctly believe in the jus divinum of the Holy See till I joined the Church. I then believed in it as I believed in any other doctrine of the Church because she was the Church, the oracle of Christ.451

Fourteen years later in 1876, he stated:

There are men, as I suppose T. W. Allies, who have been converted to the Catholic Church by their belief in the divine Mission of St. Peter and his successors; I on the contrary, . . . mainly received it on the word of the Universal Church, that is, on faith. I believed that our Lord had instituted a Teaching, Sacramental, organized Body called the Church, and that the Roman communion was as an historical fact its present representative and continuation—and therefore, since that communion received the Successor of St. Peter as the Vicar of Christ and the Visible Head of the Church such he was . . .452

After he had accepted the Roman Church as the Church of Christ, Newman could accept what was taught about the Church and about its Pontiff. To a frequent correspondent he wrote: “I think there are abundant reasons for holding the R. C. Church to be the true Church, quite distinct from any argument (which to some is so convincing) through the infallibility of Rome. A point which to some people is the proof, is to me a doctrine of the Church.”453 Thus, Newman’s emphasis on apostolicity corroborated his conviction of the Church’s divine origin; as he wrote to William Gladstone: “From the time I took that step, close to 30 years ago, I never have had a moment’s misgiving in my conviction that the Catholic Roman Church comes from God, and that the Anglican is external to it, or again in my sense of duty which lay upon me to act on that conviction.”454

In directing others, Newman insisted that prospective converts act neither precipitously nor haphazardly, but only after they had a clear conviction that the Roman Church alone is true. To Miss Alice Smith, he wrote in 1870, “I advise you by all means to become a Catholic on one condition—viz. if you can say deliberately and from your heart ‘I believe the Holy Catholic Roman Church to be the one and only Fold of Christ and Ark of Salvation, and I believe whatever she teaches, has taught, or shall teach, to be the Word of God committed by our Lord to his Apostles in the beginning.’”455 Similarly, to a priest counseling an inquirer, he advised, “not that her motive is not sufficient, ‘that Catholicism is the best religion,’ but it ought to have been accompanied by the conviction that the best religion is the true religion.”456

Newman’s advice was also motivated by his knowledge that many converts would be confused by the cultural strangeness of Catholicism.

The greatest trial a Convert has to sustain, and to women it is often greater than to men, is the strangeness at first sight of everything in the Catholic Church. Mass, devotions, conversation, all may be a perplexity to you, so I am not at all surprised at what you say about the Mass. You must be brave and determined, and resolutely beg of God’s grace to carry you through your difficulties. Every nation, every body of people, has its own ways—Catholics have their own ways—we may not at first like them—and the question is where is religious Truth, where is salvation?—not is this habit, this fashion pleasant to me or not?457

Above all, Newman wanted converts to “count the cost,” lest they be disappointed. In contrast to some of his contemporaries who accepted converts hastily, Newman wanted a slow enduring commitment that could adjust to changes and accept abuses, which, in his view of the Church, were inevitable. To the President of Oscott, he wrote:

I dare say I have said to many Protestants that they would be disappointed in the Catholic body, if they knew it experimentally; and I have said so, in order that anticipation, to hinder them from being disappointed in fact. Protestants not unfrequently view us in an imaginative way, and are in consequence likely to suffer a reaction of mind.

I have said that they ought to be prepared for disappointment. 1. because they considered that we were a powerful organization, whereas we acted and we conquered by faith . . . first rate direction is rare . . . theological schools are sparse.

I certainly think it very dangerous for persons to pass out of educated Protestantism, without “counting the cost.” I always have thus felt and acted, and I cannot change . . . I have a dread of haste.458

A slow process of decision-making alleviated two difficulties: first, acting in a state of enthusiasm usually led to future problems; second, a measured approach lessened the likelihood of “a mere outward conformity to the Church or rebellion of the reason after joining it.”459 Yet, in Newman’s opinion, a convert need not solve every single difficulty before converting. Human decisions are not that neat and tidy. Accordingly, he counseled F. R. Wegg-Prosser in 1851:

I do not deny, far from it, that there are objections to a doctrine so great as to be sufficient to overturn the authority of the person who propounds them. Did the (Roman) Catholic Church say that impurity was a virtue, there would be no way of solving the opposition which our moral sense would make to it—there would be arguments so decisive against so monstrous a position, as to suffice simply to overturn the Church’s authority—all proofs for that authority notwithstanding—and so doubtless there might be historical arguments against our Lord’s Divinity or Papal Infallibility such as to destroy the credit of the oracle which asserted either. On the other hand there might be arguments against the doctrines of the church, unanswerable, yet insufficient to overturn the authority propounding them, which had a just claim to be believed in its propounding, in spite of those arguments; and this, whether against its moral precepts, or its theology, or the economy of grace.460

The mind leads a person to a broad and sound base on which to accept the Church as true. Apostolicity was the base for Newman. The will, however, embraces the Church, not under a single aspect, but as a totum, with all its doctrine, with its virtues, with its abuses. Accordingly, when asked whether it is not sort of “intellectual tyranny,” for a Catholic to be cautioned not to raise doubts about the Church, Newman answered: “A Catholic is kept from scepticism, not by any external prohibition, but by admiration, trust, and love. While he admires, trusts, and loves our Lord and His Church, those feelings prohibit him from doubt; they guard and protect his faith; the real prohibition is from within.”461 The support to continue steadfast in one’s faith is not from the vividness or strength of one’s personal experience of Christ. Newman stressed that the support of faith is one’s trust and love of the Church. While many would be tempted to say that they are supported by their love of Christ, the object of this support is internal. Newman perceived that the object of support needed to be outside, without denying that the experience of Christ is important, yet within. Newman simply asked why did those who placed such stress on a personal experience of Christ no longer believe?

I should myself consider that this personal hold upon Him is the immediate evidence of divine truth to every consistent Christian; who has no need of having his answer in hand to every one of the multiform, many headed objections which from day to day he may hear urged against his faith.

But I consider too, that the Lover of souls and Searcher of hearts has not thought it enough for us, has not felt it safe for our poor nature, to have no other safeguard for our faith than this. Religious experiences and convictions, when right, come from God; but Satan can counterfeit them; and those may feel assurances who have no claim to them. And in matter of fact, men who have professed the most beautiful things, and with the utmost earnestness and sincerity believed in their union with our Lord, have often slipped away into some form of error on the ground of new experiences and assurances, nay into scepticism and infidelity. Looking over the letters of early friends, who are now unbelievers, I have before now come upon the expression of their faith and hope in Christ so simple and fervent, and of their experimental certitude so vivid, as to fill one with awe and tearful pity at the vision of such a change.

Here it is that I see the wisdom and mercy of God in setting up a Catholic Church for the protection of His elect children.462

In Newman’s view, in accepting Catholicism, one is first and primarily accepting the Church as such. On that basis, one accepts the doctrines of the Church. Furthermore, although one accepts the Church’s practical system in globo, one must find one’s own genuine expression. For example, English devotion should not be Italian; thus in Newman’s judgment, Italian devotion should not be imported into England.

Directing Others to Recognize the Church

Much of Newman’s spiritual direction was intended to help people recognize the Catholic Church as the one, true Church established by Christ. By patiently answering questions, by responding to difficulties and especially by sharing his own beliefs concerning the nature of the Church, he was able to direct prospective converts while leading others to a deeper understanding and a richer participation in the life of the Church. In directing others towards the Church, Newman made frequent use of the “notes of the Church” not as a systematic theological treatment, but as a practical pastoral approach.

Notes of the Church

The first characteristic of a Note is that it is easily perceptible. It recommends itself, directly and immediately; it is not subtle but based on common sense evidence. In his correspondence with Catherine Ward, Newman pointed out that discovering the Church is not reserved to the wise and learned, but open to the simple.

As to the question of inquiring about religion, surely religion is not like the “philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” for the learned only. What a condemnation of any man’s religious system, for him to allow that it is like a heathen science. To the poor is the Gospel preached. Accordingly the notes of the Church are simple and easy, and obvious to all capacities. Let a poor man look at the Church of Rome, and he will see that it has that which no other Church has. He has nothing to do with books or controversy. The world calls it “the Catholic Church”; the world allows that all the sects have separated from it, though it may justify them; the world calls the Anglican communion Protestant. And so on with the grand outhnes. All the details of a Church, how to get pardon, how to get grace, what to worship, what to believe—confession, absolution, the Real Presence, the Creed, the list of duties, the distinction of sins, all are set down with an exactness such as is implied by a gift from heaven, not a vague generality, not an idea, but a working religion. Its visible unity answers to the scriptural prophecy of a kingdom. And so on with other notes. Keep them from books, keep him from his letters, and he will join it. But when you go to private teachers, and they bring down St. Basil, and St. Cyprian and St. Chrysostom from their shelves, then the confusion Dr. Pusey spoke of begins, and it begins with those who begin it.463

Perception of a note, however, must not be solely subjective. As external, the note is valid to the extent that it can impress itself on people generally. “It is nothing to the purpose then that this communion or that says that itself has the Notes of the Church; or that divines of this or that say so; for the fact is to be decided, not by any such private judgement, but by the consent of the world . . . The appeal and the decision lie with the bulk of mankind. Take then the Roman Church, and take the Anglican in a large town; let each call itself the Church, and just see what the people say to it.”464 On the negative side, if a “note” does not make a general appeal, Newman would not allow it.

This persuasion, conviction, impression, call it what you will, felt by the large mass of Protestants as well as Catholics, may be analyzed variously and the heads of arguments, into which it is resolved, are called Notes. But I say frankly, that if this conviction, and the heads of arguments or Notes, into which it is resolvable, be not assented to by the mass of enemies as well as friends, be not independent of particular persons, independent of me, I give up the very theory of the Notes of the Church, and will look for other arguments in contending for the Roman Church against the Anglican.465

Thus Newman was emphasizing that a note must make a general appeal, as note; however, this does not mean that a note convinces the general multitude, nor is it equally convincing for each Catholic. Different persons are attracted by different notes. Indeed, some people are not attracted to any notes and never become Catholics, even though they will admit that the Roman Church is “catholic” or “visible” or possesses other notes.

In the middle ages, when it [the Church] was without rival and supreme, it seemed to have a divine blessing with a luminousness and force of evidence, which is now wanting to it. But it must be considered, that at that time the minds of a race or a population were for the most part homogeneous, because education had not brought out their individual differences. A broad, shining assemblage of Notes, one and the same, confronted the popular mind. Now that every mind stands (so to say) by itself, it is not wonderful that the Notes of truth, necessary for conversion, are various and relative to individuals; that one has one reason for believing, another another; and that our duty is to look at ourselves, not at others, not to try to make out why they do not embrace the truth, but to ask whether there is not evidence enough for us personally . . .

And thus I think that in every age every man may find a sufficient evidence in his own line of thought. One aspect of the Church will be the instrument of conversion with one man, another with another; but some or other for every one. For myself, what made me a Catholic was the fact, as it came home to me, that the present Catholics are in all essential respects the successors and representatives of the first Christians.466

Newman’s “broad view of matters” also extended to his treatment of notes, and he employed this technique in his spiritual direction. He wrote to Lady Heywood who became a Catholic two months later: “No truth, no conclusion about what is true, is without its difficulties. You must give up faith, if you will not believe till all objections are solved. . . . Take then a broad view of Catholicism and Anglicanism. . . . Which has ever spoken to the whole truth? Which has ever felt it a duty to propagate religion and has carried out its profession? Which has succeeded in converting men of all races, countries, ranks, classes, callings, descriptions, rich and poor, learned and ignorant.”467 Newman went through a litany of such external notes and concluded: “Which in its genius and look, in its tone of teaching and in the character of its devotions, is more like the Church of the early centuries?—So I might go on, and fill another sheet. This is a broad view.”468

This appeal to notes cannot be separated from God’s grace; as he pointed out to Mrs. Houldsworth: “Ask of God to give you tokens . . . I don’t mean miraculous things, but tokens appropriate to your position and case . . . Pray to God to give you tokens to distinguish between the side which He owns and the side which He rejects—and beg of him faith and patience.”469.

In his correspondence, Newman utilized three notes of the Church: visibility, unity—which he closely connected with catholicity—and apostolicity, which was so persuasive for him personally. The note of sanctity received occasional mention.

