Heart speaks unto heart

Some things draw me to Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890) including the following:

• He journeyed from Anglicanism into full communion with the Catholic Church.
• He served as the founding Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, from which University College Dublin eventually emerged. I completed three degrees, there, between 1977 and 2005.
• He established the beautiful University Church on St Stephen's Green, where I was baptised on 22 December 1956.
• He anticipated many themes later developed at Vatican II, especially concerning the role of the laity, the development of doctrine and the importance of returning to the sources of the early Church.
• He was a loyal son of the Church but not blind to historical context and development of doctrine (although he accepted the doctrine of papal infallibility defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870, he questioned the timing, prudence and formulation of the doctrine).
• His deep personal friendship with Fr Ambrose St John (1814-1875) showed his extraordinary capacity for human friendship.

After the death of his friend in 1875, Newman wrote:

I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband or wife, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine.

The site of the grave where, St John Henry Newman was first buried along with his life companion and friend, Fr Ambrose. His body was later moved. Source: Flickr

Following his death in 1890, Newman was buried, on his request, in the same grave at Rednal in Birmingham as his close friend Ambrose.  A curious development was that the body of St John Henry Newman was removed from Rednal cemetery to the Oratory in the same city in 2008 just before his beautification.  

Newman believed that hearts are transformed through loving communion, ultimately finding their fulfilment in the Heart of Christ present in the Eucharist.

To understand the man, we need to understand something of the tradition from which he came.

Anglicanism is a product of the English Reformation and emerged from the tensions, conflicts and divisions that characterised post-Reformation Europe. Mainstream English Protestantism is, in many respects, a compromise between different tendencies, held together by a shared respect for Scripture, tradition and, later, the influence of post-Enlightenment reason. The strength of Anglicanism lies in its diversity; its weakness lies there also. In its contemporary manifestation, by embracing different strands, liberal and conservative, catholic and reformed, it has managed to hold together within a single communion of self-governing national churches.

The upheavals associated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the rise of feminism and the declining influence of Christian values in Western societies have left their mark on Anglicanism, as they have on other Christian traditions. A key weakness in Anglicanism, in my view, is the absence of a central teaching authority or living Magisterium capable of giving definitive interpretations of Scripture and tradition.

Against this background, we can better understand Newman himself. John Henry Newman, born in 1801, belonged to the Catholic wing of the Church of England. Along with other notable churchmen of his time, such as Keble and Pusey, he pioneered the Oxford Movement and promoted a via media, emphasising catholic tradition, the sacraments and liturgical worship from within the reformed or Protestant tradition. He believed that Anglicanism could bridge the gulf that had opened between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism from the sixteenth century onwards.

His efforts to hold this middle ground were ultimately unsuccessful. His journey took him back to the patristic sources of the early Church and, in 1845, into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Having reached the inner citadels of the Church of Rome (he became a cardinal in 1879), he nevertheless remained something of an outsider among some Catholics, while enduring isolation and estrangement from many within the Church of England.

Seven years before his transition to the Roman Catholic church, in sermon, The Eucharistic Presence (1838), he wrote:

Christ, who died and rose again for us, is in it spiritually present, in the fulness of His death and of His resurrection.

He immediately explained that by ‘spiritual presence’ he did not mean a merely symbolic presence:

not as if 'spiritual' were but a name or mode of speech, and He were really absent ... though He is really present.

He wrote:

All that we know or need know is that He is given to us, and that in the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

Newman maintained that Christ's Bread of Life discourse in John 6 points toward Holy Communion. He saw the consecrated Bread and Wine as the fulfilment of Christ's promise:

The Bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

Although he did not, at that point (1838) subscribe to a doctrine of transubstantiation he was on the way - so to speak. Although he had believed in the Real Presence for many years as an Anglican, he later acknowledged that he did not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation until his reception into the Catholic Church in 1845. In answer to his critics in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman did not pull his punches:

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation.

His faith and his journey was built on a personal encounter with Jesus in his Word and in his Sacraments.

In Meditationsand Devotions, he wrote:

O most sacred, most loving Heart of Jesus, Thou art concealed in the Holy Eucharist, and Thou beatest for us still.

Shortly before he died, the late Pope Francis later summarised Newman's spirituality in DilexitNos in the following terms:

Saint John Henry Newman took as his motto the phrase Cor ad cor loquitur [Heart speaks unto heart], since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart. This realization led him, the distinguished intellectual, to recognize that his deepest encounter with himself and with the Lord came not from his reading or reflection, but from his prayerful dialogue, heart to heart, with Christ, alive and present. It was in the Eucharist that Newman encountered the living heart of Jesus, capable of setting us free, giving meaning to each moment of our lives, and bestowing true peace.

St John Henry Newman was declared a Doctor of the Church in 2025 and canonised in 2019.  Though he died on 11 August, 1890, his memorial in the liturgical calendar is today, 9 October. He was received into full communion with the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845.

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth")