Pope paves way for St. John Henry Newman to be formally named doctor of the church

St. John Henry Newman — the 19th-century theologian, intellectual and preacher who journeyed from Anglicanism to Catholicism, powerfully shaping religious thought in both faith traditions — will be named a doctor of the church by Pope Leo XIV.

The news was announced by the Vatican shortly after Pope Leo’s July 31 audience with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

The Vatican press bulletin stated that the pope had “confirmed the affirmative opinion of the plenary session of cardinals and bishops, members of the dicastery” for sainthood causes, on conferring the title, which since the early church has been bestowed on saints whose doctrinal writing and teachings are held to have special authority. St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great and St. Jerome were the first four doctors of the church, and excluding today’s announcement, there have been 37 saints so named — including four women, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Hildegard of Bingen.

The move had been supported by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who at their November 2023 plenary assembly voted almost unanimously to support a request by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales that Newman be named a doctor of the church by Pope Francis.

Speaking at the 2023 plenary, Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, said the USCCB doctrine committee, of which he is chair, “considered this matter back in 2019 and concluded that the writings of St. John Henry Newman are truly eminent and of great relevance for the church today, especially in the areas of the development of doctrine, the moral foundations of education, the primacy of conscience, the role of the laity and the search for the truth, amongst many others.

“The committee therefore determined that St. John Henry Newman is indeed worthy of this high honor,” said Bishop Flores at the time, who was joined in his remarks by several bishops.

According to an online biography by the Oratories of England, prepared for his canonization cause, John Henry Newman — born 1801 in London and raised in a middle-class Anglican family — displayed an early interest in Scripture.

In his “Apologia Pro Su Vita” (“A Defense of His Life”), his 1864 autobiography, Cardinal Newman recounted “a great change of thought” he experienced at the age of 15, one that enabled him to “rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator.”

With the revival sparked by John Wesley, Newman converted to evangelicalism during his final year at Great Ealing School. At 16, he went on to study at Oxford, which along with Cambridge University offered seminary formation for Anglican clergy — a vocation Newman sought out, even looking to take what for that clerical tradition was the unusual vow of celibacy. He was ordained in 1825, and dedicated himself to making pastoral visits to the sick and the poor while also tutoring college students, said the Oratories biography.

However, Newman’s zealous sharing of his faith with the students led to a clash with the administration, and deprived of the opportunity to teach, he began reading the works of the Fathers of the Church, which he described in part as “music to my inward ear” and “response to ideas … I had cherished so long.”

Newman’s preaching began to attract national attention, and a near-fatal bout of illness in 1833, contracted while in Sicily — which saw him feverishly repeat, “I have a work to do in England” — intensified his desire for the renewal of the church. Upon returning to his homeland, Newman teamed up with like-minded others who feared the Church of England had become complacent and politicized, said the Oratories. The group formed what would become known as the Oxford Movement, publishing tracts to rouse faithful from their torpor and reclaim the Gospel.

The future saint fell afoul of the university and Oxford’s bishop by arguing that the Church of England’s doctrines were more Catholic than Protestant. Newman left Oxford, and took up residence in the nearby village of Littlemore, where he pursued study and prayer. Resigning from his parish, he began to discern — albeit not without struggle, as the Oratories observed — a calling to embrace the Catholic faith.

In the canonization cause biography, the Oratories pointed out that Newman’s battle with sacred tradition on matters such as purgatory and papal supremacy spurred further historical study, leading to his 1845 “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” in which he described ideas and doctrines as organic, with “old principles” reappearing “under new forms.” Newman observed in the work that “in a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

That same year, he was formally received into the Catholic Church — making his confession right in his home to a Passionist missionary priest, Father Dominic Barberi, and speaking at such length that the priest had him resume the following morning.

Newman’s conversion led to the loss not only of his Oxford fellowship, but of most of his Anglican friends and his family. Yet, said the Oratories, he also wrote of a great peace amid the isolation — describing the conversion as “like coming into port after a rough sea.”

In 1847, Newman — having completed additional study — was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome, where he became acquainted with the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri, whose communal way of life recalled the college fellowship of his university days. A year later, with papal approval, he established the first Oratory of St. Philip in England at Birmingham, with a second founded in London the following year.

Expanding his ministry to Ireland, Father Newman became the rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College Dublin, under the leadership of Ireland’s Catholic bishops. Through his religious, spiritual and intellectual thought, Newman synthesized the pursuit of knowledge and of God, writing that “knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.”

The demands of his role in Dublin — which saw him make 56 sea crossings from Britain to Ireland in just seven years — proved exhausting, said the Oratories, and in 1858 he returned to the Birmingham Oratory.

The succeeding two decades were marked by struggles with both Catholics and Anglicans — with some of the former distrustful of his conversion, and the latter claiming he had never been an honest Anglican in the first place. In response, Father Newman penned his massive 1864 Apologia to “show what I am … I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow.”

The candor of his writing helped to assuage both Anglican and Catholic fears, and Father Newman was even invited to serve as an expert theological adviser at the First Vatican Council in 1868 — although, the Oratories noted, he declined in order to complete “The Grammar of Assent,” which considers the process by which an individual espouses convictions.

In 1874, he countered Prime Minister William Gladstone’s assertion that Catholics could not be loyal subjects due to their papal allegiance, with Newman writing in an open letter that his coreligionists did not deserve “this injurious reproach that we are captives and slaves of the Pope,” quoted the Oratories.

Three years later, Father Newman returned to Oxford and received the first honorary fellowship of Trinity College. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII named him a cardinal, extolling his fidelity to the faith, and granted his request to remain in Birmingham and forego consecration as a bishop. The elevation was lauded by Catholics and Anglicans alike, said the Oratories.

In Birmingham, Cardinal Newman continued to write, pondering in one of his final works — quoted by the Oratories in the online canonization biography — that God “has provided for the creation of the Saint out of the sinner … He enters into the heart of man, and persuades it, and prevails with it, while He changes it.”

Cardinal Newman died at age 89 in 1890 and was canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.

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