No longer the constant topic of conversation, the personality and priorities of the new Pope, Leo XIV, remain a matter of great curiosity. It is suggested that one of the reasons he has spent time in the Papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo is to focus on and develop his practical and theological initiatives for governing the Church. He is rumored to be composing “his first encyclical,” and identifying “his curia.” All this remains to be seen, but that does not mean that we have not already had glimpses of what he considers important.
On July 31 he announced his intention that Saint John Henry Newman be declared a Doctor of the Church. This has not sprung from the fertile recesses of his mind and personal pieties, but rather has been a hope and desire of many parties within the Church for some years, and is an idea that has received serious examination. Only 37 other saints have received this designation and distinction.
An Englishman of the nineteenth century (1801-1890), Cardinal Newman was a prominent Anglican cleric, thinker, preacher, and writer before his entrance into full communion with the Catholic Church, an act shocking in that time that lost him several friends and many supporters. He was ordained Priest and founded the Birmingham Oratory. In 1878, Pope Leo XII created him a cardinal though he had never been a bishop and granted him the unusual permission to remain in England at his Oratory.
One of his sayings that I have often shared in the confessional with penitents who fear that they have doubted God, or the Faith, is that One thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. That helpful assertion comes from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, the book he published to explain his conversion and rebut accusations and calumnies from his detractors. I found the whole paragraph from the fifth chapter of that book, and I think it is even more helpful in context.
I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as anyone; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.
We know that our new Holy Father chose his regnal name in reference to his predecessor by one century. Clearly Number Fourteen shares Number Thirteen’s estimation of John Henry Newman as one who has much to offer the Church. We can explore the wealth of wisdom and insight this English saint has to offer while we await the manifestation of what our Anglophone Pope intends to emphasize in his leadership of that same Church. It could even give us something fruitful to talk about.
Monsignor Smith
