The news that St John Henry Newman is to be declared a Doctor of the Church has been greeted with joy. This has been expected for some time, having been requested by, among others, the Episcopal Conference of England & Wales, the Irish Episcopal Conference and the Bishops of the Church of England. Newman joins the ranks of saints such as Thomas Aquinas, Anthony of Padua, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux and Hildegard of Bingen.
There is an irony in Irish bishops acknowledging Newman’s knowledge and wisdom now given that their predecessors spectacularly failed to do so when he placed himself at the service of the intellectual life of the Irish Church a hundred and fifty years previously.
In their statement welcoming the news, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell, highlighted its special significance for the Irish Church, referring to his predecessor, Archbishop Paul Cullen’s invitation to Newman to set up a Catholic university in Dublin, a project Newman worked on from 1851 to1858. During this period, Newman delivered the lectures he subsequently published as The Idea of a University, which are among his most famous works.
Unsure from the outset that the Irish bishops knew what they were about or had any shared commitment to the task, Newman didn’t want to accept the job. He only finally accepted it in 1854 when persuaded to do so directly by the Pope. According to Newman’s biographer, William Philip Ward, “the story of the next three or four years is a long, drawn-out history of apparent failure.”
Anyone who knows anything about Newman knows that he was an advocate of a well-educated laity. Many Irish bishops back then, he felt, however, could see the University at best in terms of a kind of ‘pre-seminary’, and not in terms of a proper university as such. There was also the fact that the project was set up in opposition to the Queen’s Colleges, which, among other anti-Catholic sentiments, had a ban on theology. The best advice among leading clergy at the time, however, was to find an accommodation with the secular colleges, but the bishops were having none of it.
These Bishops are so accustomed to be absolute that they usurp the rights of others and rough ride over their wishes”
What did the most damage, however, were the power games. For instance, staff Newman wanted to assist him were not given appointments. Instead, the four Archbishops appointed people to leading positions who would be ‘their’ men on the inside. Recalling this difficult period in his life, Newman wrote:
“First, Dr Taylor, then Dr Leahy were appointed, and both of them, in the intention of the appointment, rather as the four Archbishops’ representative and their security and safeguard against me, than as my own helper and backer up.”
He went on to say,
“The truth is that these Bishops are so accustomed to be absolute that they usurp the rights of others and rough ride over their wishes and their plans quite innocently without meaning it, and are astonished, not at finding out the fact, but at its being impossible to these others.”
Unraveling
The project began to unravel quickly; enrolment remained low, funding was uncertain, and a blame-game began. What limped along for a few decades after Newman’s resignation in in 1858 as the Catholic University of Ireland was eventually absorbed into the very system that the Catholic University was set up to oppose. Ward said Newman’s work in Ireland “made no difference and wasted his time.”
Today, within Irish colleges and universities you will find classrooms and research centres named after Newman because it became stylish to do so but probably the closest you will get to his Idea of a University is, sadly, the library bookshelf. When Newman was canonised in 2019, University College Dublin, which lists him under Past Presidents on its website, had to be embarrassed into sending a representative to the ceremony at the last minute.
Newman’s elevation to Doctor of the Church should be more than ceremony and an exercise in nostalgia”
In his statement welcoming the declaration of Newman as a Doctor of the Church, Archbishop Farrell expresses the view that Newman’s works remain relevant and thought-provoking today, and he is right. Celebration of Newman’s elevation to Doctor of the Church should be more than ceremony and an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it provides an opportunity for stocktaking in regard to how his legacy impacts upon Catholic education in Ireland today, faced as it is, with an operative culture that fosters instrumental reasoning and competitiveness and reduce education to the service of the economy and the labour market.
Theology
Newman held a particularly strong position on the importance of theology. Only theology could ensure that the unity and universality of knowledge would be preserved. The danger, as Newman saw it, was that over-specialisation meant students learned more and more about less and less in such a way that the ultimate questions of meaning would never be posed. Only theology, which remained faithful to its sources and purposes could ensure that questions of ultimate meaning would be posed and addressed.
In particular, Newman cautioned against “an art or a business making use of theology,” in other words, only seeing theology in terms of its “usefulness”, for example, to the training of priests and teachers, and not as essential in itself.
So: what, then, would a fitting tribute to Newman’s elevation as a Doctor of the Church look like, then, from the Church in Ireland today? Perhaps one tribute to him would be for some of the dwindling resources of the Irish Church to be placed into a Newman Trust specifically aimed at educating laypeople in theology and philosophy. In an age when the sense of meaning is being lost, Newman would say that he gave us the antidote if we care to take heed.
