St. John Henry Newman

“Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” 

This, one of St. John Henry Newman’s most famous sayings, aptly describes his life.  A member of the Church of England, Newman had an encounter with Christ at age 15 that left him with a passionate desire for God.  This led him first to the Bible and to an evangelical, Calvinist approach to faith.  But realizing he needed help in interpreting Scripture, he then plunged into the writings of the Fathers of the Church.  There he discovered the importance of the eucharist.  Therefore, as a young Anglican clergyman, he launched “the Oxford movement” which, by a series of popular pamphlets, sought to bring Anglicans back to a deeper sacramental life and to faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. 

Further reading of the early Church Fathers finally brought him to a very uncomfortable and inconvenient realization: that the Catholic Church was the true church of Christ and that he was therefore obliged in conscience to enter it.  This obedience cost him his position at Oxford, his livelihood, his Anglican priesthood and his friends. 

Predictably, Newman was ridiculed by Anglicans for his “popery.” What was surprising was that he was suspected by some Catholics of not being sufficiently Catholic even after he studied in Rome and been ordained a Catholic priest.  Some zealous English Catholics had an idea of papal infallibility that regarded the political actions of the Pope and even his private opinions as unquestionable.  When Newman expressed reservations about such extremism, some branded him disloyal to the Pope.  Yet ironically, when the First Vatican Council finally defined the dogma of papal infallibility a few years later, it was Newman’s conception of the matter which was approved, namely, that the Pope’s infallibility is limited to those times that he teaches formally and definitively on faith or morals.  Eight years after the council, Leo XIII became Pope and vindicated Newman by making him a cardinal.

It is very fitting, therefore, that the Catechism cites Newman, a man who sacrificed so much to follow his conscience, in its teaching on conscience as the voice of God.