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Gratian's avatar

Actually, if St. John Henry Newman was named a Doctor of the Church, then he'd be the first Protestant convert named as such, wouldn't he?

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John Pauley's avatar

Newman’s “not easily pigeonholed.” Hear hear!

Perhaps it’s safe to say, though, that one contribution Newman made and can continue to make is exemplified by the fact that his Anglican background and his erudition as a scholar at Oxford of the 1830s provided him with a grounding in patristics that had long been thin-on-the-ground among Catholic theologians and seminaries (and can still be so, alas). In the broadest of terms, yes, Newman was a Protestant convert. But identifying him as such risks pigeonholing him in a way that might ignore Anglicanism’s uniqueness, how that brought Newman to Catholicism, and how that uniqueness (through Newman and others) can help the Catholic Church reclaim its fuller both/and approach to theology. Anglicanism's uniqueness vis-à-vis both the continental Protestant movements and many Catholic theologians: Anglican divines retained a strong sense that patristic sources matter. This appreciation has been weaker in Anglicanism’s Low Church/Evangelical wing (Cranmer himself acknowledged it but played fast and loose with the original sources) than in the High Church wing. John Keble, whose family had been part of the CofE’s old High Church wing, influenced the young Newman—who had been raised in the CofE’s Evangelical wing—when Newman went up to Oxford. Newman (and many of us who have become Catholic by variations on this evangelical-to-Old High Church trajectory) thus grew in his understanding of Catholic theology precisely because of his grounding in Anglicanism’s patristic emphasis.

Among the difficulties Newman had to bear as a Catholic was the fact that he was not primarily a scholastic or manualist kind of theologian, though his thinking was too broad and deep to have thought of dismissing those theological approaches. His preeminence as an authority on patristic sources incurred suspicion from those who did things in the pervasively Roman way (including Cardinal Manning in England, who had little time for Newman’s “old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church.”) The Church needs to breathe with both her lungs--St. John Paul II’s metaphor for East and West living in fuller accord. Another anatomical metaphor is the benefit of both left-brain and right-brain thinking, so to speak. The former representing the more logical/discursive approach of the scholastics and manualists; the latter, the more poetic, reflective approach of the Church Fathers.

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