Church has much to learn from this convert from Anglicanism: Pell.
By Anthony Barich
The impending beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman will further prompt clear thinking about conscience and help the Catholic Church’s understanding of the priesthood and of Mary, Sydney Cardinal George Pell said.
In a statement posted August 12 on The Cause for the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman website, www.newmancause.co.uk, Cardinal Pell said that the British cardinal’s beatification comes at a “good time for the Church”, and expressed hope that it would encourage Catholics to rediscover Newman’s own God-centered understanding of conscience within Catholic tradition.
In a column titled, “Newman, Conscience, and the primacy of Truth”, Cardinal Pell said there are “numerous ways’ in which the beatification of Newman will help to strengthen and renew the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Pell added that Newman’s understanding of the priesthood would help the Church, as the British cardinal insisted that Christ’s priests “have no priesthood but his; they are merely Christ’s shadows and instruments”.
Newman’s devotion to Mary will also help the Church. His words describing the Mother of God as being “like a tower who stood by the cross and stood upright to receive the blows which the long passion of her Son inflicted upon her,” are timeless and timely for all Catholics.
Cardinal Pell said that Cardinal Newman’s writings carefully distinguish the “proper understanding of Christian conscience from its secular alternative, which in one way or another is a creation of man”.
Quoting Cardinal Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Cardinal Pell said that conscience in the modern age “has been superseded by a counterfeit” which earlier times would never mistake for conscience because it is merely “the right of self will; the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience”.
Aligning Newman with Pope Benedict XVI’s analysis of ‘the dictatorship of relativism’, Cardinal Pell emphasised that Newman’s understanding of conscience is in “the mainline of the Christian tradition, which upholds the view that we do not create truth but stand underneath it”.
“Even conscience, therefore, must be ‘judged by conformity to the truth, and to the Word of God,” Cardinal Pell said, adding that Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk showed that conscience is “fulfilled and completed only when it embraces the Faith and Morals taught by the Catholic Church”.
Cardinal Pell said that Newman maintained that “knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith”, and that “the Church fears no knowledge”, although secularised knowledge often fears the Church.
This is not, Pell said, because the Church’s claims are intrinsically ridiculous or unreasonable but because they emphasise truths about the key questions like the humanity of the unborn child, the old, disabled and sick, and the wrongness of unjust working conditions.
Cardinal Newman, a convert from Anglicanism who died in Birmingham on August 11, 1890, was declared Venerable on January 22, 1991.
The Vatican announced on July 3 that Pope Benedict XVI had signed the decree recognising as miraculous the healing of a US deacon, which clears the way for the British Cardinal’s beatification.