THE
P RTAL
Advent Supplement
Page ii
and it is ordered precisely towards encounter with the
Newman’s first conversion was, then, a conversion
person of Christ.
to an explicitly dogmatic conception of the Christian
faith: a faith whose creeds, he believed, ‘were facts, not
It is scarcely possible to read Newman’s great poem, opinions’.[7] It would be a mistake, however, to read
The Dream of Gerontius, or to sing his hymns, such as this as being a purely intellectual conversion.
Praise to the Holiest in the Height, Firmly I believe and
truly or Lead Kindly Light, without recognising this
It was, rather, a religious experience of the whole
same intense and personal Christ-centred imperative: man: it was knowing with the whole person. He recalled
a focus on Christ, gaining all its impetus, its energy its effect on him as an event ‘making me rest in the
from Christ. Nor can we read or sing those hymns thought of two and two only absolute and luminously
without coming to know something of the depth self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.[8]
of feeling with which his Christian Faith imbued
Newman.
This is a description of religious feeling that has more
of the intimacy and intensity of the profound knowing
These are works of profound emotion, deep personal of one another by the lover and the beloved than it is
insight and undeniable affective maturity. They point of mere sentiment or belief in a doctrinal proposition.
unerringly and unremittingly towards the person of It is a profoundly affective statement and yet it is
God in Jesus Christ and yet they are also profoundly expressed in the language of faith and reason. What
dogmatic, deeply theological and are marked by he described was a conversion of cor ad cor loquitur.
an undeniable doctrinal richness of astonishing
complexity.
In 2010, Newman’s motto was adopted as the theme
of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Great Britain, a visit
These hymns speak of a religion where head and heart, that the Holy Father explicitly set within his call for a
reason and faith, are not opposed one to another but are new evangelisation. After he had returned to Rome
complementary, the each strengthening the other. They he wrote:
are expressions of Christianity that manifest that truth
which Pope St John Paul II named at the beginning of
In addressing the citizens of that country, a
his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, when he wrote: ‘Faith
crossroads of culture and of the world economy, I
and reason are like two wings on which the human
kept in mind the entire West, conversing with the
[4]
spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.’
intellect of this civilisation and communicating
the unfading newness of the Gospel in which it
If the Church is to engage in the evangelisation
is steeped. This Apostolic Journey strengthened
of those societies and cultures which were
a deep conviction within me: the ancient nations
formerly predominantly Christian, our own and
of Europe have a Christian soul, which is one
societies like it, it must propose such a vision of
with the “genius” and history of the respective
the Christian Faith: one where faith and reason
peoples, and the Church never stops working
are in a complementary harmony, one that points
to keep this spiritual and cultural tradition
to ‘Jesus Christ and Him crucified’. (1Cor.2: 2)
ceaselessly alive.[9]
Writing in 1864, Newman recalled his first
recollections of faith. He sketched a childhood of
religious practice grounded firmly in the reading of
the Bible and of perfect knowledge of the catechism –
that is the Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer.
But, as he recalled it, it was a religion devoid of serious
affective conviction: it pulled neither on the heart nor
the head. At the age of fifteen, Newman was overcome
by that ‘great change of thought’[5] that, as he later put
it, he saw as his conversion to Evangelicalism. The
particular character of that conversion, at least as he
recalled it forty-eight years later, was one where he said:
I fell under the influences of a definite creed,
and received into my intellect impressions of
dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never
been effaced or obscured.[6]
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of
Askelon, (2 Sam.1:20) but it was perhaps this very
concern that caused him, most felicitously, to establish
you in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham
and Blessed John Henry Newman.
From the pulpit of the University Church in Oxford,
in early 1832, Newman preached his fifth University
Sermon. He reminded his hearers that the truth of
the Gospel: ‘has ever been upheld in the world not
as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by
temporal power, but by the personal influence of such
men . . . , who are at once the teachers and patterns
of ’[10] that Gospel.
Later in the same sermon, Newman talked of: