THE
P RTAL
Advent Supplement
Page i
Cor ad cor loquitur –
‘heart speaks unto heart’
A homily given by The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan on the
Feast of Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of the Ordinariate,
at the Church of Our Lady and St Gregory, Warwick Street,
London, on Friday 9th October 2015
When an
individual is invited to choose a motto or a distinguishing phrase to sum up a life or a
mission, a number of factors come into play. In the present day, especially for those who have the
privilege of working with families in planning the funerals of deceased family members, wit, or at least
attempts at it (or even occasionally inappropriate humour), is often uppermost in people’s minds.
Corporate mottos seem to veer between the
narcissistic, the pretentious and the clichéd, whilst
a review of a selection of heraldic mottos chosen by
the newly armigerous over the last ten years reveals
some serious choices, some dreadful puns, not a few
flippant ones and others plainly crass. It has not always
been so and, on his being made a Cardinal in 1879,
Blessed John Henry Newman gave serious thought to
the choice of his motto.
The expression he chose, cor ad cor loquitur – ‘heart
speaks unto heart’ – captured in four short Latin
words the whole of his approach to faith and offers a
paradigm for the New Evangelisation. It is a motto
that, if properly understood, can speak very effectively
to people in those places and societies like our own,
where the struggle between the conviction of the
heart and the scepticism of the mind is a common
experience.
Furthermore, Newman’s motto describes a way of
enabling the proclamation of the Good News about
Jesus Christ, whilst charting a safe course between
the Scylla of that ultimately subjectivist religion of
“feelings” – the “Church of nice” – on the one hand,
and the Charybdis of arid, positivist, propositional
legalism – or perhaps what Pope Francis has called
‘self-absorbed, promethean neo-pelagianism’,[1] on
the other.
Truly, the chief exercise in mystical theology
is to speak to God and to hear God speak
in the bottom of the heart; and because this
discourse passes in most secret aspirations and
inspirations, we term it a silent conversing.
Eyes speak to eyes, and heart to heart, and none
understands what passes save the sacred lovers
who speak.[3]
In choosing cor ad cor loquitur, Newman had
thought that he was quoting a phrase from Sacred
Scripture or, perhaps, from Thomas à Kempis.[2] In
fact the expression, or something very like it, comes
from St Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of
God, where the sixteenth century saint was writing
What an utterly beautiful description of prayer. It is
of the relationship between theology and prayer. He neither primarily an intellectual nor an affective act:
wrote:
it is an act of the whole person to the whole person