John Cornwell's Hijacking of John Henry Newman by the Rev. Robert Barron

Sept. 17, 2010 — -- John Cornwell's recent article condemning Pope Benedict XVI for hijacking the legacy of John Henry Newman, turning the great English "liberal" into a "conservative," is a prime example of the danger of using such tired and unhelpful categories to characterize the thought of serious people.

Taking certain texts of the great cardinal out of their literary and historical contexts, Cornwell argues that Newman was the leading liberal Catholic thinker of his time. Then he insinuates that, were he alive today, Newman would be radically out of step with the reactionary Joseph Ratzinger who is, curiously enough, beatifying him.

Well just for starters, I wonder how he squares that judgment with Newman's own famous self-assessment in the speech that he gave upon being named a cardinal: "I consider my entire life's work, both as an Anglican and a Catholic, to have been a battle against liberalism in matters of religion!"

If we're truly interested in interpreting Newman's thought accurately, we might begin by unpacking this remark. By "liberalism," Newman meant the view that "there is no truth in matters of religion," that religion, in a word, is a function of subjective whim or feeling. He was absolutely consistent on opposing this kind of religious subjectivism all his career.

When he was still an Anglican and leader of the Oxford Movement, Newman identified one of his central convictions as the "dogmatic principle," which is to say the affirmation of the objective, intellectual content of religion. And in his midcareer "Idea of a University," Newman strenuously objected to the marginalizing of theology from the circle of proper university disciplines, under the false pretext that religion has to do with private emotions.

Now, it is glaringly obvious that this sort of approach to religion -- privatized, subjective, feeling-based, and relativistic -- is prevalent today. And this helps to explain why Joseph Ratzinger, who has identified the "dictatorship of relativism" as the chief spiritual problem of the present day, is happy to make common cause with John Henry Newman.