Chapter 40: Papal Infallibility and Letter to the Duke of Norfolk
CHAPTER 40
PAPAL INFALLIBILITY AND LETTER
TO THE DUKE OF NORFOLK
DOUBTS concerning Newman’s orthodoxy would arise when some of his writings were taken out of context. As a Roman Catholic, Newman fully accepted Papal Infallibility in doctrinal matters. This is shown in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he examined the subject of papal authority and illustrated its historical reach. When in 1867 Pope Pius IX announced the intention of convoking an ecumenical council, it became evident that the council would deal with the question of Papal Infallibility. Dupanloup, the French Bishop of Orleans, invited Newman to accompany him to the Convocation as his theologian, but Newman declined. Next the Pope asked Newman through Archbishop Ullathorne to be a consultant for one of the preparatory committees. Newman again declined. Strangely, Bishop Thomas J. Brown, who had denounced him to the Holy See, also invited Newman, and Bishop Dupanloup sent a second invitation. Newman excused himself, alleging delicate health. To Maria Giberne, Newman described the capacity of a theologian, which he denied that he possessed, although history has shown that he surely fit this description well. The once proud Oxford don had become a humble theologian who shunned personal controversy.
The subject of infallibility, however, was destined to become a heated debate which created division among English Catholics. Newman did not publicly take part in the controversy, but he assisted the Oratorian, Ignatius Ryder, who wrote an article in response to W. G. Ward’s extreme views of papal authority. Ward sustained in the Dublin Review the belief that everything the Pope said was infallible. Newman wrote to Pusey, “As to the Infallibility of the Pope, I see nothing against it, or to dread in it—for I am confident that it must be so limited practically that it will leave things as they are.”1 When Catholic periodicals in Europe began to debate a truth, which in practice was peacefully received, Newman expressed his sorrow in a confidential letter to Ullathorne. But Newman’s letter was mysteriously made public in the London Standard, resulting in embarrassment to Newman.
In July 1870, the Church’s bishops met in Rome for the ecumenical council Vatican I, which defined the dogma of Papal Infallibility before the council was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. The definition was a measured pronouncement of the authority of the successor of St. Peter. Newman, who had expected this prudent tone, was very pleased.2 Even so, he wrote Ambrose St. John that “this definition, while it gives the Pope power, creates for him, in the very act of doing so, a precedent and a suggestion to use his power without necessity, when ever he will, when not called to do so.”3 Newman worried that “the tyrant majority is still aiming at enlarging the province of infallibility.”4 At the same time Newman wrote Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, that “when Rome spoke on this subject every misgiving vanished; for, if by some fiction those who love me will have it that I am a teacher of the faithful, I am above all a disciple of the Church, doctor fidelium discipulis ecclesiae.”5 He reasoned that the definition would put an end to the ideas which gave rise to Jansenism and Gallicanism in France, and the Branch Theory in England. The same council texts had the opposite effect on Döllinger, an opponent of Papal Infallibility, who shortly thereafter separated himself from the Catholic Church.
Church doctrine and history occupied Newman’s thoughts as a theologian and Church historian, yet he was a man of great humanity who was still concerned with his friends and those around him. Newman, who lived a long life, outhved his Oxford friends and felt their loss. In 1873, Edward Bellasis, to whom years later he dedicated the Grammar of Assent, died. Bellasis had been a loyal friend and a trusted legal adviser. He had become a Catholic in 1850, and two of his sons joined the Birmingham Oratory. In 1872, Newman lost two other close friends, Henry William Wilberforce and James Hope-Scott. At the funeral Mass for Wilberforce, a priest took Newman to the pulpit. After being unable to say anything for some minutes, Newman spoke of his friend whom he had met fifty years before and who became “a fool for Christ’s sake.”6 A week later, Newman preached a beautiful homily, “In the World, but not of the World,” at the funeral Mass for James Hope-Scott in London.7 Newman praised his friend, a distinguished lawyer, who, despite great prestige and numerous professional contacts and social relations, had been able to keep himself from worldliness.
These men embodied Newman’s vision of a Christian gentleman, which differed from the worldly and utilitarian vision espoused by Lord Shaftesbury. Newman’s friends were men of faith and virtue. They were much more than men polished by the fine arts, proper taste, or useful knowledge.8 These were the type of men that Newman had wished to form at the Catholic University of Ireland and at an Oratory in Oxford. Denied the possibility of effectively carrying out his work in Dublin or of establishing an Oratory at Oxford, he and the Birmingham Oratorians formed younger men at the Oratory School. They hoped that these men would one day carry their faith and virtues into the university and professional occupations. Both Wilberforce and Hope-Scott owed a great deal to Newman, who recognized and fostered the unique and vital role that Catholic laymen should play in the intellectual spheres of society and government.
