Pope Francis, Newman and the canonisation of conscience

Thursday, October 24th, 2019

Saints don’t fit into the usual categories of right and left, conservative and liberal.

This is certainly the case with Newman, a 19th-century English intellectual giant and Catholic priest who at the height of his very considerable public renown left a distinguished post at Oxford to start a school and work among the poor of Birmingham.

His groundbreaking theological and literary contributions led Pope Paul VI to call Vatican II “Newman’s Council” and James Joyce to say that Newman was the finest English stylist of the 19th century.

Newman didn’t write a theological treatise on conscience, but the theme played a prominent role in some of his greatest works — especially the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (his classic account of his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism); Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent and Before Newman, the Catholic theological tradition affirmed a two-part, integrated understanding of conscience.

First, conscience referred to an inalienable and general human orientation to seek truth, do good and shun evil.

Second, conscience also referred to practical and specific moral judgments about something that has been done or is to be done.

Newman adapted this tradition in a distinctive way.

He recast the notion of conscience as a general orientation by emphasizing more the connection of conscience to freedom, responsibility and belief in God.

“Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts … I shall drink — to the Pope, if you please — still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

Newman found classic proofs for the existence of God to be wanting.

By contrast, his personalist and felt experience of conscience provided all the “proof” he needed.

He said of this experience: “When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness — just like that I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend.

The echo implies a voice, the voice a speaker.

That speaker I love and fear.”

In turn, Newman connected the practical judgment of conscience to his vivid sense that, in concrete moral matters, there is always an exception to the rule.

Conservative Catholics have praised Newman’s writing on conscience for its emphasis on truth: The truth that Newman found in becoming a Catholic and the truth that he fought to defend against the relativizing forces of 19th-century philosophical liberalism.

Similarly, conservatives have praised his rejection within the church of a singular reliance on what he called “private judgment” or conscience.

But this conservative appreciation of Newman has often overlooked how he situated conscience within a richly personalist, affective, social and historical world.

Indeed, he rejected a singular emphasis on a subjectivist, “private judgment.”

But, at the same time, he affirmed an indispensable role for conscience in the life of the church when he said: “Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide … .”

Here Newman anticipates a mutuality of which Francis has similarly said: “We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church….No; it is the experience of ‘holy mother the hierarchical church’ … the church as the people of God, pastors and people together.”

Moreover, Newman’s most famous statement on conscience — “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts … I shall drink — to the Pope, if you please — still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards” — has found disfavor among Catholics favoring a strong role for the infallibility of the church and the pope. Continue reading