Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

Today Pope Benedict capped his monumental visit to the UK by beatifying Cardinal Newman, who has been a hero of mine since I discovered him around the time of my re-version in 2004. Back then, I was a cradle Catholic who had become a Protestant pastor, and was being convinced (against my will!) of the truth of Catholicism. At first I thought that it would be possible to remain where I was, and simply attempt to educate Protestants about Catholic beliefs through my preaching and teaching. I didn’t think it was necessary for me to actually return to the Catholic Church – until I met Newman. He made me realize that it was not enough to recognize, and even promote to others, the veracity of the Catholic faith. I actually had to be in corporate union with the Church Jesus founded if I hoped to attain salvation, once I knew it to be the true Church. As Lumen Gentium 14 put it: “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved”. That’s the dangerous thing about truth – once we recognize it, we are obliged to act on it. It’s something Newman knew full well.

So, how did I get to know Newman? By divine providence, I was at a conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I visited the famous Eerdmans discount theological bookstore. It was there, of all places, that I found a book on Cardinal Newman by a Catholic priest, Stanley L. Jaki, called Newman’s Challenge. Reading about Newman’s courageous conversion gave me the strength I needed to return home myself. Fr. Jaki relates in the book that on the occasion of his reception into the Catholic Church, the most famous Anglican in the world wrote personal letters to several of his friends and family members, outlining his reasons for embracing the Church of Rome. Newman also spoke of why he couldn’t keep silent about what he had discovered:

Newman revealed the innermost recesses of his powerful mind by repeating that he was about to be received “into the One True Fold”. On October 9, 1845…he assured his own sister…that “if I thought that any other body than that which I recognize to be Catholic were to be recognized by the Saviour of the world, I would not have left that body”. Five days later he wrote to her that it would have been a betrayal of Truth (writ large) had he kept from others his most considered conviction that the Church of Rome was the Catholic Church. He told her that he could not live with a conscience guilty of dissimulation, with the guilt that he had deprived others of the Truth: “What a doom would have been mine, if I had kept the Truth a secret in my bosom, and when I knew which the One Church was, and which was not part of the One Church, I had suffered friends and strangers to die in an ignorance from which I might have relieved them.” He knew which was the pain to be dreaded more: the temporal pain he would feel because he had to pain others, or the eternal pain he would eventually suffer by choosing not to pain them and thereby not to inspire others to convert as he did (Newman’s Challenge, p. 81).