Visibility is a feature of the Church that was generally accepted by Anglicans in Newman’s time when the Established Church in England was very visible. Newman’s letters contain little on the Church’s visibility, except for two letters where he developed the idea of Church as visible kingdom. To Lord Charles Thynne in 1852 he wrote:

If your Lordship asks me why I maintain that my communion is the Church, the answer (to me) is so plain, that I do not know what can be said against it. I felt its force when I was a Protestant, and have done my utmost to overcome it, but in vain. The reason is this:—the Church is a kingdom—so our Lord says. Now does this mean a kingdom only as when we talk of the “animal kingdom,” or the “vegetable kingdom”? Impossible. Is it an invisible kingdom? No Anglican will say so. Well then if it be a visible kingdom, where is such a kingdom, visible and yet spiritual, all over the earth except the Catholic Church? I do not know what can be said for Buddhism or some other Eastern Superstitions; but, putting such aside, I want to know what religion is embodied in a kingdom except the Catholic?470

Eighteen years later, Newman, took a common sense approach to the note of visibility:

In Scripture, we are told that to become interested in the promises, we must join the Church. The first Christians are represented as continuing in the fellowship of the Apostles—and those who were to be saved are said to have been added by Almighty God to His Church. The Apostles were visible men—the Church was a visible body, St. Paul speaks of the Church as “the pillar and ground of the Truth,” thereupon it was a visible teaching body. If a man commit a fault against another, that other is directed by our Lord to “tell it to the Church,”—therefore, the Church was a visible body. And the earliest Fathers, as the Martyrs St. Ignatius and St. Cyprian, both of them in the clearest way speak of the Church as a visible body. Therefore the Church is the Ark of Salvation, and it is necessary to join a visible body. I can understand a man doubting, which is the Church, at first sight, but not his doubting that it is a duty to join the Church, if he can find it. As to the question “Which is the Church of Christ?” Of course it would puzzle any one—but there is a question which would puzzle no one. In the Creed we profess belief in “the Catholic Church”—Now then go into any town, and ask for “the Catholic Church,” and you know whether you would be directed.471

In corresponding with Anglicans, Newman often emphasized the note of unity, because the unity of the Roman Church seemed evident in contrast to the apparent divisions in the Anglican Church. To Miss Rowe in 1873, he wrote: “The Church is a visible body—and one body. It is not two bodies—to be a visible body, there must be a visible unity between its portions. Where is the visible unity between the Church of Rome and the Church of England? If indeed a man says there is an invisible unity between them, I deny it, but if he tells me there is a visible unity between the two,—he is uttering the greatest paradox that ingenuity can invent and he refutes himself.”472

In a long letter to an Edinburgh lawyer, Newman first defined his terms and then presented his case; he described the Anglican view of the Church as follows:

The Church is the aggregate of certain visible congregations which are descended from one stock (this by ordination from the Apostles), marked by a certain government, episcopacy, and professing one faith (Apostles’ or Nicene Creed)—When then the Catholic Church is spoken of, the word Church is not analogous to a singular noun, as John or Thomas, marking an individual, but a general term as a man or Englishman or again as manhood or humanity. The Church of Jerusalem, or the Apostolic College in the beginning, was the only instance of a Church meaning a social individual or corporation. Ever since Christianity spread into the world, it denotes a collection of small and real corporations, which are severally individual Churches, and viewed all together make up a generalized or Catholic Church.473

In contrast, the Catholic Church “is a social individual, answering to a singular noun, or corporation, having inter-communion in a political form.”474 Newman then explained to Campbell the difference between the Anglican and Catholic understanding of unity:

What [is] in our view the Catholic Church, is in the Anglican view the particular diocese. The Church of Smyrna, or of Exeter does precisely in the Anglican view answer to that idea to which the whole collection of dioceses answers in our view. By Catholic Church we mean a thing, and the Anglicans a name. When we call the Catholic Church one, we mean it to be one in the same sense in which we popularly speak of a body of men being one; e.g., there is one Royal Society, one Royal Academy, one British Association, viz. a social or political unit; when Anglicans call the Catholic Church one, they mean it in the sense in which we might call Whigs and Tories one, because they both are loyal subjects to the monarchy, or England and the United States one because their race and language are one.

We call the Church one in a sense analogous to that in which the Nicene Catholics called the Father and Son one, viz, one individual; Anglicans call the Church one in the sense in which the Arians called the Father and the Son one, viz. in will and love and (according to the high-Semi-arians) nature.475

Eleven years later, in 1862, Newman again utilized this polity-approach in response to an inquiry from Daniel Radford: “Anglicanism does not surpass the limits of the English race—where the English power colonises, there it goes. It does not take roots, it does not win hearts, any where else. It is in no sense a polity in many countries—a spiritual imperium one and the same, stretching over the nations. Nay, it is barely in communion with its own branches in Scotland, United States, Canada, Australia etc. It has no certainty, over and above the provision of Acts of Parliament, that what a Bishop does or teaches in England, other Bishops will do and teach elsewhere.”476 Newman then described Roman Catholic unity as being based on a polity, having a unified structure, and having effective authority.

There are 200 millions of Christians poured over the earth, who, while they maintain somewhat more unanimously than Anglicans that they are the primitive and medieval Church, are in matter of fact in unity. In what aspect of the Sacramentum Unitatis is the modern Roman Catholic communion inferior to the Church of St. Cyprian’s Age, or of St. Athanasius’s or of St. Leo’s or St. Gregory the first’s. Is it not more populous? is it not more widely diffused? is it not less troubled with heresy and dissensions? is it not more minutely the same everywhere, in profession of faith, in theological language, in ritual, in legislation, in moral teaching, in devotions, in spirit? Do Bishops quarrel with Bishops within its pale now, as they did within the Ancient Church? Do Archbishops initiate heresies? Is Easter of England different from the Easter of Brazil or of the Philippines? It may be objected that there are great outstanding bodies, as the Greeks with their many millions etc. etc. Well, and this was so in ancient times—at one time the Nestorians and Eutychians together equalled or out-numbered the subjects of the Church.477

Although Newman maintained that the Anglican Church does not possess the unity that Rome possesses, one could still ask: Are there “degrees” of unity? Even if the Anglican Church has less unity than Rome, could it not possess some type of unity? In response to Lord Charles Thynne who asked this question, Newman replied: “Unity does not admit of degrees but of kinds—sanctity admits of degrees. You cannot talk of ‘more one,’ you can talk of ‘more holy.’ The degree of holiness, to which the Church should attain, is not specified—we cannot say that anything has failed—on the contrary our Lord distinctly foretold ‘Offences’—and said His Church was to be a net. But if he has said His Church should be one, it either is one or it is not.”478

Since Newman’s approach was pastoral, he appealed to a perceptible unity. However, this unity did not mean that he favored a deadening uniformity; in fact he advocated freedom in both devotions and theological thought. In matters not de fide, diversity is allowable and desired. “in those things which are not of faith, there has been considerable difference of opinion among Catholics, and often serious and bitter quarrels. I have treated of the subject in the 10th Lecture of my volume on ‘Anglican Difficulties.’ Religion is so deeply interesting and sovereign a matter, and so possesses the whole man, when it once gains its due entrance into the mind, that it is not wonderful, that, as worldly men quarrel fiercely about worldly things, so, through the weakness of human nature, particular theologians have had unchristian disputes about Christian truths.”479 The same letter also responded to a question about whether the Church was one in doctrine: “As to your first question, ‘Are you indeed one in doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church?’ the only true answer is, that we are and ever have been one, and that is one of the special notes of our being the true Church. It is one which has had a special effect on intellectual men not Catholics, when they have happened to become intimate with Catholics and to witness the action of the Church. Our faith is one.”480

Newman understood “apostolicity” as the continuation in the style of the primitive Church, and, secondarily, the ability to teach accurately what the Apostles taught. He discussed this continuation in style in a letter to A. J. Hammer in 1849:

The question is, “Is the communion of Rome the Catholic Church?” . . . To my mind the overbearingly convincing proof is this: that were St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship, not to St. Paul”s Cathedral, but to Warwick Street or Moor Fields. This my own reading of history has made to me an axiom, and it converted me, though I cannot of course communicate the force of it to others . . . I hardly see a trace of the Church of the Fathers, as a living, acting being, in the Anglican communion. Whereas e.g., the Eucharistic Service of the Ancients and our High Mass would strike a stranger as the same, a priestly action with the congregation assisting and uniting with voice and posture; and so of other peculiarities. Again, an active intercommunion is a special characteristic of the Ancient Church; again, a combination of many nations in one etc. etc. Again, a one government.481

The reason for Newman’s insistence on apostolicity is that it ensures the identity of the contemporary Church with the apostolic. “All these things make up together a great note of the Church. The Church was to be one and the same from Christ’s first coming to His second. The modern Roman communion is unmistakeably like the Church of the Fathers; and this great argument is confirmed by finding that the Church of England is unmistakeably unlike it.”482

Other churches could not claim “apostolicity”; thus, Newman rejected the “branch theory” which maintained that there are three authentic branches to the Church: English and Greek as well as Latin. For example, regarding the Greek Church, which some Anglicans considered a living branch of the Church, he asked: “Did our Lord intend Councils to cease with the seventh? Why has not the Greek Church held a council these last 1000 years? In the Latin, there is a continuation of all the functions which went on in the early Church—there is no suspended animation.”483

The teaching role of the Church played a significant role in Newman’s ecclesiology and he understood that teaching as an apostolic function. “A Catholic believes that the Church is, so to call it, a standing Apostolic committee—to answer questions, which the Apostles are not here to answer, concerning what they received and preached. As the Church does not know more than the Apostles knew, there are many questions which the Church cannot answer—but it can put before us clearly, what the Apostles (being in heaven) cannot, what their doctrine is, what is to be believed, and what is not such.”484

In his correspondence, Newman did not develop the creedal note of sanctity to any great extent; when he did discuss sanctity, he usually wrote about it in reference to some abuse in the Church. To Lord Charles Thynne, who found visible sanctity in the Church very problematic, Newman suggested a more balanced position. “The degree of holiness, to which the Church should attain, is not specified—we cannot say that any thing has failed—On the contrary our Lord distinctly foretold ‘Offences’ and said His Church was to be a net . . .

“You say ‘the sanctity is lost visibly’—but I say ‘it is not lost visibly’—it is only not so great as it might be. It never could (from the nature of the case) be as great as it might be. It is as great now as ever it was, even in Apostolic times.”485

However, there is a noticeable difference in tone between two letters, one written in 1846, shortly after his conversion, and another written nearly thirty years later, after Newman had had personal experience of sanctity in the Catholic Church. The earlier letter displays some of the enthusiasm of a new convert for his new communion and a hint of disdain for his former Church. To Henry Wilberforce who argued that the note of sanctity had been obscured at times and the same could be the case with unity, Newman wrote:

Day by day, am I more and more struck with this note in the Roman Church as contrasted with the Anglican. The series of evidences depending on the inward work of the Spirit, from miracles to personal graces, has been most wonderfully unfolded to me since my conversion, in the natural intercourse and conversation I have had with Catholics. As to personal graces, as far as I have had experience, I have been extremely struck with their rigid purity. Evidence of this has come before me in a way not to be mistaken. How low the Anglican Church is here. Of course, I am speaking of religious [Newman later added pious] persons in both communions. Again, I have a passage in my first volume of Sermons, about the inconsistencies of good men.486

Writing to his nephew nearly thirty years later, the tone of the letter is quite different.

As to your other question, the virtues peculiar to Catholics, I think there are various such—but here we enter upon another large question—I do not think they make a show—that is, are such as to constitute what is called a Note of the Church. Our Lord Himself foretold that His net would contain fish of every kind—He speaks of rulers who would be tyrannical and gluttonous—and it was one of the first great controversies of the Christian Church, issuing in the novatian schism, whether extraordinary means should or should not be taken to keep the Church pure—and it was decided in the negative, as (in fact) a thing impossible. Now when this is once allowed, considering how evil in its own nature flaunts itself and is bad, and how true virtue is both in itself a matter of the heart and in its nature retiring and unostentatious, it is very difficult to manage to make a “Note of the Church” out of the conduct of Catholics viewed as a visible body. Besides it must be recollected that the Church is a militant body, and its work lies quite as much in rescuing souls from the dominion of sin as in leading them on to any height of moral excellence.487

Oracle of God and Ark of Salvation

Newman frequently described the Church as the Ark of Salvation and Oracle of Truth. He repeatedly advised prospective converts that they must firmly confess this truth before they could enter the Roman Catholic Church. Since most of Newman’s inquirers believed that Christ established a Church in and through which one was saved, their question was, how do I recognize where this Church is today? Accordingly, his purpose was not so much to analyze how the Church functioned as a saving Ark but rather where this Ark was to be found.

In his correspondence, Newman commented on the Church’s special function of proclaiming and teaching revealed truth. This duty of the Church assumed particular importance in light of the controversies occasioned by the publication of the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the decisions of the First Vatican Council (1869–70). Not surprisingly, the focus in Newman’s spiritual direction on helping people to recognize the Roman Catholic Church as identical with the primitive Church, was paralleled by his effort to help people to identify the Roman Catholic Church as the faithful teacher of the Revelation in Jesus Christ. A letter written in 1870 to William Gainsford clearly situates the context of revelation.

There are two or three large questions which carry us on—Is there a God? is there a particular providence? is there a Moral Governance? what are the relations between man and His Maker? Do we need supernatural assistance that is, a revelation? does not a revelation imply an organ of revelation? is that revelation really made, if there is no organ, or if that organ can mislead or go wrong—that is, if it be not infallible? can a book be such an organ—especially such a book as the Bible, written in a language not our own, and full of difficulties? In this way we are able to see where the shoe pinches—that is, where it is our difficulty lies.488

In contrast to those theologians who would search the New Testament to extract a definition of the Church, Newman approached the question differently. He argued from the notion of prophet and the common testimony of mankind; as he stated at the conclusion of a letter to William Pope: “You will observe, from my way of treating the subject, I have superseded your question about arguing from Scriptures—for I do not see that it is necessary to bring in Scripture into the proof of a Church.”489

William Pope had asked if he was to follow private judgment in becoming a Catholic. Newman replied that, in becoming a member of the Church, one’s private judgment which was used in discovering the Church in the first place, gives way to Revelation, as to a superseding truth. Tying together his understanding of the Church as prophet in relation to private judgment, he replied:

Now when you once fix your mind on this principle steadily, that, if God has spoken, He must have His organ of Prophet, I think you will see at once that the Catholic (or Roman Catholic) Church is that Prophet. Consider what is meant by the word Prophet, what is the idea which it conveys. I am not asking you to go by taste, or imagination, or feeling, or previous notions, or whatever is often included under the name and the exercise of private judgement in deciding what “Prophet” means, but use the judgement not of a private person, not of yourself, but of all mankind, use what may be called public judgement in determining this question, what must a prophet be like.

