THE P RTAL
August 2014
UK Pages - page 13
Thoughts on Newman
Queen or Pope?
Dr Stephen Morgan reflects on an apparent conflict between
Church and Country, referring to Newman’s advice to converts
J
ohn Henry Newman‘s “Oh, the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-
killing tyranny of Rome!”, so wrote the author Charles Kingsley, in his attempt to slander John Henry
Newman for remarks that he never uttered.
my duty to the Queen and to the
Pope potentially in conflict
pillar and mainstay of truth”, divinely constituted and
protected as such by Christ Himself. That loyalty to
Although not quite one of the marks of the Church, these claims might come into conflict with duty owed
there is something red in tooth and claw about to the Crown is hardly difficult to imagine - especially
Catholicism that regularly brings forth such reactions with the increasingly overblown claims to religious
to the claims of the Church. When, as a young and moral authority the English Crown and State
Midshipman at Dartmouth, I was received into full has made since the sixteenth century. The enforced
communion - “made my submission”, as Newman separation of Catholics from civil society in Britain for
occasionally described his own conversion - one three hundred years contributed to these impressions:
Anglican senior Naval Officer’s wife asked me whether Catholicism looked, sounded and felt foreign.
or not I now had divided loyalties, my duty to the
evangelise the culture
Queen and to the Pope potentially in conflict.
using forms familiar to those
Her reaction, when in response I asked whether to whom it is addressed
or not there was the same division in her loyalties to
the Queen and to God, was to remark, without any
apparent trace of irony, that she could not imagine
such a conflict ever arising. She enjoyed, or so she
seemed to think, the proper freedom of all good
Anglicans, whereas I had now voluntarily made myself
subject to that “conscience-killing tyranny of Rome”
and, in so doing, become, thereby, less fit to discharge
the commission I sought.
She was entirely right in her judgement of my fitness
for service but for quite the wrong reasons: it wasn’t
my Catholicism that would mean I would not make
the grade as a Naval Officer (after all, Admiral Sir Bill
O’Brien remains, at 97, one of the most distinguished
D-day veterans, Vice-Admiral Mike Gretton had five
successful commands at sea and Admiral of the Fleet
Sir Julian Oswald rose to be First Sea Lord - all of
them faithful Catholics) but my sloth. Nevertheless,
the reaction was far from unusual and not altogether
unreasonable.
Newman’s constant advice to enquiries from
prospective converts was that they should not become
Catholics unless and until they believed those claims
that Catholic Church made for herself but that
when they did, they had an urgent duty to seek her
communion. For me the price to be paid for that
realisation has been little more than the occasional
crass remark, but for Newman, as for many members
of the Ordinariate, it was to lose his livelihood and be
ostracised by family, friends and his beloved University.
There is little that can be done about the claims the
Church makes for herself: they are true and, like a light
on a hilltop or - to return to the seagoing trope - a
lighthouse, they shine brightly as a sure mark in an
uncertain sea.
The cultural expressions of the faith, however,
might legitimately feel less foreign and Pope-Emeritus
Benedict XVI’s gift of the Ordinariate is surely one way
in which that can happen. If the New Evangelisation
of these islands is to be successful, it will need to
The claims the Catholic Church makes for herself are pay close attention, no less than the original one, to
quite remarkable. She claims to be able to teach without Gregory the Great’s advice to Augustine to evangelise
error with the authority of God. She claims to be the the culture using forms familiar to those to whom it
chosen vessel of salvation for mankind. She claims, as is addressed. That is, I would suggest, the mandate for
the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution the missionary endeavour of the Ordinariate: that is
on the Church Lumen Gentium reminds us, to be “the the value and place of “patrimony”.
content 2vP