A man of endless controversy

As ever, the philosopher, theologian, poet, priest, and saint is a towering figure who is both loved and despised.

Next Thursday Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United Kingdom for a three day visit that will culminate, on the 19th September, in the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. In this and two companion articles MercatorNet surveys the controversies surrounding these events and pays its own tribute to the great Englishman.

It is now less than a week to Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain, which will culminate with the beatification of John Henry Newman, a 19th century cardinal who died 120 years ago. The beatification of the great Victorian will be a moment to mark the congruity of so many things which are often kept separate – among them Englishness and Catholicism, obedience and conscience, faith and reason, change and commitment.

Newman is also, of course, a fascinating figure. A cleric who lived in an all-male Oxford college or a house of celibate clergy, he was also a major intellectual – a novelist, poet and educationalist – and friend of the Prime Minister. A contemporary of Darwin and Marx, he was a polemicist, essayist, and apologist, one who explored the depths of Christian orthodoxy while society around him was secularising. He is, in many ways, the Christian lynchpin of the contemporary era, the frontline intellectual in a nation leading the race into the modern world.

But engaging today’s secular media with Newman – my current task as Press Officer for his beatification – has not been not so straightforward. He can seem remote and forbidding, distant from the lives of ordinary modern folk. How to educate public opinion? How to plug him into the news? How to ensure that when Pope Benedict beatifies Newman the people of England believe that the successor of Peter is honouring one of our own?

Most British people have never heard of Newman and have little interest anyway in religious matters. The media usually ignore faith, especially when it involves historical figures. Unless, of course, they sense controversy.

I have some experience of this. In 2006, while working at the press office of Opus Dei, we suddenly found ourselves under the brightest of all spotlights due to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. We were depicted in a hit book and film – both of which claimed to be true – as murderous masochistic monks: how did we respond? We decided to take advantage of the controversy to tell our story, and received the largest amount of (free) publicity in our history.

Unless Dan Brown does Cardinal Newman the same favour, a Da Vinci Code-type searchlight looks unlikely. Yet Newman is far from uncontroversial. He lived, after all, in the intense heat of religious polemic and misunderstanding. But even now, when the intensity of the theological disagreements that swirled around Newman is hard to relate to, there are controversies which have the potential for stories and comments. I have identified five.

The first springs to mind among many non-religious people as a result of the activist Peter Tatchell’s claim last year that Newman was gay – something he claimed the Vatican was suppressing. We will never know what struggles went on inside Newman’s heart; but we can be sure that he would have found the question very strange. The idea of “being homosexual” would have been to him an unfamiliar categorisation. What mattered was what people did; and in that sense, there is no doubt that Newman lived a life of chastity and never broke his vow of celibacy. But his many intense friendships, mostly with men in his priestly community of the Oratory, such as Ambrose St John, are hard to make sense of in our age. In our sexualised society, the idea of intense, loving and chaste friendships seems weird, and the temptation to read back into Newman’s age our own preconceptions will continue to be hard for many to resist.

After the struggle over Newman’s sexuality comes the battle over his soul: there have been many attempts to conscript Newman. Some like to emphasize his devotion to dogma, others his defence of individual conscience. In his biglietto speech Newman said he had spent his life fighting liberalism in religion, or the idea that one religion was as good as another.  Newman believed profoundly in the primacy of conscience, but would he really have pitted conscience against authority? Pope Benedict, speaking this year to the bishops of England and Wales, said it was “important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate”, citing Newman as someone who would have realised this. Author John Cornwell thinks Pope Benedict is “clearly bent on sanitising Newman’s progressive Catholicism”. Others suspect Cornwell of trying to hijack Newman for his own purposes. We can expect this one to resurface as September approaches.

Then there is the question of Newman’s holiness. A prickly character who had trouble getting on with some people, Newman could be shy, retiring and unfriendly. Yet tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them not Catholic, lined the streets of Birmingham to see his coffin pass: “whether Rome canonises him or not he will be canonised in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England”, The Times wrote at the time. What does it mean to be holy, if it doesn’t mean to be other-worldly, or inhumanly perfect? Is it a human construct, or a mirror refracting something of God? And if the latter, what does that look like? How can we tell, looking at the tracks in the sand of a person’s life, that God has passed by?

The fourth controversy is over the miracle that has paved the way for Newman’s beatification. In January a journalist claimed that a miracle that serves the Church’s purpose of proving holiness is per se dubious; and Cornwell argued more recently in the Sunday Times that the miracle itself was bogus, citing medical experts to back up his claims. Yet none of the expert witnesses adduced by Cornwell to study the cure of Jack Sullivan, a Boston-based deacon, can explain how, on 15 August 2001, after saying a short prayer to Newman, Sullivan was relieved of his post-operative pain and immobility in a complete, instantaneous and permanent manner. On the other hand, it is hard for contemporary society, convinced that the scientifically inexplicable can only be what has not yet found an explanation, to believe that God intervenes directly in human lives.

Finally, there is the ecumenical controversy. At the age of 44 Newman made the searing decision to leave the Church of England to become a Catholic. Does that make him a symbol of inter-ecclesial division, or a symbol of ecumenical unity? Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey, said in an interview earlier this year that Newman could help the cause of unity and that Anglicans already celebrate Newman on the day of his death, August 11. In the Anglican calendar, the entry reads: “John Henry Newman, priest, tractarian, 1890”. 

When Newman was made a Cardinal in 1879 an Anglican friend wrote to him in emotional terms. “I wonder if you know how much you are loved by England”, Octavius Ogle said, and then went on to add, “and I wonder whether this extraordinary and unparalleled love might not be – was not meant to be – utilized as one means to draw together into one fold all Englishmen who believe”.

These five controversies do not lead, easily, to the bright sofas at GMTV. But they suggest that plugging Newman into the national conversation could be easier than at first it seemed.  The man the Pope will declare “blessed” is still able to cut across our society’s values – and to generate stories.

Jack Valero is the Press Officer for the Beatification of Cardinal Newman.

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