THE P RTAL
August 2017 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
On Consulting the Faithful
Dr Stephen Morgan
love St Mary ’ s Church , Redenhall . The flint and stone flush-work of the tower , the size of the interior ,
I quite disproportionate to the needs of the population of the village at any time in the six hundred years since its construction , the pre-reformation brass double-headed eagle lectern ( probably one of only three in the country ) and it ’ s location , towering above the rise of the old High Road from Harleston in Norfolk to Bungay in Suffolk , all make for a most striking church in a part of England replete with striking churches . St Mary ’ s , Redenhall , is not only notable for its architecture , fittings and situation but also for its dedication . Redenhall church isn ’ t merely “ St Mary the Virgin ”, nor any other of a hundred pious dedications to Our Lady common to medieval English churches : its proper name is the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary , Redenhall .
Growing up , I had been led to believe ( taught explicitly , I suspect ), that the Catholic Dogma of the Assumption , which could not be proved from Sacred Scripture , was a typical example of the corruption of Christianity by Roman Catholics ( the first word stressed to underline the essentially foreign , unBritish nature of the religion ), whose beliefs about Mary ( always referred to as just “ Mary ” and nothing else ) were an impious fable and tantamount to idolatry .
The Assumption – along with its sister Dogma , the Immaculate Conception – was clearly something foisted on credulous folk by scheming priests and smacked of the worst excesses of declining Papal temporal power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .
What has all this to do with Bl . John Henry Newman and on consulting the faithful , let alone Redenhall church ?
Newman ’ s unsigned article in the July 1859 edition of Rambler was entitled “ On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine ”. It would be no exaggeration to say that , along with his remarks on change from the Essay on Development and on conscience in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk , more mischief has been made by deliberate misrepresentations of what he wrote here than anywhere else .
On consulting the faithful is most certainly not a democratisation of belief which leads by a short route to contraception , women priests , gay marriage and ceremonies to mark so-called gender reassignment .
For Newman , the key word is “ faithful ”, understood as “ those filled with Catholic faith ”. The Christian believer is , by virtue of his Baptism and communion in the Church , a repository of an infused sense of the truths of the faith : a sensus fidei . It abides by virtue of the faithfulness of the believer : this faith-filledness is its condition precedent .
When he defined the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950 , Pope Pius XII followed the practice of his blessed predecessor , Pius IX , in asking the Bishops of the whole Catholic Church whether the Dogma was indeed the belief of the faithful . And like Pio Nono in 1854 , concerning the Immaculate Conception , Papa Pacelli got an almost unanimous response in the affirmative .
John Henry Newman knew only too well that the whole Catholic world judges securely what the faith once committed to the saints truly was . The faithful , faith-filled parishioners who witnessed the building of St Mary ’ s , Redenhall , understood well enough that the title of dedication of their splendid church was a part of that .
It stands , high above the River Waveney , as lapidary proof of the truth that “ the Immaculate Virgin , preserved free from all stain of original sin , when the course of her earthly life was finished , was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory , and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things , so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son , the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death .”