THE TABLET


THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY Founded in 1840


INFLUENCE OF NEWMAN I


t was courteous of Pope Benedict to thank the British peo- ple for the reception they gave him in September 2010, and unique of him to do so by means of a broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day” slot on Christmas


Eve. It became clearer why he did this in his annual address to the Roman Curia just before Christmas. In his resumé of the papal year, he dwelt at some length on the profound impres- sion his apostolic journey to Britain had made on him, hardly mentioning his visits to Malta, Portugal and Spain. Pope Benedict also made clear once more his deep attach- ment to Cardinal Newman, whom he beatified during his visit. Those who have searched for the strongest influence on the life and thinking of Joseph Ratzinger – asking whether it was, say, von Balthasar or Rahner, Aquinas or Augustine – have missed the obvious front-runner. It may have been Newman, for example, who lay behind the Pope’s approach to his broad- cast. It was simple evangelism, explaining the true meaning of the Incarnation as God’s gift of liberation for all humanity. Many listeners will not have understood all of it, and some, none of it; but Newman would have recognised the mysterious power that biblical exposition can have even on secular minds. God works alongside the preacher, as heart speaks unto heart. It was Newman’s contribution to the Catholic understand- ing of conscience that the Pope chose to emphasise in his curial address, rejecting the idea that conscience was a purely sub- jective intuition as if morality could ever be reduced to mere personal opinion. True conscience involves an element of obedience. In Newman’s case, said the Pope, it brought him


into Christianity and later into Catholicism, and continued to guide his life thereafter. This concept of the possibility of objective moral truth is never more necessary than when it is put in doubt. The Pope recalled that in his Westminster Hall address, he had said that democracy itself required “a funda- mental moral consensus ... transcending individual denominations”, adding: “only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function”. This points to a serious problem at the heart of the secular project, which even secularists are beginning to acknowledge. Democracy based on majority opinion alone cannot be a source of moral principles, although it needs them if it is to function. This papal analysis is not without its own problems, not least the unlikelihood of the secular world ever turning to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in order to regain its fun- damental moral consensus. The Pope may see it as desirable, but in any dialogue with the modern world, that expectation is a dead end. If it is to be useful, the trajectory of Newman’s thinking on conscience has to be allowed to lead elsewhere, and must leave room for a greater diversity of opinion, par- ticularly on issues of sexual ethics. The secular world would regard that as non-negotiable. Perhaps all that can realistic - ally be hoped for is a consensus that objective moral truth can and does exist, without an immediate consensus on what precisely it consists of or where it is to be found. That leaves room for genuine debate, as faith interrogates reason, and reason, faith – as the Pope also called on them to do in his speech in Westminster.


LONG MARCH TO NOWHERE O


ne thing is certain about the coming year – there is pain ahead. After the voters failed to give any party a decisive election victory, David Cameron’s coali- tion Government seems to have interpreted that


uncertainty as a mandate for radical change in almost every walk of public life. As a result, there is a growing sense that the Government is moving too far, too fast. This burgeoning spirit of resistance is not confined to the Government’s oppo- nents. In some indiscreet remarks not intended for publication, Vince Cable, the veteran Liberal Democrat and Business Secretary, observed: “There is a kind of Maoist revolution hap- pening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control. We are trying to do too many things.” It is clear that other Lib Dems in government agree. Coalition government was never going to be easy. The two


parties trying to work together have disparate traditions and principles. Those extra difficulties might have persuaded the Conservatives, as senior partners, to proceed cautiously rather than to ratchet up the revolution. But they are in the grip of a fixation which tells them that a major part of the finan- cial deficit they inherited from Labour was the result of the expansion of non-productive public-sector jobs – “wasteful bureaucracy” – which on being dismantled could deliver effi- ciency savings on a grand scale without significantly affecting performance at the sharp end. The unemployed former “waste- ful bureaucrats” would then be absorbed into the private sector. This was, meanwhile, said to be being “rebalanced”, switching


2 | THE TABLET | 1 January 2011


the focus from reliance on financial services to manufactur- ing. But at some time in the future, in ways yet to be specified. These supposed public-sector efficiency savings have already been written into departmental budgets, to promote the Government’s aim of eliminating the financial deficit in four years. That, in turn, was intended to reassure the international bond markets that Britain was free from the risk of a sovereign debt crisis like the ones that affected the credit rating of Greece and, more recently, Ireland. National pride apart, the value of that reassurance is somewhat reduced by the fact that Greece and Ireland were, after all, both rescued, though at the price of a period of national austerity. Britain, it seems, has opted to have the austerity anyway, without going through the crisis. These are stark omens for the coming year. The nation has been bracing itself for hard times, but assumed that they would be under control, a virtuous spell of belt-tightening that would eventually be rewarded. The more realistic prospect is that events will start to control the Government rather than the Government control events – that its reform programme is too complicated to manage, unsound in theory, and relies on too many assumptions. And that those who will bear the great- est burden will be those least able to cope with it – the poor will inevitably be further impoverished. The distinguished polit- ical writer Anthony Howard, in one of his last reported comments before his recent death, prophesied that the Tory- Lib Dem coalition was “going to hell in a handcart” (See Notebook, page 20). If that is bad news for them, it is worse news for the country, worst of all for the most vulnerable.


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