THE P RTAL
February 2015
UK Pages - page 14
Thoughts on Newman
Newman and the integration
of different “patrimonies”!
Dr Stephen Morgan compares various “patrimonies”
with Newman’s own approach
One important
task for anyone who becomes a Catholic is establishing a way of integrating
the different religious heritages - one might even say patrimonies - that go to make us. As a teenage
convert from Welsh non-conformism (with a heavy dose of Prayer Book Anglican schooling thrown in for
good measure) that meant, for me, working out how to be true to the good and beautiful insights of the
confession of my childhood and my forebears, whilst embracing the rich culture of Catholicism.
Like many, I passed successively through several
phases: first rejecting the place from which I had come
and enthusiastically adopting every Catholic devotional
practice I could - the more Italianate the better;
later indulging in a nostalgia for an imagined nonconformism where, like the Israelites in the desert, I
longed for the onions and cucumbers of Egypt that were
the fine sermons and well-sung hymns of the Chapel I
attended as a boy; finally, coming to accept and treasure
what had gone before and still recognising I was now an
adopted child of a different family. But these patrimonies
are never as simple, as univocal as they first appear.
can seem almost bewildering.
Newman experienced a certain degree of cultural
alienation after making his submission to the Church
in 1845. He had felt no cultural sympathy with the
Catholicism he had encountered on his 1832/3 visit
to the Mediterranean. He encountered an expression
of Catholicism that he found often dirty, tawdry and
entirely unsympathetic to his tastes.
The religion of the southern Italian peasantry in
no way appealed to the Oxford Don: it didn’t even
benefit from the sense of the exotic that he (and many
The heritage of my Welsh Independent forebears an Anglican since) found in Orthodoxy. It was, in the
was almost as different as that I inherited from my recent words of the apologist for the man-monster
father’s firmly Wesleyan family (except in its suspicion Thomas Cromwell, Hilary Mantel, not a religion for
of anything that smacked, even remotely, of Rome) as respectable people. It was through the influence of
either of them were from the Catholicism I became the very Italian St Philip Neri that Newman came to
immersed in and that Catholicism was, itself, born of understand, accept and enthusiastically promote, after
an extraordinarily eclectic mix of cultural influences. the establishment of the Oratory in 1847, many of the
The process of coming to an integrated understanding very practices he had so deplored fifteen years earlier.
and acceptance of these various strains in my own
religious history was and is a complicated business.
Of course, members of Ordinariate are often
more familiar with the devotions and culture of the
Catholicism in Britain is a curious mix of the Catholicism that Newman and his followers had
interaction between the religious culture of the Irish advanced, the disappearance of which from the life
immigrant communities, of that steady stream, almost- of British Catholic parishes is one of the unexplained
but-never-quite a flood, of Anglican converts and of and, surely, unintentional consequences of the postthe influence, disproportionate to their numbers, of conciliar period.
those families that had clung on to the Faith through
the time of persecution.
My own experience has been that where Ordinariate
clergy and lay faithful have, eschewing the shrill or
To that can now, increasingly, be added the lives and strident, encouraged other Catholics to discover what
practices of Eastern European, African, South Asian might, tongue-in-cheek, be referred to as ‘Patrimony”,
and Filipino Catholics. For those coming into the they find a warm and enthusiastic reception from
Full Communion through the Ordinariate, blessed to those who had, perhaps, lost touch with their own
bring with them their own distinctive patrimony, it religious heritage.
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