Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (34 page)

While Acton bound himself strictly to unquestioning belief in Church dogma, he was convinced that creative theology should be underpinned by historicity and that such scholarship should be conducted by laymen as well as clerics. Acton and Richard Simpson, a convert friend of Newman, took over the ownership of the
Rambler
in 1858, with Simpson as editor. The magazine straightaway began to concern itself with theological issues and became outspoken and irreverent about the shortcomings of Catholic clerical authority, past and present. Not only had Simpson run an article in which Döllinger argued that Augustine was the originator of Jansenism, but he revealed a mischievous streak by running pieces exposing past papal scandals. More pertinent for the papacy of his day, he allowed space for commentary that opposed the Pope’s temporal sovereignty – a burning issue at the time as Pio Nono attempted to resist the unification of Italy and the loss of the Papal States. The ultramontane faction in England supported the Pope’s temporal power enthusiastically, seeing it as tantamount to an article of faith. Cardinal Wiseman, who in any case saw the
Rambler
as a rival to the
Dublin Review
of which he was the proprietor, was furious.

Things came to a head over an article on Catholic education. The hierarchy had declined to cooperate with a Royal Commission on elementary schools. The bishops refused to appoint a Catholic representative on the committee since they were adamant that questions about religious teaching methods in Catholic schools were none of the government’s business. In January 1859 the
Rambler
ran a forthright piece on the issue by Scott Nasmyth Stokes, a government Catholic Schools Inspector and elementary education expert. Stokes declared that the Church had nothing to fear from the Commission and that it was self-defeating to refuse cooperation since State funding might be withdrawn to the advantage of non-Catholic schools.

The
Rambler’s
other rival periodical,
The Tablet
, hastened to defend the bishops, accusing Stokes of disloyalty and impugning his Catholic credentials. Stokes

replied in the correspondence pages of the
Rambler
that his Catholicism had nothing to do it; he implied that the problem was one of ignorance and prejudice on the part of the bishops as well as their failure to consult qualified lay Catholics. He opined that he would be surprised if the bishops should be ‘displeased by the loyal expression of the opinions entertained by many Catholics, and supported by arguments that cannot be met’.
2
2
Emboldened by the
Tablet’s
attack, and infuriated by Stokes’s reply, several bishops decided that unless Simpson resigned his editorship forthwith, with consequent drastic changes of editorial policy, they would destroy the periodical by condemning it in their pastoral letters. So it was that Newman, at the direct request of Wiseman and his own Bishop, Ullathorne, agreed to become editor after persuading Simpson to withdraw.

Newman’s first editorial as editor proclaimed the periodical’s new mission statement: to promote ‘the refinement, enlargement, and elevation of the intellect in the educated classes’. He declared, moreover, that the magazine would ‘discountenance what is untenable and unreal, without forgetting the tenderness due to the weak and the reverence rightly claimed for what is sacred; and to encourage a manly investigation of subjects of public interest under a deep sense of the prerogatives of ecclesiastical authority’.
²³
‘Manly investigation’ was a curious note, but it seems that it was code for unflinching and courageous criticism of ecclesiastical matters where due.

There were instant complaints that Newman had not sufficiently censured Simpson (years later Newman wrote that he ‘thought it unfair, ungenerous, impertinent and cowardly to make in their behalf acts of confession and contrition, and to make a display of change of editorship’).
²⁴
Newman had in fact been more than fair to the bishops in his adjudication of the schools’ question, quoting their pastoral letters at length. But he then enlarged on his own views about the role of the laity in the Church. ‘Acknowledging then most fully the prerogatives of the episcopate’, he wrote, ‘we do unfeignedly believe … that their Lordships really desire to know the opinion of the laity on subjects in which the laity are especially concerned.’ He went on to cite the case of the infallible definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception ten years earlier. ‘If even in the preparation of a dogmatic definition the faithful are consulted … it is at least as natural to anticipate such an act of kind feeling and sympathy in great practical questions …’
25

The tone was irenic, the proposal modest. But Dr Gillow, professor of theology at Ushaw College, seminary for the North East of England, accused Newman of heresy: the laity had no right to be consulted on doctrinal issues. Instead of addressing Dr Gillow directly, Newman decided to ask Ullathorne, his bishop, to appoint a theological censor for the magazine’s copy, as would be the case with any Catholic book of theology published within the diocese. Ullathorne

hurried over to Edgbaston for a conference. He complained that the new
Rambler
had not altered its ways, and something drastic must be done: but what? New-man kept a waspish note of the meeting dated 22 May:

The Bishop … thought there were remains of the old spirit [in the new
Rambler
]. It was irritating. Our laity were a
peaceable
set, the Church was
peace
. They had a deep faith – they did not like to hear that any one doubted … I said in answer that he saw one side, I another – that the Bishops etc did not see that state of the Laity,
e.g.
in Ireland, how unsettled, yet how docile. He said something like ‘who are the Laity’, I answered that the Church would look foolish without them –
not
those words.
26

Ullathorne was deaf to Newman’s insistence that the laity deserved encouragement, and to be heard. It ended with Ullathorne telling Newman to resign the editorship. Newman instantly acquiesced. Strangely, Ullathorne urged that Simpson should be allowed to take back the magazine. Evidently Ullathorne, Wiseman, and the other bishops, were now far less afraid of a lay editor than they were of Newman. ‘Perhaps’, Newman wrote in a memorandum, ‘it was the Cardinal etc, were seized with a panic lest they had got out of the frying pan into the fire’.
2
7
Newman wrote to his friend Henry Wilberforce:

If you attempt at a
wrong
time what in
itself
is
right
, you perhaps become a heretic or schismatic … When I am gone it will be seen perhaps that persons stopped me from doing a
work
which I
might
have done. God over-rules all things. Of course it is discouraging to be out of joint with the time, and to be snubbed and stopped as soon as I begin to act.
28

His initiative might well have been untimely in the mid-nineteenth century, but his thoughts and writings on the matter would have reverberations down to the First Vatican Council of 1870 and beyond.

Newman had one more edition of the magazine to bring out and he used the opportunity to expound his views not so much on the laity as the ‘faithful’, for they were not necessarily synonymous in his view, the faithful including both clergy and laity.
²⁹
The article has come down to us as the text of the essay
On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine
.

A crucial test of Revelation, Newman maintained, consisted in the scrutiny of the beliefs of the faithful:

the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church … manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect.
30

Invoking the case of the Arians, he argued how in the fourth century, ‘the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate’.
3
1
Indeed, ‘the body of the Episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism’. The Church flourishes, he wrote, when at one with the faithful, but not ‘when she cuts off the faithful from the study of her divine doctrines and the sympathy of her divine contemplations, and requires from them a
fides implicita
[implicit faith] in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition’.
3
2
Resorting to the Early Fathers, Newman was expounding a powerful vision of the Church as a single, organic communion with a common conscience. In 1859, however, the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities in England were aghast. Dr Gillow of Ushaw now wrote to Bishop Brown of Newport who ‘delated’ the article to Rome; in other words, he found a bishop who would officially report Newman as a heretic. The process involved writing to the Congregation of Propaganda in Latin; alas Bishop Brown’s Latin was not quite up to it and it was mistranslated, making Newman’s proposal far more unorthodox than it originally sounded in English.

Realising what was afoot, Newman wrote to Wiseman, who happened to be in Rome at the time, making it clear that he would submit to the Church’s teaching whatever that might be, at the same time attempting to explain himself as clearly as he could. Meanwhile, Propaganda had drawn up a list of their objections to the article and passed them to Wiseman who either forgot, or declined, to send them on to Newman for an answer. In the event Newman received a letter from Henry Manning, now Monsignor Manning, who was acquiring stature and influence as an administrator and Rome-England papal go-between. Manning indicated that Wiseman would settle everything in a manner that Newman would find acceptable on his return to London. And that was the last Newman was to hear of the affair.

Alas, in Rome, the orthodoxy watchdogs were still waiting for Newman’s reply to their list of objections, and his failure to oblige them was taken as insolence and obduracy. Newman’s reputation was sinking fast and a principal antagonist in his undoing was Monsignor Talbot. We gain an impression of Talbot’s poisonous character, ecclesial attitudes, and animosity towards Newman, in a letter he later wrote to Manning about the
Rambler
article:

It is perfectly true that a cloud has been hanging over Dr. Newman in Rome ever since the Bishop of Newport delated him to Rome for heresy in his article in the
Rambler
… [the laity] are beginning to show the cloven foot … putting into practice the doctrine taught by Dr. Newman … What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all … Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England.
33

Three years after he wrote this letter, and with ample capacity to do more mischief in the meantime, Monsignor Talbot would be committed to a lunatic an asylum outside Paris; hence it is possible that he was suffering from mental illness during this period. But had Manning betrayed Newman, whom he professed to admire and love? In time, it would become apparent that Manning would sacrifice anything and anyone in defence of the papacy, a loyalty that coincided with his own rise to power. Samuel Wilberforce remembered a conversation with Odo Russell, ten years on from the
Rambler
debacle, who said: