On the Solemnity of All Saints (November 1), Pope Leo added St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) to the list of the Doctors of the Church and named him co-patron, along with St. Thomas Aquinas, of the Church’s educational mission. This was not a surprise, given the influence the English Cardinal and theologian has had on contemporary Catholicism, but the timing of the ascent is notable. Beatification came during Benedict XVI’s historic trip to England in 2010, and he was canonized nine years later by Pope Francis.

It was not all that long ago, however, that supporters of his cause for sainthood were uncertain of success. Newman was, after all, an adult convert to the Church who sometimes clashed with his bishops and was known to question the timing of Pius IX’s effort to be declared infallible. He was also not a neo-Scholastic or even a Thomist at a time when that approach was gaining a near monopoly over Catholic intellectual life. Even worse, many of his ideas regarding the development of dogma, the intuitive character of religious knowledge, the universal call to holiness, and the role of the laity were favored by theologians held in suspicion by the Roman magisterium during the first half of the twentieth century.

Things changed, of course, with Vatican II, a council St. Pope Paul VI referred to as “Newman’s hour.” There is obvious truth to this. It is hard to imagine the Second Vatican Council turning out the way it did apart from the intellectual contributions of Newman. That said, Avery Cardinal Dulles, who in countless ways patterned his work after the English Cardinal, was correct to insist that the matter was more complicated.

If Vatican II can be described as an interplay of ressourcement and aggiornamento, Newman is more in line with the former than the latter. He would have celebrated, of course, a return to Scripture and the Church Fathers, but had been doubtful that any rapprochement with the modern world was possible or prudent. Dulles points to Newman’s assertion in his religious autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), that the divine gift of infallibility is “happily adapted” to combating “the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect” that he saw gaining dominion.

In other words, there is little reason to believe that Newman would have shared in the optimism that characterized the council. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Pope Paul’s commendation of Newman happened in 1975—after it became apparent that the world was not receptive to the Church’s offer of peace. In that sense, I would submit that Newman speaks especially to a Catholicism still finding its legs in the aftermath of a reform council that guessed wrongly about the direction of the world.

As with the making of saints, just why someone is made a Doctor of the Church is often difficult to determine. More than one pope is almost always involved, and sometimes with distinct motivations. In this case, the decision was made by Pope Francis and enacted by Pope Leo. If Leo’s homily for the occasion is any indication, a major reason was Newman’s ideas concerning education.

The Mass in which Newman was named a Church Doctor occurred during the “Jubilee of the World of Education” sponsored by the Dicastery for Education and Culture. Moreover, Pope Leo looked back to a talk Francis gave to the newly created Dicastery in which he alluded to Newman’s poem “Lead Kindly Light” to describe education as an essential aspect of the Church’s work to “set humanity free from the encircling gloom of nihilism, which is perhaps the most dangerous malady of contemporary culture, since it threatens to ‘cancel’ hope.” Pope Leo built upon this idea and made the connection to Newman explicit:

The task of education is precisely to offer this Kindly Light to those who might otherwise remain imprisoned by the particularly insidious shadows of pessimism and fear. For this reason, I would like to say to you: let us disarm the false reasons for resignation and powerlessness, and let us share the great reasons for hope in today’s world. Let us reflect upon and point out to others those ‘constellations’ that transmit light and guidance at this present time, which is darkened by so much injustice and uncertainty. I thus encourage you to ensure that schools, universities and every educational context, even those that are informal or street-based, are always gateways to a civilization of dialogue and peace.

Beyond this, the homily was notably short on Newman’s specific contributions. It was a homily after all, and others will surely pick up on the idea of education as a source and path of hope in Newman’s work. One of the happy results of an ecclesial honoring of a particular theologian is that it occasions a fresh retrieval of their work. Expect a burst of writings, both scholarly and popular, on the newest Doctor of the Church and co-patron of Catholic education.

I begin my suggestions of what to read now by revisiting two articles published in First Things. The first is “A Paper Church” written by Julia Yost. The title refers to Newman’s attempt in his famous Tract 90 to interpret the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England against their plain meaning. Once Newman’s Catholicizing interpretation was officially denounced, it became undeniable that he and his donnish friends had constructed a Church that lived only in their heads, unavailable to the average believer.

Happily, Newman’s intellectual integrity compelled him to turn to a Church that openly and obviously taught what he considered requisite for the Church of Christ. Yost applies this lesson to the Catholic Church of our day, which, she argues, increasingly struggles to teach with clarity. In each of the cases she cites, a pope has introduced a doctrine which seems to the uninstructed eye to be a reversal of past teaching but is couched in such ambiguity that no one can be quite sure.

