Pope Leo XIV has decided to confer the title of Doctor of the Church on St. John Henry Newman. Newman thus joins the exclusive circle of 37 saints – such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux – whom the Church already venerates as Doctors of the Church. Every saint reflects a particular aspect of the life and teaching of Jesus, and each can teach the faithful something through their witness of life and faith. However, because of the exceptional value of their doctrine, some of them receive the honorary title of Doctor of the Church.

John Henry Newman was born in 1801 in London and was raised in the Anglican faith. He carried out his pastoral duties as an Anglican priest with a great sense of responsibility and taught at Oxford University. Together with some friends, he founded the Oxford Movement to renew the Anglican Church through the writing of texts inspired by the teaching of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers. In the 1830s, he was considered the most important Anglican intellectual of his time.

But the more he studied Anglican doctrine, the more doubts he developed, and in 1845 Newman reached the certainty that the fullness of truth was to be found only in the Catholic Church. He converted, was ordained a priest, and brought the Oratory of St. Philip Neri to England. One cannot understand Newman's spirit without considering the community he belonged to: from St. Philip he learned that, for a member of the Oratory, the place of sanctification is first and foremost community life – not so much following an abstract rule, but loving real people, with all their faults. In the following decades, many English Catholics found it difficult to trust this convert, until 1863, when he wrote Apologia pro vita sua to defend the sincerity of his conversion and that of Catholic priests in general. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII appointed him cardinal. At his funeral in 1890, his coffin was followed by a huge crowd, estimated at 20,000 people, including a large number of poor.

Many great thinkers of the 20th century, such as Romano Guardini, Erich Przywara, Edith Stein, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar, recognized the importance of his thought. Fr. Luigi Giussani also read several of his main works as a seminarian. Przywara regarded Newman as a potential new Doctor of the Church, capable of offering a faith-based response to the challenges faced not by ancient or medieval humanity, but by modern and contemporary humanity. According to the Polish Jesuit, Cardinal Newman succeeded in overcoming the typically modern division between the realm of objectivity, exemplified by the natural sciences, and that of subjectivity, exemplified by the Protestant view of faith. I would like to illustrate Przywara's insight in three areas.

The first division Newman overcame was that between reason and truth. In his final University Sermons, while still an Anglican, Newman began to oppose the rationalist belief that the difference between reason and faith lies in the fact that the former is based on strong evidence, while the latter is based on weak evidence. For Newman, reason consists instead in the faculty that proceeds from things perceived to things not perceived, just as faith does. Faith, therefore, uses the method of reason and is reasonable. Defined in this way, however, reason can no longer claim to be infallible. Newman thus identified ways to strengthen and broaden it. First, he asserted that appropriate affections make reason healthier: a person who loves will make fewer mistakes in understanding the one they love. Second, he emphasized the need for a synthetic vision of reality: those who perceive the meaning of individual phenomena and the connections between them understand them more deeply. “A type of philosophical thinking,” he writes, “(...) an insight into the bearing and influence of each part upon every other; without which there is no whole, and could be no centre.”

Thirdly, Newman held that knowledge is a dynamic phenomenon: a person who, as an adult, merely repeats the things they learned as a child , who does not continue to learn permanently from what happens to him, is not in touch with reality. In his work The Development of Christian Doctrine, he also applied this idea to the Church itself, which, over time, comes to understand more deeply the truths it has always professed. Finally, in The Idea of a University, Newman insisted that truth is recognized in communion – in dialogue with friends.

As can be seen from the above, Newman did not consider reason in an abstract way, but as an embodied faculty, closely linked to the individual person and their history. Although this concept of reason is therefore subjective, its task is to recognize objective truth. Newman firmly believed in the existence of dogma, of an immutable truth, which everyone must try to understand as best they can. Though he sought to grasp the Church's teachings as accurately as possible, he never accepted them without rethinking them completely in light of his own experience and first principles.

A second area in which Newman overcame the division between objectivity and subjectivity concerns the relationship between personal moral conscience and authority. Here too, he avoided fundamentalist and one-sided views. For Newman, conscience and authority need each other. As an Anglican, Newman attempted to deepen the Protestant thesis that a person normally converts by meditating on Scripture alone. He therefore examined the sacred texts to see how people were converted in the biblical accounts and was particularly struck by one episode: the encounter between the apostle Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch . The latter was meditating on Isaiah's Songs of the Suffering Servant. When Philip asked him whether he understood what he was reading, the Eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” (Acts 8:31). Newman interpreted this response to mean that a Christian should not try to understand Scripture alone, but rather to seek a teacher who can explain it. The main task of personal conscience, then, is to recognize the authority to follow.

A few years later, Newman went further and asked himself what qualities such authority must have if it claims to explain the meaning of Scripture. He answered: a teacher who wants to explain Revelation must claim to be infallible, otherwise it is not even worth listening to them. Those who seek the truth about God do not seek personal opinions, but the voice of the Church, that is, the voice of Christ. Having reached this insight, Newman asked to be received into the Catholic Church – not for convenience, but for reasons of conscience.

Twenty-five years after his conversion, the First Vatican Council promulgated the dogma of papal infallibility, and Newman found himself faced with a new problem. Some ultramontane Catholics interpreted the dogma to mean that the Pope was infallible in all his statements. Newman reaffirmed the importance of infallibility, but without forgetting the other side of the coin, namely the moral conscience of the individual. Without denying the Church’s authority to teach on matters of faith and morals, the Cardinal stated: “If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

For Newman, moral conscience and authority are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. A person who sincerely seeks the good and is aware of their own limitations cannot but desire to find an authority that can guide them in their search. Conversely, an authority such as that of the Church, which has no means of physical coercion at its disposal, can only appeal to the conscience of the individual, hoping that they will recognize the truth. For Newman, the Church and moral conscience are two vicars of Christ, whose task is to assist the individual in their search for the will of God.

A third tension that Newman overcame is that between the ‘moralists’ – who, by virtue of the common call to holiness, urge everyone to observe moral law – and the ‘laxists,’ who justify their faults by the fact that all men are sinners and that God is merciful. Newman asked what distinguished the ancient virtuous man and the Christian saint. He answered this question as follows: the ancient virtuous person, such as the Greek philosopher Aristotle, follows a commendable path of asceticism that leads him to become increasingly good and perfect. Yet the result of this path is that, over time, he begins to increasingly despise his brothers who have not chosen the same path and remain trapped in sin.

The Christian saint, on the other hand, as he advances along the path of faith, hope, and charity, increasingly recognizes himself as a sinner. He cannot despise sinners because he feels he is one of them. Indeed, he will admit to being the greatest sinner of all, partly because he recognizes himself as responsible for the sins of his brothers. For the ancient philosopher, the measure of morality is himself. For the Christian saint, the measure of morality is Christ. Comparing his own life to that of Christ, even the holiest person cannot but admit that he is still very far from perfection.

With holiness and with closeness to God, repentance grows, as does sorrow for one's sins. “Only Catholic saints alone confess sin, because they alone see God (...). It is the sight of God, revealed to the eye of faith, that makes us hideous to ourselves, from the contrast which we find ourselves to present to that great God at whom we look.”