Now surely it is no private judgement, but it is a mere explanation of the word to which all will assent to say that a Prophet must come from God, must say that he comes from God, must know what he has to tell, must be able to answer all questions which are put to him on the subject of his message, must be firm and resolute against all opposers or corrupters of it. He must be up to his office, up to emergencies, and consistent in his view to his duty. Has any so called Church any claim to answer such a description, (which I say is involved in the very idea of a prophet) but the Church of Rome? Is not the question reduced to this—either the Church of Rome is God’s organ or He has none? And is not this conclusion arrived at without any private judgement at all? for my description of it with the Church of Rome, of England, the Presbyterian Church, the Lutheran etc. etc. has nothing private either.490

Newman maintained that if God has spoken, then there must be an organ, an agent, for this revelation. In other words, there must be a prophet who claims to speak for God; not only in biblical times but today as well.

The question then is brought to this? is there a Prophet of God on earth now? or, in other words, is there a Church? Now I do not think that even here private judgement comes prominently in, though it does partially. It is true, Protestants and Infidels deny that God has an organ of revelation or Church. The Infidel says He never had—the Protestant says, He once had—viz. the 12 Apostles, that they wrote the New Testament, and handed over the Old to us; that the Bible is their legacy, the record of revelation made through Apostles and Prophets—but that Prophet on the earth there now is none.

On the other hand, a large body of even your own communion have ever said that there is and ever will be a Prophet on earth—the followers of Laud, of Bull, of the Non-jurors, and of Dr. Pusey. Now it is not a violent private judgement to go by them—But further extend your view across the channel and let it range the earth—go back into past history for 1800 years; and it is a matter, not of private judgement, but of public fact, that the immense majority of Christians have ever said that there is a Church, that there is a Prophet of God. Count up all Christian countries from the Apostles age till now, and see what a very small minority on the whole will be found to deny the existence of a Church. At this very time the (Roman) Catholic Church is, I believe, nearly equal to all other forms of Christianity together—and of those other forms the largest (the Greek) and besides, the Monophysite, the Nestorian, the Copt, the Armenian, a good part of the Episcopalian, all maintain that there is a Church. Which is most like Private Judgement, to deny it or to affirm it?491

Numerous correspondents wrote Newman concerning their doubts about and objections to various doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. One pattern found in his responses was not to focus on a specific issue, but to raise the more fundamental question: “Do you accept the Church as Teacher?” For example, shortly after Newman’s conversion, his friend, Henry Wilberforce, wrote about the disturbing doctrine of Papal Supremacy; Newman responded:

It seems to me extravagant or unreasonable in you to demand proof of one certain particular tenet which it so naturally comes to the Church to decide. If the Roman [Catholic] Church be the Church, I take it [and submit to it] whatever it is [monarchical, aristocratic or democratic]—and if I find that Papal Supremacy is a point of faith in it, this point of faith [though not capable of proof on its own merits] is not to my imagination so strange, to my reason so incredible, to my historical knowledge so utterly without evidence, as to warrant me in saying “I cannot take it on faith.”492

Many years later, Newman wrote in the same way to another prospective convert about the basic condition for becoming a Catholic: “If you can say deliberately and from your heart ‘I believe the Holy Catholic Roman Church to be the one and only Fold of Christ and Ark of Salvation, and I believe whatever she teaches, has taught or shall teach, to be the Word of God committed by our Lord to his Apostles in the beginning.’”493 The basic and broad truth was the Church-as-Teacher.

This emphasis can be seen in a letter reacting to Edward Pusey’s Irenicon; Newman indicated that the attitude, “enumerate the doctrines I must believe and I will say if I can become one of you,” was misplaced.

I have made this long talk by way of protest against the principle of the “Minimum,” which both you and De Forbes stand upon, and which we never can accept as a principle, or as a basis of an Irenicon. It seems to us false, and we must ever hold, on the contrary, that the object of faith is not simply certain articles, ABCD, contained in dumb documents, but the whole word of God, explicit and implicit, as dispensed by His living Church. On this point I am sure there can be no Irenicon; for it marks a fundamental, elementary difference between the Anglican view and ours.494

Newman’s belief that Christ spoke through the Church and that individuals receive Church doctrines on faith, gives an incarnational perspective to his spiritual direction: “We rely, not on the word of man, but on the word of God. However, thro’ whatever instrument, He speaks to us, if he speaks to us, we are bound to believe. The voice of the Church is but the particular mode under our Dispensation, and the usual and ordinary under it, in which the word of God is proposed to us. If Almighty God spoke to Abraham, Abraham was bound to believe, and (by divine grace) did believe, without the voice of the Church.”495

The normal and ordinary vehicle of Revelation is the Church. For a Revelation apart from the Church, namely, a direct communication from God to an individual, only that recipient is bound to belief. Similarly, a person is not obliged to believe what is not formally taught by the Church. For example, a year before the publication of Ineffabilis Deus, Newman wrote: “The Immaculate Conception may be a point of faith in this way to the individual, though not to the faithful generally, because the Church has not proposed it.”496

Implied in the belief that the Church is the instrument of God’s word, is the idea that the Church alone can determine what that word is: “The rule of the Church is never to decree any doctrine to be of faith but what comes by tradition; but the Infallible Church, while she always appeals to tradition, is the true judge and interpreter of it, not you or I.”497 The Church, as instrument, is not mechanical; it must bring its judgment to bear on what has been revealed to it; it speaks from out of its own faith, and so it alone can judge what its faith is.

The process, of course, is difficult, ambiguous, slow, and sometimes discordant. There are times, when the voice of one age seems to contradict that of another age. Criticizing Newman’s Letter to Pusey, Robert Jenkins cited the denial of the Immaculate Conception by the Dominican Cardinal, Blessed John Dominic. Newman answered that the meaning of the term “Immaculate Conception” was determined by the Church in the Definition of 1854 and other uses of the phrase must be judged on their own merits.

As to Cardinal Dominic’s judgement and that of many other Divines you speak of, I do not feel it is to the purpose, because they all meant something different from what we mean now in speaking of the “Immaculate Conception.” There is a sense doubtless in which the words may be taken, which would be, if not heretical, very like heresy. The history of the word Homousion is a parallel. The Great Council of Antioch, 70 years before Nicea, rejected it in the sense in which Paul of Samosata and the Manichees understood it. And even long after the Council of Nicea, orthodox Catholics had a difficulty in taking the word in what to them was a new sense upon the word and introduced it into the Creed—and in like manner, after a far longer controversy and probation, the Infallible Church has rejected certain old notions attached to the words “Immaculate Conception” and has used the phrase to express that old truth conveyed in the doctrine of the “Second Eve.”498

Newman then saw the Church as an instrument speaking God’s word today and determining the sense of that word. Newman’s satisfaction with this position is apparent in a letter to Catherine Ward, who, under Newman’s direction, later became a convert: “There are now, as at all times, a thousand disorders within and without the Church—her members full of imperfection—but there is that in her which is what she peculiarly promises, which no other body promises, and in which she does not deceive; she can present a Creed, she alone can do what a Messenger from heaven ought to do; and her children feel this and are satisfied.”499

Characteristics of Newman’s Spiritual Direction

Since many of Newman’s letters were responses to concrete problems, his ecclesiology in these letters was practical and pastoral. Simultaneously, his spiritual direction about the church is characterized by recurring themes.

The most consistent element of Newman’s spiritual direction is his encouragement of persons in their search for the Church and his support in their difficulties. He realized that recognizing and believing in the Catholic Church was no easy matter. The painful process of his own conversion offered a unique vantage point from which to direct others.

Letters abound in Newman’s correspondence in which he supports persons at various stages in their investigation into the Church. Newman advised others that individuals are not bound to join the Church until they have considered the arguments for Catholicism; once they are convinced, then it is their duty to join. As he wrote to Albert Smith: “You are not bound to become a Catholic till you feel it your duty to be one, and then you are bound . . . it is better to consider all the difficulties in the argument for Catholicism before becoming a Catholic, than to let them come upon you after you are a Catholic.”500 Similarly, after explaining the visibility of the Church to S. S. Shiel in 1870, he wrote: “I can understand a man doubting, which is the Church, at first sight, but not his doubting that it is a duty to join the Church, if he can find it.501

Noteworthy in Newman’s encouragement is the empathy he expressed for people struggling with the question of conversion. Because Newman had himself gone through a similar struggle, he appreciated the internal turmoil that others were experiencing. Two months after his own conversion, Newman wrote the Marquise de Salvo about her desire to enter the Church yet her fear at causing pain to relatives and friends:

I earnestly exhort you to join the Catholic Church. It is necessary for your salvation, considering your present state of mind. Believe me to feel very much for you, which I do— . . . You say you have to pain relatives by your step—alas, that is the trial which all have to go through. You hardly can be called on to inflict such pain as has been my own duty to inflict. But God will support you under every trial He puts upon you—and you will have the strength of the whole Church of all saints who ever lived. You will be one of a body who have gone through far more than any of us are called to undergo—and their prayers and their sanctity will operate in you, and raise you above yourself. I am not speaking necessarily of sensible comfort, but of real power which will be yours in God’s presence.502

Similarly, he wrote an understanding letter to his friend Henry Wilberforce about how the trial of conversion is one of the ways in which God prepares us for new birth:

The distress of mind at this moment of other friends of mine, of a different kind—I mean, their struggling to know whether or not they should join the Church of Rome, and not seeing their way—[is] a most consuming, exhausting trial. Yet it will, doubtless, all turn to good. Perhaps, if we knew all, we should know it is impossible for the elect of God to emerge from darkness to light in any other way. Such travail is necessary for the new birth. Perhaps if we saw our way too soon, there might be a re-action and old habits and associations might come over one again. I know too well the state [of mind] of those in doubt, not to understand that the long trial of some is no sin of theirs, but God’s way with them, imparting light slowly that He may impart it more effectually. My only dread is, and it is in some cases very great, when they are not, to all appearance, using the light given them, but shutting their eyes. And as doubt long continued may be the fiery process by which one person is brought into the Church, so the loss or alienation of friends by their conversion may be the divinely sent trial of others. It may be the gradual operation, by which God prepares their own souls for the truth.503

In 1875, in a letter to Lady Heywood, Newman compared the inner turmoil of converting in the nineteenth century to the struggle of the early Church.

Your case is the case of many others, and a very painful one. But I suppose the inward conflict of mind which was the inevitable lot of those who in the first age of the Church had to face the prospect of loss of friends, home, familiar habits, the happy and secure routine of life, life-long beliefs and opinions and human authority and favour, with the chance of persecution and death, in order to win Christ, was still more painful, but even the trial to which the soul is subjected now and in this country, ere it can get free of the world and follow Christ, is great indeed. And bystanders can only pray for souls in this distress; for it is God, and none else, who must help them.504

An additional instance occurred in the case of Lord Fielding whose father, the Earl of Denbigh, threatened to disinherit him for joining the Catholic Church. Since Newman had experienced the painful reaction of family and friends at his conversion he could write:

It was with deep sorrow I read what you told me about your family matters. Time, however, please God, will set all to rights, or at least indefinitely soften the acuteness of feeling which such steps as you tell me of express. Such feeling in course of time may give place to a very different sentiment. For such a change you must pray unceasingly.

. . . Be of good cheer, my dear Lord, the first months of a convert’s life, though filled with joy of their own, have a pain and dreariness of their own too. We feel the latter when nature overcomes grace—the former, when grace triumphs over nature. But no one made a sacrifice without effect. God does not forget what we do for Him—and whatever trouble you may have now, it will be repaid to you a hundred fold.505

Another element that emerged in Newman’s guidance of others towards the Church was his personal testimony. Newman was willing to share his own struggles, questions, and trials. Frequently, his personal witness became a way of helping others to resolve their own difficulties. With the Marquise de Salvo, he employed this method in advising in her to join the Church.

You will see from the letter which has already gone all I have to say—and how idle the report is that I repent of having joined the Catholic Church. This is said of every one in turn—and in every case which I am acquainted with most falsely—there is but one feeling of joy and happiness among those persons with whom I am acquainted who have become Catholics—and as to finding things we did not expect in the Church, I do not know what is meant by “finding.” I inquired into the system of religion I was joining before I submitted to it. Many things indeed I have found—extreme kindness and unsuspicious cordiality far beyond my deserts—and great excellence of life and character among a circle of persons with whom I was hitherto unacquainted: I earnestly exhort you to join the Catholic Church.506

A week earlier, Newman had written to A. J. Hammer about his own new found certitude in relation to the Church: “Then I was in doubt about things of which I am now sure. When one is sure that a certain thing is in itself right, one feels far less scruple in recommending it to a given individual, than when one is in doubt about its truth or propriety. I am now so convinced of the truth and divinity of the Catholic Church, that I am pained about persons who are external to it in a way in which I was not before.”507

Similarly, when Mrs. J. W. Bowden was trying to decide whether to convert or not, one of her concerns revolved around the issue of certainty. Newman responded:

But among the anticipations you must entertain, I think must be this—that you cannot have “certainty,” to use your words. The class of minds to which I just now referred have certainty—that is, they have no doubt at all. But calmer and more sober minds from the nature of the case see difficulties on all sides of them, in every course of action—and must in a certain sense act in the dark, and have their reward, and perhaps greater merit, in thus looking up to God and doing what they really do trust on the whole is pleasing to Him, though they have much hesitation while they act. Perhaps one speaks from oneself—not for one moment have I felt otherwise than most grateful to God that I did what I did last October—and it comes to me sometimes with affright “what if I had missed the moment and lost my election!” and day by day I seem to gain a nearer approach to Him who condescends to dwell with man upon earth under sensible forms—but what would I have given for a clearer view at the time of acting, and for a year before!508

Later in this letter Newman cautioned Mrs. Bowden about what to expect by way of final temptations.

