It seems certain that John Henry Newman will be beatified some time this year.  People have often asked me why he has not yet been canonized.  My reply has always been quite simple:  because there has not been enough prayer invoking his intercession.  Because of the intellectual nature of Newman’s heroic work for the Church, there was never a widespread popular cult in Birmingham.  But in recent years there has been a change:  all over the world people have begun seriously to pray not only for his canonization but also for his intercession.  And now at last it seems a miraculous healing has been worked through Newman’s intercession.  If this is so, then I have no doubt that sooner or later another miracle will be worked, especially as more and more people will be praying through Newman following the beatification.  Of course, it is humanly impossible to be certain if and when he will be canonized, but what it is possible to be certain about is the inevitability, in the event of canonization, that Newman will be declared a Doctor of the Church.

A Doctor of the Church has to be a canonized saint because he or she is much more than a very learned or original theologian; he or she is literally an official teacher of the Church.  If this happens, then Newman will be a Doctor of the Church for all times and seasons.  But I believe he will certainly be seen to be the Doctor of the Church for the era of Vatican II, just as St Robert Bellamine is the Doctor of the Church par excellence for the Tridentine era.  After all, if Newman is, as he has often been called, ‘the Father of the Second Vatican Council’, then presumably there is no better prism through which to understand and interpret the teachings of Vatican II than his own thought and writings.  

The Second Vatican Council would have been impossible – that is, in the form it took – without the French scholars and theologians, most notably the Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, of the so-called Ressourcement or retrieval of the sources, named after their famous critical edition of the Fathers, Sources chrétiennes.  This return to the patristic sources of the Christian tradition had already been anticipated a hundred years earlier by Newman and his fellow Tractarians in their Library of the Fathers.  And it was the Fathers, as Newman always said, who eventually led him into the Roman Catholic Church.  In other words, it was the same formative influence that underlay both Newman’s thought and so much of the teaching of Vatican II.

Apart from this general way in which the Tractarian Newman’s own ressourcement had anticipated the French ressourcement which laid the ground for Vatican II, there are also very specific respects in which Newman anticipated the Council documents, as well as almost certainly influencing the actual text of one of them.  First and most important is the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, which must surely be the foundational document of a Council which was overwhelmingly about the Church herself.  Newman knew that the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, which was suspended before it could complete its proceedings, would have to be modified by a wider ecclesiology.  Besides, his own study of the early Church showed how successive Councils complemented, supplemented, and completed the teaching of previous Councils.  He was confident that there would be another Council sooner or later to place the Petrine office within a larger context.  This, of course, was done in the chapter of Lumen Gentium which explains the primacy of the pope as the headship of the whole college of bishops.  He would also have welcomed the chapter on the role of the laity as he deplored the excessively clerical character of the nineteenth century.  And the final chapter on the Blessed Virgin Mary fully vindicated his own balanced scriptural and patristic Mariology.  However, more important than these convergences is Newman’s fundamentally sacramental understanding of the nature of the Church that he had learned from his study of the Greek Fathers, namely, that, far from being primarily hierarchical, the Church is first and foremost a mystery, the temple of the Holy Spirit, being the communion of all those who have received the Holy Spirit in baptism.  He would have been delighted by the first two chapters of Lumen Gentium which define this essential nature of the Church and which differ so fundamentally from the post-Tridentine ecclesiology that predominated in Newman’s day.  The rediscovery of the charismatic dimension of the Church in these two chapters, which Pope John Paul II called one of the most significant achievements of the Council, would have resonated with Newman, who, during both his Anglican and Catholic years, showed a keen awareness of the great importance of charismatic figures like St Benedict, who like others was not a priest, and how they needed the hierarchical dimension of the Church to flourish as was demonstrated by the example of Wesley whom the Church of England was unable to accommodate. 

Newman’s own cautious ecumenism would have welcomed the Decree on Ecumenism, but with some wariness.  In particular, I think he would have thought it unrealistic not to be clear about the degree of liberalization and secularisation that had overtaken the churches of the Reformation since the nineteenth century.  He had hopes of reconciliation between Rome, which he thought should be ready to make concessions, and Anglo-Catholics; but the prospect of full corporate reunion between Rome and Canterbury he dismissed as wholly unrealistic.  History has shown how far-sighted he was.  There are three other major documents of the Council that Newman anticipated.  First, the dogmatic Constitution on Revelation reflects Newman’s own view of the inseparability of Scripture and Tradition, implicitly rejecting the post-Tridentine ‘two sources’ theory.  Again, the document’s understanding of the inspiration of Scripture as extending only to truth relating to salvation is consonant with Newman’s position that was advanced for its day.  The paragraph on the development of doctrine is the one text in the conciliar documents where Newman’s direct influence can be felt. The decrees on non-Christian religions and on the Church’s missionary activity, allow for the possibility of religious truth outside the Christian revelation, just as Newman had done, who seems even to have gone beyond the Council in allowing for salvation without the involvement in some way of the Church.  The pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, the most problematic of the Council’s documents, would have had a somewhat mixed reaction from Newman.  He would have approved of the desire to engage with the world as opposed to the siege mentality of the Church of Pio Nono.  On the other hand, he would surely have been worried about an optimism, not to say pelagianism, in the document that was inconsistent with the reality of a fallen, sinful world, and for the apparent acceptance of secular autonomy in secular matters in one particular paragraph.  The Declaration on Religious Freedom, on the other hand, he would surely have seen as a good example of development according to the criteria for genuine developments that he put forward in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, even though it appeared to Archbishop Lefebvre, most notably, to be a case of a complete volte face on the part of the Church.  In his own time, he had seen only too clearly how impractical and counter-productive it was to deny religious freedom to Protestants in Catholic countries, on the ground that Catholicism was the true religion and that the state should not tolerate error.  He saw that the Church had to make its way in an increasingly pluralistic world through reason not force.  

 In the wake of the First Vatican Council, Newman had many interesting things to say about Councils in general.  When he looked at the history of the early Church, he was struck by the way the Church ‘moved on to the perfect truth by various successive declarations, alternately in contrary directions, and thus perfecting, completing, supplying each other’.  Vatican II itself was no progression from Vatican I in the Ultramontane direction.  What, therefore, is referred to disparagingly as the ‘restorationism’ of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI would seem not to be some unfortunate accident of history merely delaying the inevitable but a real example of the way in which the Church moves ‘alternately in contrary directions’, precisely, in Newman’s words, to attain to ‘the perfect truth’.  By being defined in isolation, Vatican I’s definition ‘looked extreme’ and needed to be ‘explained and completed’ by Lumen Gentium.  Similarly, Gaudium et Spes’s notorious article 36, which refers to the ‘autonomy of earthly affairs’, looks ‘extreme’ and requires modification in the sense of explanation in the light of article 22 which states that ‘it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear’, since it is Christ who ‘fully reveals man to himself’.  Newman was perfectly well aware that conciliar texts do not speak for themselves, but require a great deal of theological interpretation as well as subsequent teaching by the magisterium.  They also require assimilation by the whole Church.  Councils generally, he thought, threw ‘the existing theological system’ into disorder and inevitably led to acrimonious controversy.  False interpretations were to be expected.  Ultramontanes exaggerated what had been defined at Vativan I; it was only to be expected that the ultra-progressives would do the same after Vatican II.  The phenomenon of so-called ‘creeping infallibility’ after the 1870 definition is paralleled by the so-called ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that equally ignores the actual conciliar texts.       

