THE
P RTAL
July 2017
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Risk Taking
Deacon Stephen Morgan asks what
John Henry Newman would do
O ver the
few gloriously hot, sunny, blue-skied days in early June, almost all of the active clergy of the
Diocese of Portsmouth – including four of the five Ordinariate priests who combine their Ordinariate
duties with serving diocesan parishes – gathered near Windsor for our Convocation: the first in twenty years.
It was a time of great fraternal conviviality, of
profound and sustained reflection and, most of all,
of prayer with and for one another. Our reflection –
Divine Renovation of parish life – was led by a priest of
the Diocese of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Fr James Mallon,
who was at pains to stress a number of things: that
he wasn’t an American but a Canadian (have you
noticed how Canadians always do that?); that he had
been born and spent his childhood here in Britain, in
Glasgow; and that he was not telling us prescriptively
how we should go about the mission of making Jesus
Christ better known and better loved in His Body
the Church, but how he had sought to do that in the
face of the overwhelming and inescapable evidence
of catastrophic decline in the numbers and fervour of
those Catholics who go to Mass.
Church of England for a Catholic Church of which he
had astonishingly little direct knowledge, would, on
submitting to her Communion find himself becoming
an Oratorian, a spiritual son of St Philip Neri.
The Rome in which Philip Neri came to recognise
God’s definite purpose for him was not unlike the
Britain of today. Opulent and extravagant wealth
existed cheek by jowl with crushing material poverty,
the Church seemed at best irrelevant to the lives of the
poor save and except as a source of cold, cold charity
and to the lives of the rich as a source of further wealth
and power and influence, or as a convenient place to
put unmarriable daughters and idiot younger sons. The
churches themselves were – unless they had wealthy,
aesthetic patrons – in a physically ruinous state that
were almost sacramental signs of the ruinous state of
We could not, he argued, ignore the numbers, nor yet the spiritual health of the Church in the Eternal City. It
could we think that just doing more of the same would wasn’t only Martin Luther who was appalled at early-
achieve different results. He urged us to be prepared to sixteenth century Rome.
take risks, to be prepared to try new things, knowing
that we would risk failure.
Philip Neri might have left it at that, shaken the dust
from his feet and sought another place to love God and
It was difficult for me not ask once again the serve His people but he did not. He took the risk of
question that I asked several months ago, WWJHND? establishing his Oratory as a place of beauty and truth,
What would John Henry Newman do? Helpfully, we goodness and unity at the service of the poor and the
need not speculate, because we know precisely what marginalised, whether spiritually or materially.
he did do; we know the risks he took, the new things
he tried, those that succeeded, those that failed. The
The sons of St Philip have sought to do this ever
whole cursus of Newman’s life was an engagement since. It is certainly what Newman sought to do on the
with the enterprise of taking risks for God. It should Hagley Road in Birmingham and it is, I suggest, what
be no surprise to us that the man who took the risk of he might tell us to do in the face of the incontrovertible
rebuilding a church and building a school at Littlemore, evidence of the present day. You might even say that
who took the risk of the Tracts for the Times and the the programme for Divine Renovation is what used to
Oxford Movement, who took the risk of leaving the be called “the Virtue of Religion”.
The Maronites ... continued from page 6
faith and life when unity was at last re-confirmed?
when critics say the Ordinariates have few prospects,
remember that the great Maronite Church, with its
There are currently over 3.5m Maronites, of which historic witness to the Arab Muslims that is now infused
under half now live in Lebanon. Since the 1970s, most into augmenting the mission and appeal of the fellowship
have found new futures in the Americas, Australia and of all Catholic Churches worldwide, began as a single
Europe. There are 1.4m in South America alone. So, group of monks and lay people way out of town.