Newman’s was not the only attempt at starting a Catholic university. In 1874, a plan by Archbishop Manning to establish a Catholic university in Kensington, just south of London, failed for lack of sufficient Catholic youth prepared for university studies and of families who could afford the costs. Newman did not oppose Manning’s plans for a Catholic university, but he had become convinced that the presence of Catholic students at public universities was inevitable.9
Even as Newman’s public profile receded, still there came a time when he had to make another public defense. He had chosen not to accept invitations to serve as an expert at Vatican Council I, but soon he was called upon to publicly defend the council’s dogma of Papal Infallibility. It was another important service rendered to the Church, as had been the case with his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The occasion arose when his friend, William E. Gladstone, a religious man with a good sense of justice, surprisingly wrote an article in which he criticized some of the council decrees. Gladstone argued that Catholic convictions would lead men to relinquish their moral and intellectual freedom and to abandon their civil responsibilities on the basis of a foreign authority.
As a rebuttal to this nonsense, and urged on by Henry Fitzalan Howard (the Duke of Norfolk), and other Catholic nobles such as William Monsell (1st Baron Emly), and George Robinson (Marquis of Ripon), himself a recent convert to Catholicism, Newman published on January 14, 1875, the soon famous Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. It was a brilliant defense of Catholic citizens in which Newman asserted that they are loyal citizens of any just state. He explained that the Catholic religion does not keep Catholics from fulfilling their obligations as loyal citizens and that the Holy See does not have the custom of interfering in their civic duties. Newman repeated the teaching of the Constitution Pastor Aeternus of Vatican Council I, which asks Catholics for obedience to the Pope only in matters of faith and morals, and in matters of discipline and ecclesiastical government. From this qualification regarding the obedience asked of Catholics by the Pope, Newman offered a masterful explanation of the moral conscience, which is neither eliminated, nor substituted by authority. Proper authority strengthens the judgment of conscience, making it possible for the person to act with true freedom.
Newman explained that together with the external witness to God which comes to us through the teaching of the Pope and the Magisterium, we have conscience, an internal witness which commands man to fulfill his duty. He described conscience as a messenger from God, an internal witness of God’s Revelation which like a high priest is able to command, to judge and to bless:
The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a longsighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.10
In this same passage and others in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk Newman argued against the arbitrary usurpation of conscience as a license for one’s own utility or pleasure. Conscience is always bound to the truth. It should never be used as a justification for a self-referential interpretation of goods and events which cuts man off from God and His Revelation.
Newman received numerous congratulations for his Letter, including those of Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin.11 Cullen had issued a pastoral letter about Gladstone’s claims. In it he wrote: “The grounds on which this statesman founded his expostulation have been admirably answered by the venerable Dr. Newman, for many years the great and pious and learned rector of the Catholic University, whom Ireland will revere….”12
Newman and Gladstone remained friends. In January 1875 Newman wrote him a friendly letter expressing his grief at having had to write the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. He explained, “I could not help writing it. I was called upon from such various quarters; and my conscience told me, that I, who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming Catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious and unexpected.”13 Gladstone replied that he had intended the remarks for “Vaticanismus” only, that is, Ultramontane Catholics.
A few months later, in May of 1875, Ambrose St. John, Newman’s close friend and disciple, died a premature death. Newman told David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, that this was the greatest affliction that he had suffered in his life.14 And he told another friend that this severe blow was a necessary preparation for his own death.15 It was only natural that as his intimate friends died, Newman thought more and more about the reality of death and eternal life.
More than just considering the last things, in 1864, while writing the Apologia, he had a presentiment of an imminent death. In this situation, Newman wrote a final testament, which revealed a deep Trinitarian faith. Newman’s will expressed his lively sense of the communion of the saints and his devotion to the Fathers of the Church. A few months later, in 1865, Newman composed and published his longest poem, The Dream of Gerontius. The poem conveys important Christian truths about the soul’s immortality, personal judgment at the moment of death, the intercession of the saints and angels, Christ’s Majesty, and the merciful nature of Purgatory. Most of the ideas were already present in his Anglican sermons. The poem was well received, and later became famous when, in 1900, Edward Elgar turned it into a musical oratorio.
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1LD., Vol. XXII, JHN to E. B. Pusey (November 17, 1865), 103-105; 103.
2The definition holds that it is a divinely revealed truth that “when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.” Vatican Council, session IV, chapter IV (July 18, 1870), available at: http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V1.HTM#6.
3LD, Vol. XXV, JHN to Ambrose St. John (August 21, 1870), 191-193, 192.
4Ibid.
5LD, Vol. XXV, JHN to Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris (end of 1870), 259.
6The Weekly Register (May 10, 1873), 295, cited in LD, Vol. XXVI, footnote n. 1, 300.
7“In the World, but not of the World,” in OS, 263-80.
8M. Katherine Tillman, “A Rhetoric in Conduct: The Gentleman of the University and the Gentleman of the Oratory,” Newman Studies Journal (Fall 2008), Vol. 5, No. 2, 6-25.
9Morales, Newman (1801-1890), 312.
10“A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation,” in Diff., II, 248–249.
11Morales, Newman (1801-1890), 317.
12LD., Vol 27, xvi.
13LD, Vol. XXVII, JHN to William Ewart Gladstone, (January 16, 1875), 193.
14LD, Vol. XXVII, JHN to David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry (June 5, 1875), 313.
15LD, Vol. XXVII, JHN to John Hungerford Pollen (September 5, 1875), 350.