There are two different kinds of developments that Newman speaks of and that are relevant to the aftermaths of Councils, given that Councils are inevitably not cul-de-sacs but starting-points for new developments.  The first kind is illuminated by one of his most telling images.  At the beginning of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, he argues that, although what he calls a ‘living idea’ like Christianity cannot avoid contact, nor should it, with the world around it, that does not mean that the idea necessarily becomes corrupted in the course of time on the principle that ‘the stream is clearest near the spring’.  On the contrary, he insists that this image does not ‘apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which … is more equable and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full.  It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil.  Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary …’ This point would seem to be very applicable to Vatican II, which took place in the 1960s, a time of great optimism but also of moral and social revolution.  Gaudium et Spes in particular ‘savours of the soil’ of the 1960s; but even apart from the actual text, the conciliar documents were inevitably seen and interpreted through the prism of those times.  If Newman is correct, then, far from the actual participants in and contemporary commentators on the Council having a privileged access to the real meaning and significance of the Council’s documents, the opposite will be the case.  At the time of Vatican I the German church historian Döllinger, who was excommunicated for refusing to accept the definition of papal infallibility, and the Ultramontane Cardinal Manning were paradoxically very much in agreement about the force of the definition, the very limited nature of which we are now in a much better position to appreciate.  Similarly, both the excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre and, at the other extreme, the Swiss theologian Hans Küng have both exaggerated the revolutionary nature of Vatican II, stressing discontinuity rather than continuity with the past.  Distance both from the time when the threatened temporal power of the papacy seemed to be a practically a dogma of faith and from the revolutionary 1960s improves understanding of the texts of Vatican I and Vatican II.

There is another kind of development that Newman refers to in his theology of Councils.  For it is not only a question of the meaning and significance of an ‘idea’ like the teaching of Vatican II becoming more luminous and focused as it is seen in retrospect in the developing life of the Church, but there is also the consideration that Councils open up further developments because of what they don’t say or stress.  Vatican I was unable to complete its agenda and only lasted one year compared with the four years of Vatican II.  Newman’s prediction, therefore, that there would have to be another Council, if not a re-assembled Council, to complete the Council’s incomplete ecclesiology was hardly penetrating in its prescience.  But clearly prediction in the case of Vatican II is more problematic.  We have already seen that Newman’s own reading of the history of the early Church’s Councils did not support any kind of linear progression of the sort favoured by those who look forward to a Vatican III which will have the same priorities as Vatican II but which it will simply pursue in a more ‘progressive’ way.  However, if Newman’s point about what is not said or stressed at a Council is taken as a clue to the future, then there was one glaring omission in the agenda of Vatican II’s: namely, evangelisation – or what Pope John Paul liked to call ‘the new evangelisation’.  His predecessor, Pope Paul VI, had in fact already begun to move the Church in that direction with his Evangelii Nuntiandi, issued in 1974 nine years after the end of the Council.  By that act, Paul VI in effect sent out the message that in one crucial sense the Council was out of date:  a new problem had come to the fore about which Vatican II had nothing to say explicitly.

My own belief is that in fact there is a conciliar text that has turned out to be extremely germane to the subject of evangelisation:  the first two chapters of Lumen Gentium.  For the most surprising and unexpected development since the Council, a development that has shocked and dismayed proponents of the Vatican III school of thought, has been the extraordinary rise of the new so-called ecclesial movements and communities, some of which in fact pre-date the Council.  The excellent theological reason why John Paul used the description ‘ecclesial’ rather than ‘lay’ is because these groups are open to all the baptised, and thus realise in the concrete that organic communion of the baptised, in which the categories of clerical, religious and lay are reduced to secondary importance, which is at the heart of the Church’s recovered understanding of herself as primarily the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Here, then, one could say is a development that exemplifies both of Newman’s two kinds of development applicable to Councils:  on the one hand, the concrete fulfilment in the life of the Church of the key text that presents the Council’s understanding of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore a guide to its authentic interpretation; and, on the other hand, a startling reminder of what the Council failed to speak about.  One is reminded, in conclusion as a footnote, that the Oxford Movement, of which Newman was very largely the founder and leader, consisted of both clergy and laity and is not all that dissimilar to the ecclesial movements of today; similarly, Newman’s clear understanding of the early un-clerical character of his own Oratory of St Philip Neri brings to mind the new ecclesial communities of today.

 
Fr Ian Ker is Lecturer in Theology at Oxford University, and one of the world's leading scholars on John Henry Newman. His written works include John Henry Newman: A Biography (1989).