Another thought about you is this—that, did you make up your mind to the step of which I have been speaking, you might have great temptations at the last minute, to make you change it. This occurs to many persons, and in various ways. Of course, I should call them artifices of the enemy to hinder what seems inevitable. The moment before acting may be, as can easily be imagined, peculiarly dreary—the mind may be, confused—no reason for acting may be forthcoming in our mind—and the awful greatness of the step in itself, and without any distinct apprehension of its consequences, may weigh on us. Some persons like to be left to themselves in such a crisis—others find a comfort in the presence of others. I could do nothing but shut myself up in my room and lie down on my bed. In addition to this, a person may very easily be tried, in a way I was not, by strong misgivings that perhaps he is doing wrong.509

Newman’s own conversion had been a lengthy process; understandably, he insisted that others take their time and not rush their decision. When Mrs. Bowden was considering joining the Church in 1846, Newman wrote to her:

I cannot wish you to be otherwise than slow in your decisions, were I to choose for you, in those very solemn matters which at present press upon you. There are persons who must be taken at a moment or they will not act—and whose minds are so variable and who go so little by reason that they are incapable of going through a process of change. But you, I suppose, are very different—and I should not like you, as you would not like yourself, not to contemplate the consequences of a great step, and so to leave no place afterwards for re-action of mind or the rise of difficulties or distresses which you had anticipated.510

Some months later, however, on learning that she was very confused by the conflicting advice she was receiving, Newman advised her to join the Church immediately.

It really seems now that time has come when I ought to speak. You know how very much I have kept in the background. You have not been allowed to make up your mind calmly for yourself. You have (naturally) had kind friends urging you to stay—those on the other side who might have spoken, have not urged you to go. Much as I have felt, earnestly as you may conceive I have prayed, I wished you to make up your mind slowly and for yourself, because I thought that you had a right to do so, and were equal to doing so. You may think how hard it has been to be patient—but I really reverence you too much to have the same temptation to impatience which I should have with other people.

Now I only claim this—to be able to judge that really you see you ought not to remain where you are. You have no faith in the system you are in—you cannot have the Christian grace of faith where you are. You do not know what to believe and what not—you have no one to tell you. As to corresponding with Pusey, nothing will come of it but weariness and disappointment to him, and pain to yourself. I do seriously counsel you to join the Church at once.511

Yet Newman did not want people considering conversion to act impetuously or on the spur of the moment because he felt that trouble would arise later and the conversion would not last. Thus he advised Lady Heywood:

Certainly you have a great trial and I wish that you could be relieved from or under it—but God knows what is best for you, and will reward you for all you suffer for conscience sake. You wish to do God’s will; He will not forget you. Have a full trust in Him; go to Him with an open heart and you will find how good He is. Of course you should not act in a state of enthusiasm, and of course too, I cannot know whether such is your state. I doubt not you pray God to keep you from enthusiasm.512

Similarly, Newman cautioned Gilbert Simmons who was inquiring about the Church:

But when the question is asked who are those who are called, and when are they bound to act upon it, of course caution is necessary in dealing with individuals. I have long determined, though I find it difficult to keep my rule, not to give definite advice to anyone I have not seen. How do I know you are not a person who have taken up a fancy today, and will give it up tomorrow? There is nothing in your letter like this, and I am not supposing it—but there are those who have come to the Church with but an imperfect idea of its teaching and its usages, and when they knew it better have, like the disciples at Capernaum (John VI) left it again.513

For Newman, knowing an individual personally was an important factor in spiritual direction; in fact, he hesitated to advise anyone if he did not know them personally.514 Similarly, when a person asked advice on guiding a prospective convert, again his counsel was not to hurry, but to take the time needed. For example, Mrs. Bowden was anxious to have her son become a convert; Newman advised her:

You must not be anxious about John as regards yourself. It is as clear to you, as it is to me, that you could not have done, that you cannot be doing, anything more than you have done and do. We cannot change wills at pleasure. You cannot force a boy of his age. To join the Church would not profit him, if he did it against his will. And you must not be troubled with ups and downs of hope and fears which his conduct gives you. . . . For myself I know not how to doubt, looking at the case externally that you will ultimately have him. Meanwhile the delay is doubtless intended to quicken your prayers for him.515

Since Newman felt that his own conversion was “coming out of shadows into truth,” he wanted converts to join the Church for the right reasons. Accordingly, he was constantly advising persons to be sure of their motives before joining the Church. Newman believed a person ought to come to the Church “in the spirit of a child” in order to be “taught and with the intention of submitting to her teaching.”516 Ultimately, it was a question of salvation. As he wrote to the Marquise de Salvo: “You may suppose I can have no doubt on the point, considering how much I have given up for it. I never could think it right to change my religion on any ground short of the absolute necessity of the act, as a condition of everlasting salvation.”517

In discussing the correct motives for conversion with Mrs. Froude, Newman wrote: “You must come to the Church, not to avoid it, i.e., trial but to save your soul. If this is the motive, all is right—you cannot be disappointed.”518 Twenty-two years later he wrote almost the exact same thing to Fanny Pearson: “Do you come to the Church to save your soul? That is the only true motive.”519

Newman was sometimes faced with situations where people wanted to join the Church for incorrect or inadequate reasons. Whenever this occurred, he patiently attempted to guide the person to what he believed to be correct reasons. For example, in 1848 Newman wrote A. J. Hammer that it was not enough to possess a “mere outward conformity to the Church”;520 rather a sincere internal faith is needed. Another external factor is human respect, which can be employed to pressure an individual to join the Church or to keep a person from converting. The latter was the case with his friend Henry Wilberforce. Newman agreed that a person ought not to join the Catholic Church out of human respect, yet he observed: “And they tell you to be aware of human feelings and human respect, as if there were none on the side of staying where you are.”521

Perhaps the most unusual motive for wanting to become a Catholic appeared in his correspondence in 1864 with Baroness von Köller. She apparently believed that she would be supported from Catholic sources if she became a convert; she wrote to Newman to confirm this. Newman quickly assured her that this would not happen, and hoped that she would not become a Catholic for this motive.522

At least four different persons, at various times, told Newman that they were thinking of converting because they “liked” the Catholic Church. Newman replied to one: “You must not become a Catholic merely because you like our doctrines and devotions, but because you believe the Catholic Church to be the Ark of Salvation.”523

Another person apparently wanted to convert “merely to get rid of painful doubts.” Newman felt that such doubts would simply return later, and the second state of the person would be worse than the first. Writing to Richard Hutton in 1870, he explained: “I never shall wish you to become a Catholic, merely to get rid of your painful doubts. I don’t see that it is a sufficient motive—and I do see at least the danger of their reviving when you were in the Church, if you had not let them die a natural death before you came into it.”524

Another inadequate motive was suggested by James Le Quesne who wanted to join the Church because he thought he could be more “religious.” Newman pointed out that this kind of fervor dies away quickly and that unless an individual believes what the Church teaches, this person will not persevere.

In answer to your question, I would observe that there is a great temptation, (as it is to some people) without believing that the Catholic Church is the One authoritative Oracle of God and the one Ark of Salvation, to join it merely because they can pray better in it, or have more fervency than in the Anglican Church, and in consequence conceive a “hope” of becoming more religious in it than they are at present, whereas the demand which the Church of God makes on them is to believe her teaching as the teaching of God. We will say, perhaps they become Catholics; their fervour after a while dies away, their faith is demanded for some doctrine which as yet they have not heard of or considered—and they stumble at it and fall away.525

Even when Newman was eighty years old, this concern continued to appear in his correspondence; he wrote to an unknown correspondent that the desire to become a missionary was an insufficient motive for wanting to join the Church, “If you become a Catholic, it must be in order to save your soul, not in order to become, or on condition of becoming a missionary.”526

A final characteristic of Newman’s spiritual direction is honesty. Newman directed prospective converts to be honest with others even when that was very painful. By so doing, he hoped to prevent more serious difficulties in the future. He advised Mrs. Newdigate, whose husband was an Anglican clergyman, that she do nothing without her husband’s knowledge.

Whether he would have you join at once, or not at once, delaying either for instruction in our faith or for other reasons, I should advise you to do nothing without your husband’s knowledge. I know it is a most cruel thing to have to tell him, but it is more cruel not to tell him. I know too how sadly it must embarrass him as an Anglican clergyman, but on the other hand an underhand conversion will be the beginning of a long train of miseries. Better meet the trial at once—it is the honest and the expedient course.527

Similarly, he directed young people who were contemplating conversion, to be honest with their parents.528

In guiding many different persons in their process of conversion, Newman wanted them to know that they were not alone. He knew the importance of waiting patiently on God, who was directing the process; the person’s job was to pray and be receptive to God’s action in them. For example, he wrote Mrs. Froude, who was having a difficult time accepting the Church:

My dear Mrs. Froude, do you pray for “effectual grace”—? Suppose I come to a high wall—I cannot jump it—such are the moral obstacles which keep us from the Church. We see the Heavenly City before us, we go on and on along the road, till a wall simply crosses it. Human effort cannot clear it—there is no scaling, no vaulting over. Grace enables us to cross it—and that grace is called effectual grace. Our first grace is sufficient to enable us to pray for that second effectual grace—and God gives grace for grace.529

Directing Others in Particular Aspects of Church Life

After his own conversion, Newman experienced a period of adjustment; it took him time before he felt at home in his new communion. First of all, he encountered the suspicious attitude of English Roman Catholics toward converts. He was also embarrassed by publicity and display: “I was the gaze of so many eyes at Oscott, as if some wild incomprehensible beast, caught by the hunter, and a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers as himself being the hunter who captured it !”530 Nonetheless, his letters written soon after his conversion reveal a brighter aspect of his experience. On December 13, 1846, he wrote from Rome to Henry Wilberforce: “I was happy at Oriel, happier at Littlemore, as happy or happier still at Maryvale—and happiest here.531

For most of his life rumors kept arising that Newman was unhappy as a Roman Catholic or that he was returning to the Anglican Church. Nothing could have been more unfounded. From his letters it can be seen that not only had he discovered truth and happiness, but that he never had any intentions of returning to Anglicanism. In 1848 he wrote to Henry Bourne: “I can only say, if it is necessary to say it, that from the moment I became a Catholic, I never have had, through God’s grace, a single doubt or misgiving on my mind that I did wrong in becoming one. I have not had any feeling whatever but one of joy and gratitude that God called me out of an insecure state into one which is sure and safe, out of the war of tongues into a realm of peace and assurance.”532

In 1862, the Globe published a report that Newman was about to leave the Oratory and return to the Church of England. This occasioned Newman’s strongest language in his response. Without desiring to offend anyone, but at the same time wanting to squelch the growing number of rumors, Newman replied:

I have not had one moment’s wavering of trust in the Catholic Church ever since I was received into her fold. I hold, and ever have held, that her Sovereign Pontiff is the centre of unity and the Vicar of Christ. And I ever have had, and have still, an unclouded faith in her creed in all its articles; a supreme satisfaction in her worship, discipline, and teaching; and an eager longing and a hope against hope that the many dear friends whom I have left in Protestantism may be partakers of my happiness.

This being my state of mind, to add, as I hereby go on to do, that I have no intention, and never had had any intention, of leaving the Catholic Church and becoming a Protestant again, would be superfluous, except that Protestants are always on the look-out for some loophole or evasion in a Catholic’s statement of fact. Therefore, in order to give them full satisfaction, if I can, I do hereby profess ex animo, with an absolute internal assent and consent, that Protestantism is the dreariest of possible religions; that the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the thirty-nine Articles makes me shudder. Return to the Church of England: no; “the net is broken, and we are delivered.” I should be a consummate fool (to use a mild term) if in my old age I left “the land flowing with milk and honey” for the city of confusion and the house of bondage.533

Newman was quick to point out that his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church and his desire to remain in it was a matter of faith and did not depend on personalities or how he was treated by others in the Church. He wrote a letter to Sir Frederic Rogers in 1868 reminiscing about his life in the church:

I have found in the Catholic Church abundance of courtesy, but very little sympathy, among persons in high places, except a few—but there is a depth and a power in the Catholic religion, a fulness of satisfaction in its creed, its theology, its rites, its sacraments, its discipline, a freedom yet a support also, before which the neglect or the misapprehension about oneself on the part of individual living persons, however exalted, is as so much dust, when weighed in the balance. This is the true secret of the Church’s strength, the principle of its indefectibility, and the bond of its indissoluble unity. It is the earnest and the beginning of the repose of Heaven.534

Infallibility

The specific ecclesiological topic which received the most attention in Newman’s letters during his Catholic years was infallibility.535 For over four decades it was a recurring theme. His letters do not offer a complete theological treatise on this topic since his inquirers were usually asking specific questions. Nevertheless it is possible to trace chronologically his own progression of thought concerning infallibility and to see how he directed others.536

Newman had been a Roman Catholic for only two months when the first letters concerning infallibility arrived. His earliest explanation of the role of infallibility in the Church focused not on infallibility as such, but rather on the consistency of the contemporary Roman Church with the primitive Church. When Mrs. Anstice wrote on December 18, 1845, concerning Mr. Northcote’s difficulties with infallibility which were keeping him from joining the Church, Newman suggested taking “large and broad views of the subject, instead of entangling ourselves with particular questions.”537 He went on to say “that some things perhaps must ever be difficulties, but that on the whole and in proportion as persons come nearer to the system, there is a growing evidence of consistency.”538

Several months later he asked his friend, Henry Wilberforce, who was also having problems with infallibility, to examine his own inconsistency, “You must go one way or the other. You may shut your eyes for a time to the fact of your on inconsistency, but it will break upon you.”539 The following month he wrote again with more precision:

If we can get a tolerable notion which is the Church, and know (as we do) that it may be trusted because it is the Church, then comes the question why should not the Pope’s Supremacy be one of the points on which it may be trusted? For myself I have had so great experience of the correctness of the Roman view where once I thought otherwise, that I should be a beast if I were unwilling to take the rest on faith, from a confidence that what is still obscure to me . . . is explainable. And it seems to me extravagant or unreasonable in you to demand proof of one certain particular tenet which it so naturally comes to the Church to decide. If the Roman Church be the Church, I take it whatever it is—and if I find that Papal Supremacy is a point of faith in it, this point of faith is not to my imagination so strange, to my reason so incredible, to my historical knowledge so utterly without evidence, as to warrant me in saying, “I cannot take it on faith.”540

In 1849, in response to A. J. Hammer, who still had not settled his difficulties about infallibility, Newman discussed, not the issue itself, but his understanding of the Church. “Next, I cast my eyes over your ten difficulties, and I see that not one of them is (as I think) to your purpose. The question is, ‘Is the communion of Rome the Catholic Church?’ and you answer in these ten difficulties that the Pope is not infallible. How does the argument run, ‘The Pope is not infallible, therefore the Church in communion with him is not the Catholic Church’?”541 Then taking a more strategic approach to the question he continued: “Now, it is the old fallacy of division, and nothing else, to say, ‘This (infallibility) is not necessary to the Church, nor that, nor the other; therefore not all together.’ All these things make up together a great note of the Church. The Church was to be one and the same from Christ’s first coming to His Second. The modern Roman communion is unmistakeably like the Church of the Fathers; and this great argument is confirmed by finding that the Church of England is unmistakeably unlike it.”542

Between September 1851 and February 1852, Newman wrote a series of seven lengthy letters to Francis Wegg-Prosser, which presented his most comprehensive treatment of infallibility prior to its definition in 1870. Wegg-Prosser found difficulty in accepting papal infallibility. Newman’s approach was to present the infallibility of the Church and then, within this context, to encourage an acceptance in faith of the infallibility of the Pope.

