THE
P RTAL
October 2015
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Shooting Niagara
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan asks:
What did Blessed John Henry Newman think
of Church Councils and Synods?
As a
scholar of the Early Church, Bl. John Henry Newman was distinctly luke-warm about Church
Councils, Synods and the like. As an Anglican he was far from disappointed that Convocation had fallen
into desuetude by his time and I imagine, had he known of it, he would have thought little or nothing good
would have come of a body like the General Synod, still less of the General Convention of our transatlantic
cousins.
Nevertheless, he accepted that they were necessary,
as a means, even the “normal way of doing things”
(Letters & Diaries of John Henry Newman (LD) xxiii,
255), by which the truths of faith could be developed,
error corrected, and the Church, when occasion
demanded, reformed.
will and revealed truth.” (LD xxiii, 284) Despite being
invited by the Bishop of Orleans, Mgr Félix Dupanloup,
to attend the Council as the Bishop’s personal
theologian (peritus), Newman made his excuses. He
was, he wrote, “too old for it”, “the Roman diet would
most seriously compromise” his health, and “there
are men, and some of them have been Saints, whose
In his own time, the great nineteenth century vocation does not lie in such ecclesiastical gatherings”
Pope, Bl. Pius IX, called the twentieth General, or (LD xxiii, 396).
Ecumenical Council of the Church to gather in St
Peter’s, the Vatican Basilica.
Acres of paper have been covered and gallons of ink
spilled arguing about Newman’s reaction to Vatican
Vatican I met between 1869 and 1870 – its I – his reluctance to comment on its outcome, the
proceedings hurriedly suspended as the French troops highly nuanced and delayed public response – but it
of Napoleon III approached Rome, although it wasn’t is certainly the case that it caused him to adjust his
formally brought to an end until the decree by which attitude to Councils and Synods.
Pope St John XXIII called the next Council, Vatican II,
ninety years later.
He still understood them to be the normal way of
going about things, but in relation to Divine Will he
Newman was initially delighted by the prospect of seemed now to see them as much an expression of
Vatican I, particularly when he heard that it would God’s permissive will, as His positive will: allowed as
confirm the Pope’s 1854 definition of the Dogma of the much as encouraged, prevented from formal (although
Immaculate Conception. He was less enthusiastic at not necessarily material) error by the Holy Spirit, as
the rumours that it would define Papal Infallibility in much as a positive agency of the truth.
its most advanced form.
He saw, for example, that as much as the moderate
It did neither: the former did not come before Vatican definition of infallibility at Vatican I was true in theory,
I and the latter subject was addressed in a moderate “considered in its effects both upon the Pope’s mind
form that, inopportune as he may have thought the and that of his people, it is nothing less than shooting
definition at all, Newman felt to be quite in continuity Niagara” (Letters & Diaries xxv, 262), in it’s practical
with the ancient faith concerning the Papal Office – result of encouraging an identification of the Papal will
he had been struck, nearly forty years previously when with the Divine – an attitude not entirely unknown in
studying the Council of Chalcedon, by “the great our own time.
power of the Pope (as great as he claims now almost)”
(LD vii, 105).
Newman’s counsel was patience: the boat might yet
be trimmed, the course adjusted, as indeed Vatican
Whatever his enthusiasms and reservations about I was to be by a later Pope, a later Council. What
the coming Council, Newman recognised its limits. applies to Ecumenical Councils certainly holds good
“They cannot’, he wrote to Pusey, “go beyond the divine for Ordinary Synods of Bishops.
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