By his own admission, the high point of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI was his beatification of St John Henry Newman in Cofton Park, Birmingham, in September 2010. Throughout his adult life Benedict so admired Newman’s “theology of conscience” that he became perhaps the world’s greatest exponent of Newman’s teachings in this field. He was very keen to raise Newman to the altars of the Church.
The young Joseph Ratzinger began to study Newman’s work in depth in 1946 when he entered seminary in Friesing, Bavaria. There, he forged a close friendship with Alfred Läpple, his prefect of studies, who had undertaken a study of Newman’s theology of conscience before the Second World War and who was able to resume his work only after the conflict had ended.
“For us at that time, Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway,” recalled Cardinal Ratzinger in a 1990 speech to mark the centenary of Newman’s death. “We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: ‘I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.’ The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.”
Läpple, in an interview more than a decade later with journalist Gianni Valente, was more to the point. “Newman was not a topic like any other,” he said. “He was our passion.”
Newman’s theology was significant to German Christians of the post-war era because it helped to re-establish the meaning and role of conscience in the aftermath of a period of tyranny. It had already begun to capture the German intellectual imagination in the period after the First World War, however, when Theodor Haecker, an authority on the Danish Lutheran philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, started to translate and publish Newman in German.
Haecker began by writing to the Birmingham Oratory in 1920 to ask for a copy of A Grammar of Assent, Newman’s work on the philosophy of faith. In the following two years a further 10 works of Newman were despatched to him.
Haecker, who subsequently became a Catholic, believed that Germany was fertile territory for Newman’s ideas thanks to the evolution of phenomenological philosophy. In a letter to Fr Joseph Bacchus he wrote: “Some 10 or 20 years ago, the deep originality of Cardinal Newman’s thinking would, even by our philosophers, scarcely have been recognised at all, but now, mainly owing to Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] one has largely abandoned the prejudicial view and arbitrary abstract constructions of a sceptical Psychologism in favour of a candid examination of the mind’s real structure.”
He said that A Grammar of Assent could, as a result, now be “fully understood and deservedly appreciated by the educated class of my country”.
Prof Günter Biemer, a leading German authority on Newman, interpreted this historical moment as a “special Kairos” among his people for the reception of Newman’s theology, discovering also that the enthusiasm Haecker demonstrated was matched by a succession of eminent theologians and philosophers of the inter-war generation, such as Erich Przywara, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Romano Guardini, Matthias Laros and Otto Karrer.
Newman was read later by Sophie Scholl and in 1942 – the year before she was guillotined in Stadelheim Prison, Munich, for urging fellow students to resist “Nazi terror” – she gave two volumes of his sermons to Fritz Hartnagel, her boyfriend, as a farewell present before he left to fight at Stalingrad.
The couple referred to Newman’s theology of conscience in their letters to each other.
Ratzinger was introduced to Newman by Läpple on the back of this intellectual ferment and studied his writings more deeply under his fundamental theology tutor, Gottlieb Sohngen, and then under Henrich Fries, the theologian and Newman scholar. Läpple later remarked that Ratzinger was so intellectually curious he was like a “dry cloth soaking up water almost greedily”. Newman would have been irresistible to him.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, he would go on publicly to define conscience in his teachings in precisely the way that Newman intended, rather than the way it has been continually misrepresented as the “right of self will”, or, as what Newman himself disdainfully remarked, as “the very right of conscience to dispense with conscience”.
Both Newman and Benedict speak of conscience as an echo of the voice of God, the “connecting principle between the creature and his Creator”, and the “guide of life, implanted in our nature, discriminating right from wrong” in concrete situations.
To them, it is an expression of the natural law of God written on the heart of every human being and encompassed in the Ten Commandments. Conscience is the internal voice that testifies to this law.
The overall beauty of Newman’s writing led James Joyce to describe him as one of the best prose stylists in the English language of his times, and his writings on conscience are no exception. He describes conscience as the “aboriginal vicar of Christ” that at the same time is “so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course”.
It is the urgent mission of the Church, he argued, both poetically and with sheer clarity, to protect and strengthen it. Such theology found a faithful and eloquent echo in the teachings of Ratzinger who, for instance, observed on one occasion that “all power that the papacy has is power of conscience” and that the silencing of conscience “leads to the dehumanisation of the world and to moral danger, if one does not work against it”.
An appeal to the rights of conscience underpinned the substance of a speech Pope Benedict gave to Parliamentarians in Westminster Hall, London, just two days before he beatified Newman in Birmingham.
Benedict XVI would conclude that the extent and depth of Newman’s ideas have “not yet been fully evaluated” and suggested, before he relinquished the Petrine office in 2013, that Newman should be declared a “great doctor of the Church”, an accolade reserved to just 37 of the greatest saints in history. Some cardinals and bishops would also like Newman to be given the additional title of “Doctor of Conscience”.
As Newman’s ideas are evaluated, the people of this and future generations may, like Benedict, discover a profound relevance to the challenges of times in which the demands of the faith are increasingly in conflict with those of the state. Already, there are some who are finding themselves in predicaments where they find little option but to muster up, in Benedict’s words, “obedience to conscience … obedience to the truth, which must stand higher than any human tribunal”.
Guidance and strength can be found in the teachings of both Newman and Benedict, his diligent student. Their words contain the seeds vital for the transformation of an age threatened by moral confusion, apostasy and barbarism into a luminous new era for Christian civilisation, an age of conscience in which once again people can truly describe themselves, without any hint of irony, as “free”.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.