Did I not in my letter make the infallibility of the Pope a doctrine to be taken in faith on the Church’s word (so far as the Church says it): If I have not said so clearly (at the end of my letter) it is what I meant to say. The way I wished to put the question is this: 1. There must be ever in the world a continuation of the Primitive Church. 2. That continuation is infallible. 3. It is no other than the Roman. 4. What the Roman says is to be received. 5. The Roman teaches (if so) the infallibility of the Pope. I mean, submit yourself to the Roman Church, and then take the infallibility of the Pope, if the Roman Church teaches it.543

Two weeks later, when Wegg-Prosser tried to make Papal infallibility the basis of Catholic faith, Newman was quick to point out that the infallibility of the Pope is not the basis of the Catholic religion, but a doctrine of the Church which the Church teaches along with many other doctrines.

I must protest with all my might against what I consider an assumption, that the infallibility of the Pope is the basis of the Catholic Religion looked at controversially, and I will not meet you on a point, the admission of which seems to me a mistake . . .

For me, I maintain it is a doctrine of the church, (whether a dogma or not, I am not going into) but I mean, as far as it is to be received, it is to be received on the church’s authority . . .

I conceive that the fundamental proof of Catholicism, (i.e., the basis according to my conception of Catholicism,) is the promise that the Primitive Church shall continue to the end, the likeness of the (Roman) Catholic church to the Primitive, and the dissimilarity of every other body—The (Roman) Catholic Church then, being proved to be the organ of revelation, or infallible in matters of faith, will teach the Pope’s infallibility, as far as it is a doctrine, just as it teaches the Divinity of our Lord, or original sin—and its teaching must, as regards the one doctrine and the other, be received on faith.544

Moreover, the infallibility of the Catholic Church is an inference from its teaching office. Four years after the definition, Newman said that infallibility is “a doctrine derived from, a consequence of, an Apostolical and Divine doctrine, viz., that the Church is the authoritative teacher—She cannot teach without infallibility.”545

During the two decades prior to the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), most of Newman’s correspondence concerning infallibility was an explanation of his fundamental belief that the Roman Catholic Church was the descendent of the Primitive Church which had received the true revelation of God and, consequently, the authority to teach infallibly. Accordingly, this ecclesial infallibility provided the context for belief in the infallibility of the Pope.

After extensive preparations, the First Vatican Council officially commenced on December 8, 1869. Although the topic of “infallibility” was not on the official agenda, there were persistent rumors that there would be a definition of the Pope’s infallibility. An Ultramontane546 campaign had already begun in favor of a definition and the debate was carried on in popular newspapers with passionate partisanship.

Wilfrid Ward teamed with Cardinal Manning and Monsignor Tabot to advocate the doctrine of infallibility. These “infallibilists” insisted that their opinion was the only orthodox teaching and wrote as if they alone represented the Roman Catholics of England. Two years earlier, Newman had accused Ward of making a church within a church, like the Novatians of old or the Evangelicals within the Establishment, “by exalting your opinions into dogmas, and shocking to say, by declaring to me, as you do, that those Catholics who do not accept them are of a different religion to yours. I protest then again, not against your tenets, but your schismatical spirit.”547 Two months later, Newman expressed his feelings about Ward to his friend Henry Wilberforce:

From all I have heard Ward has hindered various people from becoming Catholics by his extreme views, and I believe is unsetthng the minds of I can’t tell how many Catholics. He is free to have his own opinion, but, when he makes it part of the faith, when he stigmatizes those who do not follow him as bad Catholics, when he saves them only on the plea of invincible ignorance, when he declines to meet those Catholics who differ from him and prefers the company of infidels to theirs . . . when the spontaneous instinct of his mind is rather that Protestants should not be converted than converted by certain Catholics who differ from him, what is he (as I have told him) but a Novatian, making a Church within a Church, or an Evangelical preacher, deciding that the Gospel is preached here, and is not preached there.548

Newman’s position was all the more delicate at this time because those who opposed the Ultramontane line most vigorously were former students or close associates. While the historical objections they raised were valid, their style was often as pugnacious as Ward’s and they sometimes repudiated every form of infallibility, which Newman never did. He objected to a sweeping application of infallibility to all the pronouncements of a Pope and to the way in which the proponents of such views anathematized everyone else as unorthodox.

A few years before the opening of the Council, Newman spoke of the infallibility of the Pope as a doctrine of the Church. As he wrote to F. C. Burnand: “Many writers, like Mr. Allies, rest the argument for Catholicity on the Pope’s authority. . . . But I was not converted by it, and I never use it myself.

“What I believe about the Pope, I believe, as I believe any other doctrine—because the Church teaches it—but, for me, the Church directs me to the Pope not the Pope directs me to the Church.”549

In 1865, when he learned that his friend Thomas Arnold was leaving the Church because of infallibility, Newman decided not to engage in discussion, but rather to express his confidence:

Do not suppose I write these lines to trouble you with controversy, or to exact an answer—but I cannot bear to let you go from the one foundation of grace and spiritual strength, without saying a word, not of farewell, for well it cannot be so to direct your course, but to express my deep sorrowfulness at hearing the news. I will not believe that you have not found strength and comfort in Masses and Sacraments, and I do not think you will find the like elsewhere. Nor shall I easily be led to believe that the time will not come when you will acknowledge this yourself, and will return to the Fold which you are leaving.550

As the controversy on infallibility became public in the years immediately prior to the Council, more people wrote to Newman for some advice. His responses at this time became more personal; he shared his own beliefs about papal infallibility without trying to force them on anyone else; he realized that others did not share this belief. For example, he told J. Walker of Scarborough, “I have myself ever professed to hold the Pope’s Infallibility as a theological opinion—but, as so holding it, of course I imply there are other opinions on the subject, and, though it would be no hard matter to me to accept it as a dogma, yet it isn’t a dogma.”551 Twice within a period of five months he wrote almost identical words to Peter Le Page Renouf: “I hold the Pope’s Infallibility, not as a dogma, but as a theological opinion; that is, not as a certainty, but as a probability.”552

When Mrs. Helbert acknowledged her confusion over the issue of infallibility since so many people were saying different things, Newman began by directing her to trust in God. When she mentioned that she had been reading many of the current books and pamphlets but didn’t know what to believe. Newman replied:

I do not know the book called “England and Christendom”—and I have not read Archbishop Manning’s. There are very false opinions afloat about the Catholic Church—it is thought it does not allow of private judgement, but it allows a great deal—and this is the reason you are perplexed by hearing different Catholics say different things. If you want to know what we believe, go to our standard authoritative books—if you wish to hear what individuals think, go to pamphlets, reviews, and the like. . . . When a man is perplexed by a difference between different teachers, if he cannot solve the difficulty at once, it is his duty to say “I believe what the Church holds and teaches.” He cannot go wrong in that.553

As the time for convening the Council approached, people began to expect a definition of papal infallibility. This prospect marked another phase in his correspondence; Newman began stating more directly that while he personally had no difficulty with infallibility, he opposed a formal definition of the doctrine because he thought such a definition was unnecessary. His letters indicated five basic reasons for his view: first, there was no heresy to quiet; second, a definition would harm the Church’s missionary efforts by unsetthng people’s minds; third, a definition would occasion greater centralization in Rome; fourth, the Church would be burdened with a great many historical objections to answer; fifth, people needed to be better prepared to understand and receive it: “We are not ripe yet for the Pope’s Infallibility.”554

At first, Newman did not really think that the Council would define the doctrine. As late as April 7, 1870, he consoled Ambrose de Lisle: “Anxious as I am, I will not believe that the Pope’s Infallibility can be defined at the Council till I see it actually done. Seeing is believing. We are in God’s Hands—not in the hands of men, however high—exalted. Man proposes, God disposes. When it is actually done, I will accept it as His act; but, till then, I will believe it impossible.”555

On March 15, 1870, the Standard printed a private letter, which Newman had written on January 28 to Bishop Ullathorne at Rome. It was “one of the most confidential letters that I ever wrote in my life,”556 he told Charlotte Wood. His letter was a protest at the methods of those who were campaigning to get the definition of papal infallibility on the agenda of the Council. In his letter to Ullathorne, Newman accused the Ultramontane papers of spreading fear and dismay among Catholics who “practically, not to say doctrinally, hold the Holy Father to be infallible.”

Suddenly there is thunder in a clear sky, and we are told to prepare for something, we know not what, to try our faith, we know not how. No impending danger is to be averted, but a great difficulty created. Is this the proper work of an Ecumenical Council? . . . When has a definition de fide been a luxury of devotion and not a stern painful necessity? Why should an aggressive and insolent faction be allowed to “make the heart of the just sad, whom the Lord hath not made sorrowful?”

I am continually asking myself whether I ought not to make my feelings public. . . . If it is God’s will that the Pope’s Infallibility is defined, then it is God’s will to throw back “the times and the moments” of that triumph which He has destined for His Kingdom; and I shall feel I have but to bow my head to His adorable inscrutable Providence.557

Once this private letter was leaked to the press, more and more people began to write to Newman for his opinion and advice. He felt that a dogmatic declaration was being rushed through like a political measure in an emergency. “You are going too fast at Rome,” he wrote to Robert Whitty,558 who had once desired to be an Oratorian but subsequently became a Jesuit: “We do not move at railroad pace in theological matters even in the 19th century. We must be patient and that for two reasons: first, in order to get at the truth ourselves, and next in order to carry others with us.

“The Church moves as a whole: it is not a mere philosophy, it is a communion; it not only discovers but it teaches; it is bound to consult for charity, as well as for faith.”559

By the end of April 1870, it had become clear that infallibility would be defined. Newman continued to express his opposition and to ask others to trust in God. To Francis Wackerbarth, a Cambridge man, who had become a Catholic in 1841, he said: “I will not believe that this definition about Papal Infallibility is passed, till it actually is passed. It seems to me a duty, out of devotion to the Pope and charity to the souls of men, to resist it, while resistance is possible . . .

“We can but leave the matter to God, and rest confidently in His protection of His Infallible Church and the guidance of the Holy Ghost.”560

During the two months prior to the official definition, a new emphasis appeared in two of his letters which made the distinction between “inexpedient” and “inopportune.”561 Newman believed the impending definition was inexpedient, as he wrote to W. J. Daunt: “I certainly think this agitation of the Pope’s Infallibility most unfortunate and ill-advised . . . there are truths which are inexpedient.”562

After the Definition was proclaimed (July 18, 1870), there was some uncertainty about its binding force because the Council had not officially ended and the bishops had not signed the decree.563 The Council was supposed to reconvene, but was unable to do so because of the political situation. By December, it had become clear that opposition to the decree would not continue and that the Council would not be reconvened in the immediate future. William Clifford, Bishop of Clifton, an opponent of the Definition, told Newman: “There is now no reasonable prospect of the Bishops meeting again in Council for a long time to come, the doctrine, has everywhere been openly taught without any organized stand having been made against it by the Bishops of the minority, several of whom have openly expressed their adhesion to it. . . . Even if opposition were offered by a few Bishops, this could only result in a schism. The Definition therefore must be accepted as the voice of the Church and as such, undoubtedly true.”564

When Newman saw the wording of the definition on July 23, he was pleased at what he considered its restrictive terminology. Accordingly, when Ambrose de Lisle wrote a worried letter, Newman replied: “I saw the new Definition yesterday, and am pleased at its moderation, that is, if the doctrine in question is to be defined at all. The terms used are vague and comprehensive; and personally, I have no difficulty in admitting to it.”565 Newman saw that the eventual effect of the terminology might even be to restrict the Pope’s power. “As to this particular doctrine [Papal infallibility], I am not at all sure it will increase the Pope’s power—it may restrict it. Hitherto he has done what he would, because its limits were not defined—now he must act by rule,” he wrote to Anna Whitty.566 But it was not easy for an ordinary person whether Catholic or not, to understand the meaning of the decree, especially when Manning returned from Rome and began to pressure people to accept the new dogma (as interpreted by the Ultramontanes party). Many whose consciences were strained wrote to Newman who thus became more and more aware of the immediate effects of the definition. He consoled Lady Chatterton:

I grieve, as much as you can, at the news from Rome, because it will pain and perplex so many good people—and I think lightly of the charity of those, who seem as if they wished to increase that pain and perplexity by exaggerated statements and words of triumph . . .

You must not fancy that any very stringent definition has passed—on the contrary it is very mild in its tenor, and has been acted on by the Pope at least for the last 300 years. And as, he has done nothing extravagant, now also, when it is declared authoritatively, we may reasonably expect that all things will go on quietly as before. So I hope you will not make yourself unhappy, when it may be all for nothing.567

Newman was opposed to putting pressure on people to submit quickly to the Definition; he felt that people needed time to digest and accept it. Referring to Manning and the Ultramontanes, Newman expressed his feelings to Bishop Moriarty of Kerry:

The definition, if we are to suppose it legitimately passed, is producing most untoward effects, as far as I have experience of it—and, when poor people ask me categorically “Is is binding?” I don’t know what to say. That “securus judicat orbis terrarum,” [“the whole world judges with confidence”] I am sure—but time has not been given yet to ascertain this, and the very cruelty of certain people, of which I complain is, that they will not let people have time. They would come round quietly if you gave them time—but, when you hold a pistol to their heads and say, “Believe this doctrine, however new to you, as you believe the Holy Trinity, under pain of damnation,” THEY CAN’T. Their breath is taken away—they seem to say “Give me time, give me time—” And their confessors all about the country, say “No, not an hour—believe or be damned—we want to sift the Catholic body of all half Catholics.”

I assure you this so pierces my heart, I do not know what to do—and I rise in indignation against such cruelty.568

Similarly, several weeks later when Manning’s exaggerated interpretation of the doctrine disturbed Lady Simeon, Newman responded:

God has certainly brought upon you a dreadful weight of suffering, but He will enable you to bear it, and will bless you in it and after it. The day will come when you will look back upon it, and praise Him for it, though it is so difficult to feel this before that day comes.

. . . The Archbishop only does what he has done all along—he ever has exaggerated things, and ever has acted towards individuals in a way which they felt to be unfeeling. . . . Therefore, I say confidently, you may dismiss all such exaggerations from your mind.569

Because the issue of infallibility was so complex and emotionally charged, Newman’s method of direction at this time was many-faceted, depending on the difficulty of the individual. Some he guided by sharing his own personal belief in the doctrine. To others, he simply explained a moderate interpretation of the definition, apparently with the hope that people would understand it and be more peaceful with it.

When some individuals objected that “infallibility” was a novel doctrine, unknown to the Apostolic Church, Newman responded that perhaps there were no claims to infallibility, in such words, in the early Church; nevertheless, the Church and the Pope have always acted as if they were claiming infallibility, that is, they presented their formal teaching as irreformable and true. Since earlier theologians were more interested in the matter settled, not the one setthng it, the doctrine of papal infallibility was an ever present truth although it was not commented upon as such until later centuries.

During these months, Newman repeatedly urged people “not to set themselves against the doctrine,” but to make an act of faith in all that the Church teaches. When Anna Whitty, who was the wife of a prominent Liverpool Catholic, wrote to Newman for advice he told her:

Don’t set yourself against the doctrine, then; don’t fancy consequences which may never come to pass. I think you should do two things—first make an act of faith “in ALL that the Church teaches”—and next, when doubts arise against this particular doctrine, put them away, on the ground that perhaps the Church teaches this doctrine, and that it is safer therefore not to oppose it. I say “perhaps” for considering the great number of religious Catholics who hold it, and how long it has been in the Church there is at least a considerable probability that it is true.570

Reflecting in 1872 on his advice about the doctrine of infallibility, Newman wrote to William Monsell: “To any one who has written to me on the subject, I have uniformly answered by advising them to accept the doctrine as an act of the Church.”571

Finally, Newman counseled people to wait patiently and to have confidence that God was guiding the Church, and to trust that with time this dogma would be better understood and accepted within the teachings of the Church.

I do not see there is any remedy for the painful state of suspense which I have spoken of, but what is cold comfort, viz. patient waiting. It is often the characteristic trial (in this present state of mind) of educated and reasoning minds, to be in doubt. If it is not their fault, they cannot help it; and even though in its origin it was, still they cannot get out of it at will, they cannot break their way out of it, but must wait God’s time. He has already done a good deal for you—He will (be sure) do more. Do not disgust Him, but put yourself into His hands as a loving Father. Do not merely say “I will follow the truth,” but “I will follow His guidance and will, who is the Truth”—and “I will ask His grace to enable me to do so.”572

In the years immediately following the definition, Newman often explained both what the definition said and what it did not say. By sharing his own belief in infallibility, by emphasizing the moderation of the definition, by showing how the early Church functioned as if it were infallible, Newman sought to allay the fears of many people who wrote to him for help on this controversial issue.

Simultaneously, Newman refined his own understanding of infallibility. In 1871 he began to write more about the doctrine of the Church’s infallibility, which he had come to see as primarily an inference, grounded on the Church’s teaching office. He told Alfred Plummer:

I have always thought, and think still, that the infallibility of the Church is an inference (a necessary inference) from her prerogative that she is the divinely appointed Teacher of her children, and of the world. She cannot fulfill this office without divine help—that is, she never can be permitted to go wrong in the truths of revelation—this is a negative proposition—the very idea of infallibility is a negative. She teaches by human means, she ascertains the truth by human means—of course assisted by grace, which a Father or a divine, or an inquirer has not—but she has this security, that, in order to fulfill her office, her outcome is always true in the matter of revelation. She is not inspired—the word has sometimes been used, and in Councils especially—but, properly speaking, inspiration is positive, and infallibility is negative.573

Newman continued to think that the definition was inexpedient; his lingering fear was that it placed great powers into the Pope’s hands and established the serious precedent that a dogma could be promulgated without special necessity. Newman hoped that God’s providence would protect the Church and forestall abuses. Nonetheless, Newman predicted that there would be modifications and safeguards added in the course of time. A new Pope or new Council would provide a proper balance, would “trim the boat.”574 Accordingly, he continued to advise people to be patient. To Lady Simeon he wrote in 1871: “Other definitions are necessary, and were intended, and will be added, if we are patient, to reduce the dogma to its proper proportions and place in the Catholic system.”575

On the whole, Newman believed that the promulgation of this Definition by the Council was an act of Divine Providence for some good purpose, even if that was not clear at the moment. Thus, the duty of Catholics was one of resignation: “Divine Providence has allowed the act of last year for some good purpose, and we must submit to His will.”576

A summary of his views at this time is found in a letter to Richard Littledale:

Infallibility is not a habit in the Pope, or a state of mind—but, as the decree says, that infallibility which the Church has. The Church when in Council and proceeding by the strictest forms enunciates a definition in faith and morals, which is certainly true. The Church is infallible then, when she speaks ex cathedra—but he has no habit of infallibility in his intellect, such that his acts cannot but proceed from it, must be infallible because he imply, involve, an infallible judgment. He is infallible pro re nata (according to the need) when he speaks ex cathedra—not except at particular times and on grave questions.

Nay further than this, even on those grave questions the gift is negative. It is not that he has an inspiration of truth, but he is simply guarded from error, circumscribed by a divine superintendence from transgressing, extravagating beyond, the line of truth. And his definitions do not come of a positive divine guidance, but of human means, research, consulting theologians, etc.577

In the aftermath of the Council, the more extreme Ultramontanes continued to interpret the dogma as extensively as possible. Manning’s Pastoral Letter in 1871, for example, included almost all papal acts under the mantle of infallibility. These maximalist interpretations disturbed Newman as well as many people who wrote asking him to refute such views. Not wishing openly to challenge the Archbishop, Newman waited for the proper moment to speak out. It came in 1874 when Gladstone’s Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance questioned whether a post-Vatican I Catholic could remain a loyal British citizen. Newman responded in A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, presenting what he saw as the real Catholic interpretation.578Advocating a principle of minimizing as necessary for a wise and cautious theology, the Letter won many people to a moderate interpretation of the Vatican Decrees by counter-balancing Ultramontane excesses. Bishop Moriarty of Kerry, in gratitude for the Letter to Norfolk, wrote to Newman of the effect on the Ultramontanes: “You and Dr. Fessler have shut them up.”579

Even after his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was published early in January 1875, Newman continued to guide people concerning infallibility. Most of this correspondence consisted in explaining and clarifying for individuals what he had written in the Letter as well as reiterating his former beliefs concerning infallibility. As late as 1886, the subject of infallibility continued to find its way into his correspondence. James Bredin had struggled to find religious certitude and when he wrote to Newman for advice he also mentioned that he had heard that Newman was having difficulty with infallibility. In his reply Newman said:

You describe very vividly the trials you have had in religious inquiry, which have been the experience of so many.

I know but one course to recommend tho’ I feel it a difficult one—to resign yourself patiently and unconditionally to Almighty God, to ask His teaching, and to persevere in waiting for it. It is a tedious, forlorn course. But I believe in its success, when pursued—but few inquiring can be found to place themselves even for a time unreservedly into the hands of a superior Power, and few are constant in such renunciation of self. As to the reports about myself which you mention, they are utterly unfounded. I never had even the temptation to disbelieve the infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith and doctrine—tho’ I did not wish the doctrine to be made a dogma, necessarily to be believed by every Catholic. This was what the Catholic popular papers succeeded in getting defined. I believe it to be true, but not an article of Christian faith. Now I believe it as an article of faith.580

Much of Newman’s direction of others in relation to infallibility involved two dimensions. On the one hand, education played a large role—explaining to various inquirers what exactly was contained in the definition; what it meant and what it did not mean. Second, since many of the letters on this issue came from people who were fearful for the Church or their own belief, Newman’s role became one of allaying fears; his advice was to be patient and to have confidence that God was involved in the whole process. As he wrote to Henry Coleridge in 1869: “There is One that is wiser than we are, and has His times and seasons for all things. All of us may securely leave it to Him, to provide against any danger to the Church from her servants as well as her adversaries.

“. . . Of course God will, as I have said, provide. Men cannot, not even the Pope, go further than He wills. He has laid down marks from the beginning, which no one can pass.”581

Two factors were operative in his view of Providence in reference to the Church and infallibility. The first, and more important, was his absolute conviction that the Church is divine and that God will never abandon it. The second factor is a variation of the idea of a “broad truth withstanding small objections.” The broad truth, in this case, was the Church under the enduring guidance of God, and the small objections were the momentary setbacks the Church suffers. The Definition of 1870, at first seemed like a dreary setback viewed in itself, but if viewed in the context of the past eighteen centuries and of the centuries to come, it was but momentary. Newman had a keen sense of the Church’s continual development; growth is not always smooth nor painless. Consequently, his advice to troubled inquirers was to remain patient and trust in Providence.

Sacraments

Newman’s personal spiritual life was intimately sacramental; his understanding of the role of the sacraments was closely connected with his understanding of the Church. Because most of his inquirers were Anglicans who asked specific questions about a particular sacrament, his direction of others in this area of the Church’s life took the form of education or of clarification concerning specific issues and questions. Accordingly, some sacraments received much more attention than others and he did not treat every aspect of the sacraments.

While Newman pointed out that the sacraments are symbols, as means of grace they are more than symbols.582 George Edwards wrote to Newman about Caroline Fox, a Quaker who did not understand what Catholics believed about the sacraments. Newman responded: “Her only idea of what we hold about the Sacraments is that they are ‘symbols’! Of course, they are symbols . . . but, if we hold them to be nothing more than symbols, we should be like the Jews or Galatians. We believe our Sacraments to be means of grace, as well as symbols.”583

In a letter explaining to Henry Bittleston the importance of the sacraments in the Christian life, Newman pointed out that: “The grace given in a sacrament is two fold—first habitual grace, by which the soul is sanctified and united with God and lives, and secondly the grace just alluded to or the sacramental grace (grace of the sacrament), which is that which is denoted under the outward sign. . . . Hence the matter and form are all that are intrinsically required for the constitution or confection [of] a Sacrament, it produces its effect, that is, it confers grace ex opere operato; i.e. by its own vis [power] without depending on the recipient.”584

Newman hastened to add, however, that the efficacy of a sacrament depends on the dispositions of the recipient: “More or less grace is given, or more effectually given according to the disposition of the recipient.585

Since the Eucharist was Newman’s major source of strength and consolation, not surprisingly, the sacrament most frequently mentioned by him in his correspondence was the Eucharist. Although he believed as an Anglican in the presence of Christ during the celebration of the Eucharist, he did not believe the doctrine of Transubstantiation until he was a Catholic.586 After his conversion, much of his correspondence concerning the Eucharist was devoted to explaining Roman Catholic teaching to Anglicans. Newman habitually spent much time in prayer before the tabernacle. During his first year as a Catholic, he shared his devotion to the Real Presence with Henry Wilberforce: “I am writing next room to the chapel—It is such an incomprehensible blessing to have Christ in bodily presence in one’s house, within one’s walls, as swallows up all other privileges and destroys, or should destroy, every pain. To know that He is close by—to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him; and be sure, My dearest W., when I am thus in His Presence you are not forgotten. It is the place for intercession surely, where the Blessed Sacrament is.”587 Twenty years later, in a letter written to Lady Chatterton on Holy Thursday 1866, Newman indicated the importance which eucharistic devotion continued to play in his spiritual life.

