Newman and his legacy in Vatican II IAN KER


Wisdom of the future


Newman recognised that great church councils have always caused tectonic plates to shift under the Church, often leading to acrimony. Their work, he said, needs explaining, completing and interpreting – a job better done by posterity than by contemporaries


Vatican Council”, adumbrated in his private correspondence what amounts to a mini- theology of great church councils, which is of relevance to our own post-conciliar age. The main point he makes is that councils


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have “ever been times of great trial”. History showed that they had “generally two charac- teristics – a great deal of violence and intrigue on the part of the actors in them, and a great resistance to their definitions on the part of portions of Christendom”.


efore, during and after the First Vatican Council of 1869-70, John Henry Newman, who has often been called “the Father of the Second


Unhappily, councils “generally acted as a


lever, displacing and disordering portions of the existing theological system”, which inevitably led to acrimonious controversy. Councils, too, have unintended consequences. Thus, although the definition of papal infal- libility was very moderate in its scope, Newman had no difficulty foreseeing its con- sequence, “creeping infallibility”. Its effect was aggravated by the lack of a general teach- ing about the Church, which would have had “the effect of qualifying … the dogma”. That the Church had to wait for another council to do this would not have surprised Newman. His study of the early Church’s


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14 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010


councils had showed him that the Church “moved on to the perfect truth by various suc- cessive declarations, alternately in contrary directions, and thus perfecting, completing, supplying each other”. The definition of infal- libility, then, would have to be “completed”, a prophecy that came true at the Second Vatican Council nearly 100 years later. Newman had noticed how the defined doc- trines of the early Church “were not struck off all at once but piecemeal – one council did one thing, another a second – and so the whole dogma was built up”. In the same way, what “looked extreme” after Vatican I needed to be “explained and completed”. A third point that Newman makes is that the teachings of councils require interpretation – although after Vatican II there was much talk of “implementing” its teachings as though they were self-evident. Newman insisted that it is not only theologians who have to “settle the force” of a teaching, just as “lawyers explain Acts of Parliament”, but “the voice … of the whole Church diffusive” has to “make itself heard”, so that “Catholic instincts and ideas” eventually “assimilate and harmonise” the conciliar teachings. There was, on the one hand, what Newman called the “active infallibility” of popes and councils, but there was also what he called “the passive infallibility of the whole body of the Catholic people” in determining the force and meaning of conciliar texts. Understanding that one of the “disadvan- tages of a General Council, is that it throws individual units through the Church into con- fusion and sets them at variance”, Newman could hardly have been surprised by either the Old Catholic schism led by the German church historian Johann Döllinger, or the extremism of the ultramontanes in exagger- ating the scope of the infallibility definition. Nor would he have been surprised by the anal- ogous if reverse situation after Vatican II when both Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers and the liberals on the opposite wing united in exaggerating the revolutionary scope and meaning of the council. However, although Newman deplored the


way Döllinger appealed to history against the council, he could not deny he had been pro- voked by the extreme ultramontanes such as Cardinal Manning, who had employed extraordinary “rhetoric” in his pastoral letter


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