THE P RTAL
December 2017 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Holy Innocents
The Revd Deacon Stephen Morgan is not celebrating
September , October and November of this year have been trying months .
Anniversaries can be occasions to celebrate but they can also be times of mourning and what some celebrate others may mourn . The anniversaries that have been so enthusiastically welcomed – especially in our state-funded broadcaster – over the autumn of 2017 have been for me the cause of profound sadness .
Bad enough that I am compelled – under pain of criminal sanction – to pay for an organisation whose manifest lack of sympathy for Christianity , simply so that I can watch the television output of other broadcasters . But in short order to have seasons that have breathlessly celebrated and remembered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation , the Russian Revolution and the passing of the Abortion Act on that last island of BBC sanity that had been Radio 3 , has been too much .
It seems to have been entirely beyond the conception of the powers that be on that network that there are those who view these events as not unproblematic : for whom the first seems to be a curse on Western Christianity that remains a deep , open wound on the Body of Christ and a fatal flaw in our civilisation , the second the cause of the deaths of millions in the name of Proletarian Revolution and the third the beginning of a holocaust in which the lives of nearly nine million on this island alone have perished .
Forgive me for not seeing in any of these developments evidence of the much-vaunted “ progress ” which I have been repeatedly invited to laud .
These articles are supposed to be about Blessed John Henry Newman – although the Editor occasionally chides me for them being insufficiently so – and so it occurs to me that rather than writing a philippic against our political and cultural establishment , rather than giving in to my inclination to engage in a jeremiad against the evils of modern societal values , I ought to give some consideration to what Newman might have to offer to this picture .
One doesn ’ t have to engage in counter-factual
speculation to know exactly what he would have said about all three of these events . Although the sheer scale of the damage done by the utter collapse of social order and the annihilation of so many that 1917 and 1967 were to usher in were entirely outside Newman ’ s conception , we know only too well what he came to believe about the Protestant Reformation and his abhorrence of the fruits of the French Revolution give us sufficient indication as to his likely attitude to Marx , Lenin , Stalin , Mao , Pol Pot , the Kims , Castro , Chavez , Morales and ( still just about clinging on as I type this but gone , please God , by the time it is published ) Mugabe .
The abominations he so abhorred that had been perpetrated by Danton and Roux , Hébert and Robespierre , he would have had no problem as seeing come to their unnatural and inevitable full-flowering in the purges and show-trials , the gulags and the Great Leap Forward .
Although nothing in Newman ’ s writings provide us with a direct comparison with the enormity of the sin of abortion , we do not have to know very much of the man or his work to predict with pinpoint accuracy what his reaction would have been .
In a sermon preached on their feast day in 1830 ( and again in 1832 , 1834 , 1836 and 1838 ), Newman saw in the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents an attack directly on the person of the Christ child . Little doubt then that he have seen in the destruction of the child in the womb , an act directed at the sovereignty of God Himself , indeed a rebellion against God Himself , a diabolical ‘ non serviam ’ without peer , so far , in human history .