THE
P RTAL
January 2012
Page 12
Blessed John Henry
Cardinal Newman
and Anglican Patrimony
by Harry Schnitker
Nobody will
give me a prize for originality if I suggest that one of England’s newest Beatified,
Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, should be at the centre of a ‘narrative’ for the new Ordinariate.
Now I must immediately declare an interest here: some of my work is carried out on behalf of the Maryvale
Institute, which aims to fulfil Newman’s dream of a Catholic University in these islands, and which was his
first home after his conversion. Even without this vested interest, however, I would still propose Newman to
be at the heart of the Ordinariate.
validity in the Anglican
tradition?
Most of the reasons will be crystal
clear to all: his theology of the
Church, his own personal journey
to Rome, and his deep love for the
culture of the Anglican Church are all
integral elements in the identity of the
Ordinariate. Newman is more than just
the sum of the above, however. He also
poses a crucial question: if the Anglican
Church is not the particularist branch
of the Catholic Church in the British Isles, which is
what he argued prior to his conversion, then is there
any validity in the Anglican tradition?
musical tradition of Anglicanism.
Indeed, this, he argued in The Idea
of a University, would invariably
lead one to Catholicism: “Music,
I suppose … has an object of its
own … it is the expression of ideas
greater and more profound than
any in the visible world, ideas,
which centre indeed in Him whom
Catholicism manifests, who is
the seat of all beauty, order, and
perfection whatever, still ideas after
all which are not those on which Revelation directly
and principally fixes our gaze”.
He applied the same argument to a deeper
This is a challenging question if ever there was one, knowledge of history: “the Christianity of history is
and the Holy Father has given us his answer through not Protestantism. If there ever were a safe truth, it is
the erection of the Ordinariate. Yet this leaves a fair this. To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant”.
amount of work to be done. In Newman’s day, of
course, one had to make a choice: Rome or Canterbury.
These, then, are the guidelines by the man who
However, I would suggest that there is plenty of inspired the Holy Father’s generous creation of the
‘Canterbury’s culture’ to be found in Newman. This is, Ordinariate. A great love for the cultural achievements
perhaps, why so many Catholic contemporaries found of the Anglican Church, combined with a deep
him an ambiguous, if obviously holy, figure.
knowledge of the past will allow the members of
the Ordinariate to begin to construct a narrative
In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua he would write: “And for themselves. It can quite openly acknowledge the
as I have received so much good from the Anglican differences of the past, quite openly emphasise those
Establishment itself, can I have the heart or rather Anglican cultural (and liturgical) elements that enrich
the want of charity, considering that it does for so Catholic culture.
many others, what it has done for me, to wish to see it
overthrown?”
At the same time, it can begin to formulate an identity
that will lead to a new form. Dare I suggest it … a Latin
Of course, that does not mean that he embraced Rite Uniate Church. Over the next year or so, my own
what Anglicanism stood for in a theological sense.
contribution to this narrative will be a series of articles
on the Anglo-Saxon saints that helped shape the new
What he did, undoubtedly, embrace, was the great communities of the Ordinariate.