St. John Paul II is guilty of the first with respect to the legitimacy of the death penalty. Yost points to the struggles of Antonin Scalia, no mean interpreter of texts, in the pages of First Things to understand whether the pope was teaching that capital punishment is now, and always has been, morally impermissible, or that it is simply no longer necessary. John Paul clearly wished to align the Catholic Church with those working to abolish the death penalty, but at the same time did not want to contradict traditional teaching. The result was confusion for the average Catholic and endless debate for the intellectuals. Unfortunately, lack of clarity on the death penalty only increased under Pope Francis, who supplies Yost’s second example. Readers of First Things are familiar with the absurd level of haziness surrounding whether divorced and remarried Catholics can receive the Eucharist. For Yost:

The maximalist reading of the Amoris footnote is elitist, both hermeneutically (esoteric) and socially (­classist). It upends Church teaching on the basis of one mischievous passage in an otherwise anodyne 261-page document, and its social plausibility requires a distinction between bourgeois and vulgar divorcées.

Newman foresaw that dueling interpretations between the average reader and the sophisticate is a by-product of a papalism that treats the pope like an oracle rather than the bishop supremely entrusted with preserving the Church in the apostolic faith. Might Pope Leo’s decision to make Newman a Doctor of the Church signal a more modest view of his office?

The second essay, “Newman for Protestants,” is by Carl Trueman. It is an appreciation of Newman’s defense of orthodox Christianity by someone ultimately resistant to Newman’s case for Catholicism. Trueman relates his first encounter with Newman, a figure he had learned to see as a religious traitor, while reading his Apologia in a Cambridge bookstore as a twenty-seven-year-old specialist in medieval and Reformation theology. Instead of finding someone he could happily hate, Trueman discovered Newman to be a kindred spirit in his unwillingness to separate Christianity from the truth claims it makes about reality, human and divine. Against his inclinations, he recognized himself in Newman’s famous description of his conversion: “When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816), a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.”

This was the Christianity Trueman knew and loved, the only Christianity worth anyone’s attention:

This was my religion he was describing, a religion that makes claims, truth claims, about the past, the present, and the future—a religion of dogmatic assertions. I believed that Christ was God incarnate, that the tomb was empty, that the resurrected Christ sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. These are not psychological projections of my religious self-consciousness. They are beliefs about time and reality. And this was Newman’s faith, too.

Yet, he could not escape the irony that Newman’s dogmatic faith had led him away from evangelical Protestantism and into the Catholic Church. Newman, thereby, became an occasion for this committed Protestant to struggle with his own confessional stance. In particular, Trueman was troubled by Newman’s claim that the prioritizing of religious experience over dogmatic precision is common to both evangelicalism and its sworn enemy, liberal Christianity. He had to concede that too many of his fellow Protestants were less concerned with the truths of the faith than “the feelings of fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness that faith provides.” In this sense, there is insufficient difference between contemporary evangelical Protestantism and the therapeutic culture its leaders never tire of denouncing.

Newman had other things to teach Trueman, once he turned to Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). The Anglican convert’s claim that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” revealed that a simple biblicism was unable to account for the development of Christian doctrine over time. The Bible alone was insufficient to ensure that the faith of the apostles was being preserved. Trueman continues:

Thus did Newman’s view of development pose one final, necessary challenge: the need to take seriously the institutional Church, a notion alien to my evangelical world, where a “high” view of the Church typically meant little more than attending morning and evening services on a Sunday. For Newman, a high view of the Church meant a high view of the authority of the institutional Church and her offices and sacraments. In Newman’s mind, this high view revealed a connection between doctrinal development, the institutional church, and the primacy of Rome. 

While Newman did not convince Trueman to follow him across the Tiber—Mariology and papalism proved insurmountable obstacles—his influence led Trueman to a conversion within Protestantism:

He led me not to Rome but to Geneva and to traditional, Reformed Protestantism—a religion that eschews the parading of personal religious experience, sees sacraments as crucial, and takes seriously its connection, through the great ecumenical creeds, to a Christianity that is bigger than its local expressions or even its denominational and confessional manifestations.

Although perhaps not the outcome a Roman Catholic might wish, Trueman’s conversion story shows how Newman can be a Doctor for Protestants as well as Catholics.

The animating idea of having Doctors of the Church is to uplift those men and women whose writings are sure guides to the faith. Newman is the thirty-eighth member. What distinguishes him from the others is that he wrote in English. American Catholics interested in learning from him can read him without the mediation of a translator. This does not mean, however, that it will be an easy task. His Victorian prose does not lend itself to the I-am-too-busy-to-read-something pace most of us now employ. One must slow down to unwind his sentences. The one who does will discover a thinker of complex but ultimately clear wisdom. Moreover, his lifelong conviction that only a Christianity that retains its dogmatic center can withstand a world poised against it is perfectly calibrated to our present moment.