Canonizing the real Newman
Kelly, Edward E.
THE SANCTITY OF A LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL Canonizing the real Newman EDWARD E. KELLY THE CAUSE for Cardinal Newman's canonization has been given new life: bishops are more committed and energetic...
...It was the Roman orientation of the Irish bishops, he claimed, that made them unappreciative of the proper intellectual goals of the Catholic University he founded for them...
...Newman's sensitivity can be viewed in a positive way: his genius, his apostolic effectiveness, and his vibrant religious conscientiousness are intricately connected with and supported by it...
...His holiness was necessarily proportioned to his whole person and existential situation, to every last cell of his particular body and every action of his unique psyche...
...But Newman's thought is not the object of canonization...
...Probably the second most troublesome area of Newman's character is his more-than-ordinary sensitivity...
...AYE, THERE'S the rub...
...After all, the same kinds of Catholics who opposed him in the past still have influential positions in the church...
...Perhaps, then, directors of the many Newman Centers at American universities might have an incentive to learn more of the cultural, academic, and religious significance of the extraordinary man whose name they adopt...
...The long enslavement to the authority of St...
...I would hope that the promoters of the Cause will not deny, ignore, explain away, or take a merely defensive attitude toward this issue...
...Stark further: did Newman's sensitivity diminish his productivity...
...What is needed today, when so many intellectuals cannot find a place in the church, is official affirmation of the sanctity of a liberal intellectual and academic, for a change...
...his need to defend his behavior in a memorandum about F. W. Faber's death appears immoderate and perhaps reveals a deeper sense of guilt...
...Anthony Stark, the vice-postulator for Newman's Cause has admitted it but claims that "only a saint could have effected the undoubted good he did despite such a sensitive disposition...
...THE SANCTITY OF A LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL Canonizing the real Newman EDWARD E. KELLY THE CAUSE for Cardinal Newman's canonization has been given new life: bishops are more committed and energetic now in England and new commissions are busy preparing the Cause...
...A Calvinistic-type drive to be one of the Elect and to show this by conscientious action characterizes both his Protestant and Catholic years...
...This analysis is on the whole too negative and yet not negative enough, if it is true...
...Even with these new grounds for hope, admirers of Newman might still be doubtful about the success of the Cause...
...Canonization would mean that his special intellectual way of life could be viewed as a sign of God in the world, as a modern reflection of the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ for intellectuals...
...There is some sense in which Newman found satisfaction in his Athanasian-like exile in Birmingham...
...Baron von Hugel worried that Newman's emphasis on authority could be dangerous in a church that was threatened by modern thought...
...Some Newman admirers are painfully disturbed by such considerations...
...Let the vox populi be heard...
...I want the Newman of his daily letters, journals, and controversies to be honored, even if this means that he will not be attractive to every Christian today or tomorrow...
...one misguided Englishman has attempted to deny them by insisting that Newman was thoroughly masculine because he was a good walker, a swimmer and a horse-rider...
...Newman suffered because of bishops and Rome itself, and he criticized and complained of them...
...Sometimes he did appear to be proud and unbending...
...The Roman intellectual confusion that produced the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 made the position of people like himself in England "as difficult as possible...
...Newman has been pronounced holy, a veritable saint, by people from all walks of life, by the non-educated as well as the educated...
...So, to canonize Newman would be equivalent to striking at the church and its authority...
...Augustine and St...
...Paul, St...
...Some contemporaries of Newman and later writers have noted a feminine dimension to his personality, and it has been suggested that his basic sexual orientation was homosexual...
...Philip Neri...
...It is not sufficient, however, to point out that Newman was more intelligent than the bishops, because he still could have been motivated by pride, self-will, or resentment...
...and an exceptionally lively conscience...
...he was not sinless...
...Avery Dulles has pointed out that Newman's ecclesiology is no longer very useful...
...Newman was certainly such a man, at least in his nineteenth-century setting...
...Louis University...
...The traditional defense that bishops and Rome kept him from doing more is only partly true...
...Athanasius, St...
...The more that is known and admitted, the more real will be the Newman canonized...
...Newman's sufferings, especially those caused by higher authorities, have often been called heroic...
...This is where obstacles to Newman's Cause have risen in the past...
...His letters and those of his correspondents make it clear that both men and women found him lovable and were drawn to God through his complex personality...
...There is also a more outspokenly sympathetic pope in Rome...
...So, the more damaging question must be asked: was this sensitivity often a manifestation of a deeper disorder-pride, vanity, or self-will...