Why, what exercise of devotion is there which equals that of going before the Blessed Sacrament, before our Lord Jesus really present, though unseen? To kneel before Him, to put oneself into His hands, to ask His grace, and to rejoice in the hope of seeing Him in heaven! In the Catholic Church alone is the great gift to be found. You may go the length and breadth of England, and see beautiful prospects enough such as you speak of, the work of the God of nature, but there is no benediction from earth or sky which falls upon us like that which comes to us from the Blessed Sacrament, which is Himself.588

Similarly, Newman often advised others to take their problems and troubles to the Lord present in the Eucharist—to find in Him their strength and consolation. After Helen Douglas Forbes, a recent convert, wrote complaining of difficulties she was encountering, Newman replied:

Pray do not think I do not enter into that solitariness, of which you complain—and of the strange and (so to say) foreign appearance which the Church presents to you. Others have felt this before you, but, O my dear Madam, why do you not speak of the Blessed Sacrament? why have you not found your comfort there? why, in all your troubles, have you not sought His Presence, who is your God before all, and, kneeling before Him, asked Him to be your light and treasure and great reward? I have said, “why have you not” and perhaps you will tell me that you have—but if so, how is it that you mention your solitariness, without speaking of him with whom you are not solitary, who is the stay and delight and Pearl of price to the solitary?589

In 1870 Newman wrote to Mrs. Wilson who was experiencing difficulties about the pending definition of Papal Infallibility:

To myself, with many others, it is the Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament which is the relief and consolation for all the troubles of ecclesiastical affairs. I wish you could make that your own consolation. What can I do better than call on you to go to Him who is your life and your Strength?—who can do everything for you—who loves you and who desires your love. What can harm you, if you place your hopes, wishes, doubts, difficulties into His hands; if you put your thoughts into His keeping, and beg Him to conform your heart to His heart, and your will to His will. He will make allowances for you, which no man can make—and can give you strength, illumination, and peace, which the world cannot give.

It is but rational in you to put away your doubts, and to trust Him unreservedly.590

Newman felt comfortable sharing this part of his spiritual life with others as a way of encouraging and directing them. Reflecting on his own struggles with Church officials, he responded to Lady Simeon who was also struggling to accept the recent definitions of Papal Infallibility.

For years past my only consolation personally has been in our Lord’s Presence in the Tabernacle. I turn from the sternness of external authority to Him who can immeasurably compensate trials which after all are not real, but (to use a fashionable word) sentimental. Never, thank God, have I had a single doubt about the divine origin and grace of the Church, on account of the want of tenderness and largeness of mind of some of its officials or rulers. And I think this will be your experience too. Bear up for a while and all will be right. What you tell me that you have ever held about the Pope’s Infallibility is, I am sure, enough now.591

Eschatology

Questions from inquirers concerning eternity and salvation provided Newman with another opportunity to direct people according to the Church’s teaching. For example, although certainly not the most popular doctrine, Newman stated that personally he had held the doctrine of Eternal Punishment “ever since I was a boy.”592 Moreover, he felt that it was important to preach about eternal punishment in order to be faithful to the complete Christian message. As a Cardinal he wrote in 1879: “I am engaged to preach, not to the world, but to Christians. . . . If so, I must not ‘spare to declare to my people the whole counsel of God.’ I presuppose faith, I am at eliciting repentance. Is not the doctrine of eternal punishment one of the most prominent in Scripture? Am I not giving a most defective view of the motives of repentance, and the attributes of God, if I leave it out?”593

Newman felt that this doctrine was not only an important part of Revelation, but also a powerful incentive to grow in the Christian life.

What’s the good of my striving so hard to keep from sin and temptation, if I am not safe when I die, and if my neighbour, who gives himself to the world, the flesh and the devil, and so dies, may, for aught I know, after this life, get to heaven, and I fail of it. . . . It is hard enough to bear the view as at present, of virtue suffering and evil triumphant. Would it not be a second trial, quite as great, nay greater because unexpected, to have to believe that, this weary life passed, the end does not come after all? Such a teaching I have called cruel, unsetthng as it is both to faith and hope.594

Newman realized many people found this doctrine difficult to accept, even a test of their faith. How could an all loving God permit a person to be eternally lost?

What is meant by having faith, if you are to have nothing to try it? What does try, what do we feel difficult to accept, but doctrines like this—which do not merely imply miracles . . . but which seem contrarieties in God Himself?

I grant that this doctrine seems to us inconsistent with His infinite love—but we cannot understand any of the divine attributes in their infinitude from the nature of the case—they run into mysteries—they seem to contradict each other. We cannot combine them. We understand enough of them to have ground for faith, hope, and love towards Him—and we must leave the difficulties which they involve when carried out to their perfection to be solved for us by Himself in a higher state of being.595

Because eternal punishment is a difficult doctrine to understand and accept, Newman spent a good deal of time trying to explain the Church’s teaching and, perhaps more importantly, what the Church did not teach. He tried to alleviate people’s fears; he told Pusey, he was “very eager to soften the difficulty.”596 The crux of the difficulty centered on the meaning of the word “eternity.” Since the Church had not spoken conclusively on this topic, Newman felt that many questions remain unanswered.

Then again, I should say we do not know what is meant by eternity of punishment, except as a negative idea—the lost never will see God—but how eternity increases the punishment we do not know. “Torture” need not be everlasting. You recollect the story of the monk and the bird. In the sweetness of the song he lost his sense of time. We do not know that the lost will not lose their sense of time. A million of years may be as one minute. This is no removal of the punishment, for the great punishment is the negative fact, that they never, never will see the face of God. What the positive infliction may be is another thing altogether. Then again, it must be recollected that great divines allow that the punishment may be diminished, as eternity proceeds. Lastly I should say that we have no proper notion while we are here of the malignity of sin, or what may be necessary for setting it right in the eternal kingdom of God.597

Similarly, searching for the “positive” element in the word eternity, he honestly stated:

I am not aware that the word “eternity” has ever been authoritatively explained.

We do not know what positive idea is denoted by the word “eternity,” or how far eternity increases the sufferings of the lost. Here on earth duration often shortens the perception or realization of suffering to those who suffer.

Indeed eternity to us is but a word; except in its negative sense; what we can and do understand is the enunciation that the lost never go to heaven.

Nor does such a view of the future state explain away the blessedness of “eternal life—” for the blessedness of heaven does not consist strictly in its never ending, but in the sight and fruition of Almighty God, and the certainty and absolute security and peace which the fruition involves.598

Newman also helped individuals probe the meaning of “time” and “suffering” in eternity. Several years after his entry into the Catholic Church, J. M. Capes wrote concerning his struggles with this teaching. Newman replied:

Another consideration is our utter ignorance of what is meant by eternity—it is not infinite time. Time implies a process—it involves the connection and action of one portion upon another—if eternity be an eternal now, eternal punishment is the fact that a person is in suffering;—he suffers today and tomorrow and so on for ever—but not in a continuation—all is complete in every time—there is no memory, no anticipation, no growth of intensity from succession. I will not say I am right in so considering it, for I have not consulted divines, (and certainly popular views, sermons etc are against me, for in them the growth of pain from succession is expressly insisted on) but if I be right, then the question is merely should a soul suffer, should sin be punished, which few will deny.599

Elaborating on this same point twenty-two years later in a letter to Pusey, Newman noted:

As to your question about the poena sensus in inferno, (sensible pain in hell) I am quite unable to answer it. I am not aware that anything is defined about it, except such vague words as occur in the Athanasian Creed etc. . . . For myself, I do not think that eternal suffering, as such, implies succession of ideas, or memory of the past suffering—and, as in the story of the Monk and the bird, the Monk was in ecstasy for 300 years, not being conscious, of any lapse of time. I do not see that continuous pain need involve a consciousness of succession. And it must be a separate revelation, over and above the revelation of “eternal” punishment, if this is so. We do not know what eternity is positively, only negatively, that it is that which has no ending. That awful idea that the lost are ever asking, “What is o’clock?” shows us that succession implies a measure of time—and where there is no sun or moon, there need be no counting.600

Moreover, because the Church had not defined the exact nature or meaning of the punishment involved in eternity, Newman speculated on his own interpretation:

The Catholic Church has not forbidden us to hope, that the punishment of the lost may diminish as time (or, if one can so speak, as eternity) proceeds; nor that there may be respites and intervals in it. And again, (though I do not know whether the point has been directly discussed,) how far the sense of continuance in suffering, and what measure of consciousness of suffering, attaches to the lost, taken one by one, are to me as points still to be determined—and I have no light to determine them;—but these surely are all-important questions in considering the difficulty of the doctrine.601

Part of Newman’s development of eschatology centered on the meaning of indulgences in relation to temporal punishment. His most complete treatment of indulgences is contained in a response to J. L. Walton: “Having had an argument with a friend, one of the points he brought forward against the Church of Rome, was that she issued ‘Indulgences’ which he explained as representing to give permission to a man to live with a certain degree of laxity; to allow him to commit a certain number of sins, or rather, to recognize at the ‘Confession’ certain sins as righteous and just.”602 Newman then explained:

Indulgences have in principle ever been in the Church of God, though they have had greater efficacy and breadth, since our Lord made atonement for all sin. It is a doctrine which even Protestants admit, that, even when God forgives sin and reconciles the sinner to Himself, He not unfrequently assigns some punishment for what is past. Thus a drunkard may reform and his sins be washed away and he may live and die in the grace of God, yet he may suffer much from disease which is the direct consequence of his intemperance, or, what Catholics call, his “temporal penance” paena, or punishment.

We differ from Protestants in this, that such temporal penances is [sic] God’s rule, that it is a great law, that punishment follows sin; we differ from Protestants also in considering that, if not undergone by the repentant sinner in this life, he will have the prospect of it after this life, that is, before he is admitted into heaven. As we call it “penance” when undergone by the repentant, reconciled sinner, when undergone in this life, so we call it “purgatory,” when undergone after this life.

Penance and purgatory are names for the “temporal” punishment of sin, of forgiven sin; “temporal” meaning that punishment which comes to an end, and is not eternal.

Penance and Purgatory are the punishment of forgiven sinners, not of unrepentant.

As all have sinned, all have the prospect of punishment, and the more the repentant sinner suffers here, the less he may trust will be his suffering in purgatory.

The Church has the power of opening another and more certain way, of shortening the suffering in purgatory; she can assign particular works, prayers, etc etc on the performance of which Almighty God shortens that period of suffering which otherwise the repentant sinner would undergo in purgatory. This grant is called an “indulgence.”

An indulgence cannot be gained by a man living in sin—nor is it a pardon of sin—but it is a remission of punishment, for the repentant sinner, whose sins have already been forgiven.603

After this explanation, Newman addressed Walton’s concerns.

I don’t see how such a doctrine can be “giving permission to a man to live with a certain degree of laxity” as you say—on the other hand, to tell him that, though he repents and is forgiven and becomes a child of God, and has a good hope of heaven, still every one of his sins cries for punishment against him, and the less he suffers here, the more he may expect (though he be one of God’s elect) to suffer in purgatory, does not seem to me to encourage sin. Nor surely does it encourage sin, to tell him, if he will do certain specified good works, give alms, say certain prayers, etc, he has the prospect of escaping this suffering, which his sins demand.

As to an indulgence “allowing a man to commit a certain (number) of sins, or rather, to recognize at the Confession certain sins as righteous and just,” I must ask you to excuse my saying that I cannot understand your words.604

In another letter, Newman explained to Dr. Moore that

pain is not the essential attribute of Purgatory, but imprisonment; the pain, as a general accompaniment of imprisonment, enters into our received teaching, after the way of the early Fathers, Cyprian, Origen, Hilary, Basil, etc. who speak of fire.

That it should primarily be a place of punishment can hardly be a difficulty to you, considering that in so many cases, in most cases, of the souls who enter it, it is a substitution of temporal punishment for eternal.

The only point which you would be disposed to contest, is its being a place of painful penance for all who go to it; but this is not held by us de fide.

