The 'Mary Rose'
Egan, Robert T.
would cause the laity to send their children to school elsewhere, Bishop Ullathorne demanded to know just who these laity were. Newman replied that he did not know who they were, but "you will...
...Newman was distinguished in his opponents, and bore the worst the period had to offer in the way of high-level misunderstanding...
...Both these prelates distinguished themselves at Vatican I through their work on the drafting committee, which more than once tried to impose a statement of papal infallibility as absolutist and one-sided as possible...
...But Ullathorne was not really a villain in the Newman saga...
...But curiously, now that we can see that the victories of the last council were early skirmishes rather than final achievements, and now that we are just getting the range of 13 July 1984:401...
...His authority pervaded the period of ferment that preceded Vatican II, and at that council he was more often quoted than any other single writer...
...Instead, his influence spread slowly through the Roman Catholic world...
...The worst conflicts arose when Newman was invited to found a first-class Catholic university in Dublin and, later, when he tried to open a Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford...
...His major works on faith and reason and the historical development of the church were breaths of fresh air in a period when church scholarship was dominated by antiModernist oaths imposed from Rome...
...Pope Paul VI was said to have read Newman more than any other Catholic doctor during his pontificate...
...This "Letter" helped to open the way for the "moderate infallibilism" of Avery Dulles and Peter Chirico this century, although it was a lone voice in its time...
...When Pius IX died some leaders of the British Catholic laity asked the new pope, Leo XIII, to name Newman a cardinal...
...His victorious opponents on these occasions were two archbishops, Paul Cardinal Cullin of Dublin and Henry Edward Manning of Westminster...
...After Vatican I, which Newman did not attend, he wrote a public "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk" which brought the Vatican definition of infallibility in harmony with his understanding of church history and true communion...
...Newman replied that he did not know who they were, but "you will look foolish without them...
...By then Newman was seventy-eight and had largely ceased to write, but his basic approach, built on his reading of the church fathers and nourished in the spiritual and intellectual soil of the Oxford Movement, was vindicated...
...After his death in 1890 some of Newman's writings were called into question (notably "On Consulting the Faithful," and during the witch-hunting period under Pius X...
...the latter an Oxford convert of a rather different sort...
...Some of his disciples and intellectual descendants were delated and persecuted, but Newman's own writings came through unscathed...
...Newman's time seemed to have arrived...
...Leo agreed, over the objections of Manning, and the effect was to lift the cloud of magisterial suspicion from Newman's name and work...
Vol. 111 • July 1984 • No. 13
