What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry Newman and Papal Infallibility, 1865-1875.

Gaffney, James

Newman's thoughts about papal infallibility have been reviewed by all his major biographers and analyzed and criticized by a variety of theologians. Nevertheless, Page's contribution to that subject is distinctive and valuable. The title question was cited by an Anglican friend who hoped the answer was that N. would rejoin the Church of England in outrage at the 1870 definition of papal infallibility. Although N. rejected that suggestion and others like it immediately and vehemently, it had long been clear to acquaintances that the prospect of such a definition worried him. That preoccupation and thoughts it stimulated appear in several private theological papers and a multitude of letters written during the five years preceding the definition. Subsequent letters reveal a development of N.'s personal interpretation of the definition, made public in the famous 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, which directly defended the doctrine against a critique published by Prime Minister Gladstone, while obliquely defending his own understanding of it against what he considered the exaggerations of Ultramontane Catholics led by Cardinal Manning. N. succeeded admirably in achieving both objectives, despite a second exchange of pamphlets with Gladstone and efforts by Catholic adversaries to elicit a condemnation from the Vatican.

Page provides a unique review of N.'s thoughts and feelings about the defining of papal infallibility as revealed by his letters during the decade from five years before to five years after the first Vatican Council defined it. He proceeds chronologically, quoting generously and judiciously from the letters, while filling in background of the correspondence with exceptional clarity and sensitivity. As one who read N.'s letters of this period with the aid only of general biographical and historical works, I envy those who will come to them with this excellent resource at their disposal. And despite having read with some care the letters Page cites and discusses, I must acknowledge that his single-minded pursuit of a single theme through this multitudinous correspondence provides a focus that is newly illuminating. It shows how superficial are the standard summations (including N.'s own) that show him as having at first doubted the opportuneness of defining this doctrine which he heartily accepted, and afterwards embraced the new dogma and furnished it with a soothing interpretation. The doubts N. had expressed in his Via Media about the Church's infallibility were shed in the process of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, but specifically papal infallibility was not what he had in mind. Rather it was church consensus, expressed normally through the bishops and most solemnly in general councils with which he associated infallibility. His touchstone was always the Augustinian formula securus iudicat orbis terrarum, a phrase that recurs mantra-like through all this correspondence.

Anger and anxiety are conspicuous in these letters. The anger is mainly at churchmen N. considered to be pushing an extravagant agenda towards a dubious consensus contrived by arrogance and guile. The anxiety is focused on his unsettled personal role, which he kept private throughout the controversy despite friends who urged him to take a public stand. To one correspondent he states candidly that his reticence was motivated by fear of being officially denounced and thereby discredited. In fact, his opposition became effectively public when a strong letter to his bishop, Ullathorne, was circulated and eventually disclosed by the press, an outcome at which his professed surprise can hardly have been total. There was additional anxiety over how - not whether - he would personally embrace the doctrine, and he was prepared to base that commitment on sheer obedience, since the pope's jurisdictional power to command was not in question. During the time of widespread uncertainty about the definition's doctrinal status, a number of English Catholics sought N.'s counsel after being told in confessionals that it was sinful to doubt papal infallibility. His advice, to seek less narrow-minded confessors, was not always easy to follow.

N.'s impassioned correspondence during this whole time makes it hardly credible that his misgivings were no deeper or more complex than simple doubt about the definition's "timeliness." That is not to suggest that N. retained to the end his doubts about the genuineness of consensus. But he only relinquished them after the Council was suspended, when it became clear that the opposition minority of bishops had passively acquiesced in the definition. He had no sympathy with Dollinger's readiness to break with the Church over the issue, and there is no reason to suppose N.'s defense of the doctrine in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was in any way disingenuous.

At the same time, the letters do support Page's conclusion, which he saves till the end of the book, that N. rightly perceived the definition of papal infallibility to have introduced a lopsided view of the magisterium, which in after years the Church would need to correct. Something of this was achieved at Vatican II, and the achievement probably did owe something to N.'s influence. Since then, however, the Church has experienced a renewed emphasis on doctrinal authority concentrated in the papacy that is strongly reminiscent of Pius IX. Page shares a hope that he cites from Nicholas Lash, for a third Vatican Council at which N.'s perspective would be better appreciated and would find expression in more historically enlightened and consequently more balanced doctrine.

JAMES GAFFNEY Loyola University, New Orleans