Dr Pusey: Newman's conversion was "perhaps the greatest event which has happened since the communion of the churches has been interrupted ... If anything could open their eyes to what is good in us, or soften in us any wrong prejudices against them, it would be the presence of such a one, nurtured and grown to ripeness in our church, and now removed to theirs".
(Thanks to Mgr Wilkinson for this gem.)
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7 comments:
I love the "nurtured and ripened" by "us" then "removed" to "them" . He should just admit the truth of the matter. Newman made an enquiry and realised he was in the wrong place. It was his quest for truth that nurtured him and the enquiry that ripened him. He left of his own free will.
Dear Father, well, in a way, this can be applied to the many priests of the Ordinariate, and you in particular.
The motto of my school (Holy Ghost Fathers) was "Ignis vibrante lumine" from the Lauds hymn for Pentecost "Beata nobis gaudia". Could you please tell us, what with Pentecost coming up soon, more about that hymn?
My Church History tutor, himself very well-read in Newman, once said: "Were Newman alive to-day, he would undoubtedly join the Orthodox Church."
I agree.
Newman of course spent quite a lot of time trying to explain things to Anglicans.
http://newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume1/index.html
@Patricius: In my opinion your Church History teacher was kidding himself. See the passage beginning "Deeply do I feel" on page 22 here: https://archive.org/stream/a544055000newmuoft#page/21/mode/2up
In my opinion your Church History teacher was kidding himself.
Perhaps. I am not well-enough read in Newman to venture an opinion; but to my recollection he never seriously considered the claims of the Orthodox Church vis-a-vis Rome. And it seems to me that many of the considerations and arguments by which he found Anglicanism wanting, and Rome compelling, tell in favour of Orthodoxy at least as strongly as they do in favour of Roman Catholicism.
In any case the passage that you cite and link to shows only how he actually felt and believed about the Papacy in the nineteenth century. It tells us nothing about how he would have felt and believed if he had lived, and considered these issues, in the twenty-first. The Roman Catholic Church is (to a certain extent) different now from what it was in Newman's time; and the Orthodox Church, at the very least, is much more visible and well-known in the West than it was in Newman's time. Both of those things make it at least conceivable that Newman might have taken a different path.
Where the sentiment, or where the quotation?
IF the latter, then the issue of The English churchman dated 16 October 1845. Cf. the issue of The British magazine and monthy register dated 1 November 1845 (=vol. 28 (July-December 1845), p. 528 ff. (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/chi.79237724?urlappend=%3Bseq=546).
@Chris Jones:
"but to my recollection he never seriously considered the claims of the Orthodox Church vis-a-vis Rome" It is all ifs, buts, mights. I don't know much about Orthodoxy but I do know that it is the preferred resort for many ABP(1) Christians. Which Newman was not.
Newman rejected Orthodoxy as necessarily Erastian (2), in a passage which is rather brief. In the first of the Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (lecture 5 is the one for which he was accused of criminal libel) he gives a hilarious account of a Russian Prince (=Anglican controversialist) denouncing British (=Catholic) ideas to show that the Protestant habit of selectively quoting Catholic works without any attempt to understand the context leads to absurdity. The passage partly relies for its effect on the fact that Russia was not very well known.
I think Newman, who had to deal with constant misreporting of his actual true beliefs, feelings and actions (before and after becoming a Catholic), would think speculation of what he might have done, had he lived in a different time, rather silly.
(1) "Anything But the Pope"
(2) http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume1/lecture6.html#branch
(3) http://www.newmanreader.org/works/england/lecture1.html#caricature
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