...Newman himself complained that Rome neglected or even rejected men like himself...
...Far too little honor has been given to men like Newman, no doubt, because of the general anti-intellectual and anti-liberal nature of modern Catholicism...
...When a more enlightened English theologian asked me about this possible homosexual orientation and I answered "quite likely," he remarked that if this were admitted (or even proclaimed), Newman could be an inspiration and example for many other homosexually oriented people today...
...Stephen Des-sain and other misguided Newman lovers have strictly denied this so-called injurious allegation...
...George Tyrrell rightly feared that if Newman were canonized in the early twentieth century his living spirit would be lost and his ideas petrified...
...He is right...
...Quite a new meaning would have to be given to the word heroic in order to describe the real Newman...
...Newman worked at being holy from age fifteen onwards...
...he was often haunted by a sense of accomplishing little in the very areas of life to which he felt God was calling him and giving him special talents...
...THE important point is to evaluate how Newman coped with and made use of the personality and sexuality given him by God...
...In fact, it was his very point that he was often saying only the first word and advancing only the beginning of a theory on matters like doctrinal development...
...He himself was finally responsible for his life and for his isolation...
...This desire to leave a kind of proof of his rectitude might seem excessive...
...And the clearest "miracle" has already taken place: many people during Newman's lifetime and in the ninety-two years since his death have been led to God and into the Catholic church through knowing him in his ordinary life and through reading his books...
...The evidence for it, however, is overwhelming: his family, friends, enemies, and Newman himself have noticed his sensitive nature, and every volume of his letters reveals it...
...Let them positively illustrate (at the risk of encouraging thousands of Kungs) how these criticisms were Newman's way of fulfilling his religious calling and were made for the good of the church...
...At last, Msgr...
...They are surely the most important source for evaluating the great nineteenth-century Englishman's holiness...
...He kept records (copied letters, memoranda, and autobiographical writings) of the honesty of his life and of his adherence to God's truth...
...Let him be made a Doctor of the Church, and if he is realistically presented he can be a model for others to follow...
...My hope, also, is that in the process of canonization Newman's thought will be neither ruined nor made definitive...
...There are too many problems and assumptions with both of these "requirements...
...Once he remarked to a correspondent that St...
...Like those great thinkers, Newman introduced some valuable new views on Christianity, but he did not say the last word on every topic...
...it often alienated and gave scandal to educated people...
...The negative side is that sometimes his sensitivity looks very much like simple touchiness and hurt pride...
...He achieved great things, not despite, but because of his sensitivity...
...But even in all of this, Newman's preoccupation with conscience and perfection comes through...
...Finally, it would be good to have an end to talk about miracles and "heroic" sanctity...
...As a student of Newman for thirty years, I have long desired his formal recognition as a saint...
...Augustine confessed such faults, and he was canonized...
...Newman certainly did criticize and complain of Wiseman, Cullen, Manning, Barnabo, and Ullathorne...
...Basil made similar complaints, and he was a saint...
...the best way...
...an unwavering dedication, at all costs, to divine truth and to God's special calling to himself...
...And even some of his most moving sermons are infused with a form of supernaturalism and eschatology that is not much in mode today...
...And those who strongly support the Cause can have reasonable fears that it will not proceed in FATHER EDWARD E. KELLY is a professor of English at St...
...Lawrence Cunningham has well contrasted this aspect of Newman's sanctity to the "miracles" of Padre Pio, who is the traditional canoniz-able type: who can imitate his stigmata and power of bilocation...
...Newman's lifelong holiness can readily be described in traditional terms: an acute sense of the presence of God which generated a continuous life of prayer and a connatural subordination of worldly values...
...He wanted to be like his own special saint-heroes-St...
...His greatest sorrows were for his failures...
...The same objections thrown against Newman's sanctity even by fair-minded persons twenty-five years ago have some plausibility today...
...The scene for effective action is further set with the publication of almost all of Newman's letters and other writings, especially from his Catholic period...
...Thomas should not be forgotten...
...The church has already moved a good distance beyond even his progressive ideas on faith, infallibility, and the role of the laity...
...But I have never liked the sanitized figure free of all imperfections and full of all truth that certain Newmanians, mainly European, have striven to create...
...To press Msgr...
...The real Newman might not be the person canonized...
...his life is, and it was not oriented towards protests against the evils of society or war (as many today might wish) but towards intellectual achievements, especially in support of Christianity and Catholicism...
...He himself protested that education was his work, from first to last...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