It is the teaching of various Saints that, even those whose first experience of Purgatory is that of a painful penance, and their abode there with a state of calm enjoyment, having that refrigerium (refreshment) and requies (rest), which in our prayers we daily ask for them.605

Other aspects of the Church’s teaching on purgatory are less formidable. As Newman explained to A. J. Hammer, one of the great advantages to belonging to the Roman Catholic Church is that after death, the whole body of the Church intercedes for the deceased person. “Moreover supposing they are in Purgatory, yet its pains will be shortened and lessened in an indefinitely great measure to those who die in the Church—from the communion of the merits of the Saints, the whole body of the Church exhausts together the temporal punishment, which belongs to it. . . . A Catholic is one of a company, and has a benefit when he dies, which those who do not belong to it have not.”606

Newman personally held that some persons experience their purgatory in this life; he wrote these encouraging words to his lifelong friend Miss Giberne: “You are, I know, in our Lord’s loving hands. You have given yourself to a life of great penance for His sake, and He will not, does not forget it ‘When thou shalt pass through the waters, He will be with thee, and when thou shalt walk in the fire, thou shalt not be burnt’ for you are one of those who have taken your purgatory in this life, and I rejoice to think that, when God takes you hence, I shall have one to plead for me in heaven.”607

Ultimately, what can be known about the afterlife is a matter of faith, as he wrote to J. H. Nevins in 1872: “It is difficult to speak on this subject, for the Church has said little—and one has little guide beyond one’s own private judgement. The great truth is that death ends our probation, and settles our state for ever; but there is no passing over the great gulf; that our only happiness is to be with God, and that those who are not with God are without Him.”608 Despite the difficulty in understanding this teaching, Newman still directed people to make an act of faith in the One who revealed it. “I say all this to alleviate, if possible, the awfulness of the doctrine in question; but after all our Lord surely states it in such explicit language, that, difficult or not as it may be to reconcile the mind to it, it is a simple duty to make an act of faith in His words, though it must all through this life be a hard saying to us. Why should we not trust in Him? Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?”609

Devotional Life and Practices

Another important area in which Newman directed others was in devotional practices. Personally, he valued devotional exercises as a means of keeping the soul firm in its belief in a personal God. After his conversion, he initially had difficulty in assimilating various Catholic devotions into his own life: “What I did realize was the strangeness of way, habits, religious observance, to which, however, I was urged on to conform without any delicacy towards my feelings.”610 That same year, in a letter to Lady Chatterton, he expressed his difficulty as an Englishman in accepting what he called “Romaic religion”: “As an Englishman I do not like a Romaic religion—and I have much to say, not (God forbid) against the Roman Catholic, but against the Romaic Catholic Church. I have no great sympathy with Italian religion, as such—but I do not account myself the worse Catholic for this.”611

Later, he had the opportunity of directing another recent convert who was experiencing similar difficulties. “The greatest trial a Convert has to sustain, and to women it is often greater than to men, is the strangeness at first sight of every thing in the Catholic Church. . . . Every nation, every body of people, has its own ways—Catholics have their own ways—we may not at first like them—and the question is where is religious Truth, where is salvation?—not is this habit, this fashion pleasant to me or not.”612

In reading his correspondence, a pattern emerges in the way that Newman directed others in devotional practices. First, he offered an explanation for a particular devotion; second, he shared his own devotional life as a way of encouraging others, but he never “forced” other persons to pattern their devotional lives on his. For example, valuing indulgences himself, he sent a little book of indulgences to Mrs. Bowden with a letter of explanation:

Indulgences are not very easy to obtain, though at first sight they seem to be so, and their precise benefit is not known, or at least defined. The best notion of them, I think, is that the Church wishing to encourage general habits of devotion, etc. among her children, attaches particular rewards to certain actions, and that they do those actions in order to get these rewards, being sure that they are rewards, but without a distinct notion how much they are, or whether they certainly have gained them. Of course a plenary indulgence conveys a very distinct notion, but many indulgences are not plenary.613

Newman believed that although doctrines never change, there should be a great deal of personal flexibility in devotions. As he wrote to Mrs. William Froude:

There is a marked contrast in Catholicity between the views presented to us by doctrine and devotion respectively. Doctrines never change, devotions vary with each individual. Catholics allow each other, accordingly, the greatest license, and are, if I may so speak, utter liberals as regards devotions, whereas they are most sensitive about doctrine. That Mary is the Mother of God is a point of faith—that Mary is to be honored and exalted in this or that way is a point of devotion. The latter is the consequence, indeed, of the former, but a consequence which follows with various intensity, in various degrees and in various modes, in various minds.614

This attitude was reflected in the advice he gave to Lady Chatterton in 1863: “While private judgement is forbidden to Catholics in matters of divine revelation, it is fully accorded to them in matters of devotion.”615

Of greater doctrinal significance was Newman’s devotion to the Saints, and in particular to Mary. Extolling the witness value of the saints to the truth of the Catholic Church (as distinguished from the Anglican Church), he wrote to Catherine Ward on September 25, 1848: “There is another reason why the Anglican Church cannot take support from the high religious excellence of individuals who are found in her. It is that the direction of their holy feelings, views, and works is, not towards that Church, but away from it, and bears testimony, consequently, not to it, but against it; whereas the whole company of Catholic Saints, not only are indefinitely higher in sanctity than the best Anglicans, but are the natural fulfillment of the idea, the due exemplification of the teaching, of the Catholic Church.”616

Newman emphasized the value of spiritual reading and encouraged people to read the lives of the Saints, who, he felt, reflected the power and grace of God. In a draft of a preface for Faber’s Lives of the Saints, probably written in the autumn of 1848, Newman underscored the value of the witness given by the Saints:

The Saints are the glad and complete specimens of the new creation which our Lord brought into the moral world, and as “the heavens declare the glory of God” as Creator, so are the Saints the proper and true evidence of the God of Christianity, and tell out into all lands the power and grace of Him who made Him. What the existence of the Church itself is to the learned and philosophical, such are the Saints to the multitude. They are the popular evidence of Christianity, and the most complete and logical evidence while the most popular . . . in the life of a Saint, we have a microcosm, or whole work of God, a perfect work from beginning to end, yet one which may be bound between two boards, and mastered by the most unlearned. The exhibition of a person, his thoughts, his words, his acts, his trials, his fortunes, his beginnings, his growth, his end, have a charm to every one, and when he is a Saint they have a divine influence and persuasion a power of exercising and eliciting the latent elements of divine grace in individual readers, as no other reading can claim. We consider that the Lives of the Saints are one of the main and special instruments, to which, under God, we may look for the conversion of our countrymen at this time.617

However, Newman believed that a person should not blindly read just any life of a saint, but rather be very discriminating in one’s choice:

Where the recorded actions of saints strictly agree with the precepts and counsels of the Gospel, and those of the inspired apostles of Christ, they are then of wonderful force and efficacy in stirring up a hearty desire of embracing a holy life, and of obtaining a heavenly reward. They are then the useful and practical pattern of true sanctity. Where they are otherwise—when they utterly oppose themselves to the natural end and being of man—they are worthy neither of admiration nor imitation, and had far better be consigned to respectful oblivion. They provoke cavil. They give wrong impressions of what true piety really consists in. They reduce religion to an unmeaning course of puerilities. They induce the young enthusiast in religion, and especially neophytes, to plunge into austerities and mortifications and practices of devotion, which not only seriously injure their health, but act with perilous effect on their mental powers.618

Newman emphasized that the saints belong in a unique way to the family of God and encouraged people to capitalize on their intercessory value: “The intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the saints does not differ from ours for each other, except that it is more perfect than ours, and comes from those whose holy lives have given them a covenanted claim on God’s special notice and indulgence.”619 A year later, in 1865, he wrote about the communion of saints in a letter to Edward Berdoe:

We believe in a family of God, of which the Saints are the heavenly members and we the earthly—yet one family embracing earth and heaven. We believe we have access to the heavenly members, and are at liberty to converse with them—and that we can ask them for benefits and they can gain them for us. We believe at the same time that they are so different from us, and so much above us, that our natural feelings towards them would be awe, fear, and dismay, such as we should have on seeing a ghost, or as Daniel’s when he fell down and quaked at the vision of the Angel—these feelings being changed into loving admiration and familiar devotion, by our belief in the communion of saints. Moreover, we believe them present with us as truly as our fellowmen are present.620

In his devotion to the saints, Newman gave central place to Mary. His devotion to Mary began as an Anglican; as Newman stated in his Apologia: “I had a true devotion to the Blessed Virgin, in whose College I lived, whose Altar I served, and whose Immaculate Purity I had in one of my earliest sermons made much of.”621 This sermon, preached on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1832, spoke of our Lady’s holiness in a way that led people to accuse him of holding the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.622

As an Anglican, Newman possessed a special love for Mary, yet he sought to remain faithful to the twenty-second of the Thirty-Nine Articles which maintained that invocation of the saints was against the Scripture teaching of Christ as the sole Mediator. As he explained in a letter to Mrs. George Ryder in 1848, his objections, as an Anglican, against devotions to Mary were twofold: first, it seemed to be absent from the writings of the Fathers, and second, it interfered with the supreme worship of God. “Both,” he said, “I have considered, and removed (as I think) in my Essay on Development.”623

Newman understood devotion to our Lady as a gift of God. He wrote to the Marquise de Salvo in 1848: “You know perfectly well that devotion to the Most Blessed Mother of God is not imperatively required of all. It is a gift which God gives to those whom He will. I do not see therefore that a person ought to force himself into the use of particular manuals or exercises which do not come natural to him.”624

As in the case of devotion to the saints, Newman applied the same principles to devotion to our Lady, namely, it should be based on solid doctrine and suitability; people are free to choose those doctrinally authentic devotions best suited for them. In response to a letter from Arthur Alleyne, he commented on the relationship between doctrine and devotion in relation to Mary.

No one pretends that devotion to the Blessed Virgin is necessary in the sense in which devotion to our Lord is necessary. Devotion to our Lord as God is necessary for salvation; devotion to the Blessed Virgin is not necessary for salvation. It may be dispensed with in toto as far as salvation is concerned. In the early Church, if we let history be the measure of fact, many were saved without devotion to her. The devotion to her has gradually and slowly extended through the Church; the doctrine about her being always the same from the first. But the gradual growth of the devotion was a cause why that doctrine, in spite of its having been from the first, should have been but slowly recognized, slowly defined.625

Realizing that extravagances occur, Newman emphasized the importance of the guidance of the Church. He counseled Robert Forsaith: “You will see by the pamphlet I sent you that there are extravagances in the devotions practiced by some Catholics to the Blessed Virgin—nay, for what I know, by many—for a popular religion left to itself always runs into excesses and superstitions, and requires the guidance of authority to preserve it inviolate.”626 Simultaneously, Newman encouraged individuals to cultivate more than a minimal devotion to Mary. Several years after his conversion, he advised Catherine Ward: “The de fide doctrine keeps us in the Church, but we are saved by something more than what is just necessary, as by works, so by thoughts, so by devotions. I conceive it is not safe to take the least possible sufficient in itself for salvation. We should wish at least to hold all that is received, though not de fide; devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the ordinary way to heaven, and the absence of it is at least a bad symptom of the state of our faith.”627

When some people wrote that devotion to Mary would detract from devotion to her Son, Newman quickly disagreed. In a response to Lady Chatterton he explained:

And so far from the teaching of the Church concerning the Blessed Virgin being a burden, it seems to me the greatest of privileges and honours to be admitted into the very family of God. So we think on earth, when great people ask us into their most intimate circle. This it is, and nothing short of it, to be allowed to hold intercourse with Mary and Joseph; and, so far from its hindering our communion with our Lord, and our faith in Him, it is all that we should have had without it, and so much more over and over. As He comes near us in His Sacrament of love, so does He bring us near to Him by giving us an introduction (as I may say) to His Mother. In speaking to her, we are honouring Him; as He likes to be petitioned by His chosen ones, so does He especially love the petitions which she offers Him; and in asking her to intercede for us, we are pleasing both her and Him.628

With regard to particular devotions, the one most frequently mentioned by Newman in his correspondence was the Rosary. Trying to help George Ryder, a recent convert, grow in his spiritual life through praying the Rosary, Newman counseled:

I certainly think you should get into the Catholic way of devotion by degrees. Perhaps you would feel the Rosary less trying said with others. Certainly it would be better if you fixed a time for saying it, and kept to it. How do you say it? Try it thus, if you don’t so use it at present, but perhaps you do;—viz before each mystery, set before you a picture of it, and fix your mind upon that picture, (e.g. the Annunciation, the Agony, etc.) while you say the Pater and 10 Aves, not thinking of the words, only saying them correctly. Let the exercise be hardly more than a meditation. Perhaps this will overcome any sense of tedium.629

In corresponding with two of his closest associates in the Tractarian Movement, Newman delineated his understanding of the intercessory power of Mary. In a letter to John Keble, he explained in theological terms, the efficacy of the intercessory prayer of Mary:

Our received doctrine is, after St. Justin and St. Irenaeus, as we interpret them, that as Eve had a secondary part in the fall, so had Blessed Mary in the redemption. And interpreting them still, it is our belief, that, whereas all the Saints intercede for us, through the merits and in the grace of Christ, she is the Intercessor or Helper (Advocata, St. Irenaeus)—that this is her distinct part in the economy of human salvation—so that, knowing the Will of our Lord most intimately, she prays according to His will, or thus is the ordained means or channel by which that will is carried out. Therefore “every thing goes through the hands of Mary”—and this is a great reason for our asking her prayers.630

Similarly, in answering Pusey’s question about Mary, the Queen of Purgatory, Newman wrote: “The Blessed Virgin is the great pattern of prayers, especially intercessory. And in this age especially she (and the Saints too and the Church too) is the witness against the prevailing theories, such as Mr. Buckle’s that all things go on by fixed laws which cannot be broken; thus introducing a practical atheism.

“If she is the Intercessor, and the effectual intercessor, she is so as regards earth, as regards Purgatory, as regards the whole created Universe.”631

Because of his belief in intercessory prayer, Newman directed others to avail themselves of Mary’s help. As he explained to John Perrin: “The intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the saints does not differ from ours for each other, except that it is more perfect than ours, and comes from those whose holy lives here give them a covenanted claim on God’s special notice and indulgence.”632 Similarly, to a recent convert he said: “Our Lady has nothing of her own, that is, nothing, which is not the gift of God to her. When then we ask her for any grace, we are in fact asking her to pray to God for it for us.”633

Summary

The Church was central in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic spirituality of John Henry Newman. Although the basic principles of his ecclesiology developed during his Anglican years, it was not until after he became a Roman Catholic that his ecclesiological viewpoint fully matured. Through reading the Church Fathers, he eventually came to believe that the Patristic Church continued on in the Roman Catholic Church. Consequently, his own conversion was primarily an ecclesiological decision which was largely determined by his understanding of apostolicity.

Since the Church was fundamental to his own spiritual life, it also provided the context for much of his spiritual direction. As a convert, Newman desired to share his understanding of the Roman Catholic Church with others. He wanted first of all to help others recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church of Christ, the Teacher of Revelation, the Oracle of God and the Ark of Salvation. By emphasizing the importance of certain “notes” of the Church, he argued persuasively in favor of the Roman Catholic Church, yet without pressuring anyone to join. In directing others towards the Church, Newman made frequent use of these “notes” not in a systematic theological fashion, but in a practical pastoral way. Supporting individuals in their search, he encouraged them to take their time and to convert for the right reasons.

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