Pope Leo XIV on Thursday confirmed that St. John Henry Newman will soon be recognized as a Doctor of the Church. The move is the latest recognition of the profound influence of Newman on Catholics in the almost 135 years since his death.
Reacting to the news on the social media platform X, Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation wrote, “Tremendous news about one of the truly great thinkers of the modern age.”
Roberts then quoted from one of Newman’s works, “If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society … . It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.”
“We need more of that from our universities,” Roberts added.
Newman’s conversion has been a guidepost for other Protestants looking to swim the Tiber; that is, convert to Roman Catholicism. It refers to the River Tiber, which flows through Rome and is closely associated with the Vatican.
And in the more than a century since Newman lived, we have seen no shortage of other converts. Father Richard John Neuhaus moved from Lutheranism to Rome in 1990. His eventual successor as the editor of First Things, R.R. Reno left the Episcopal Church for the Catholic faith in 2004. Others, such as Daily Signal President and Executive Editor Rob Bluey, are currently making the journey.
The formal recognition of Newman as a spiritual model for Catholics has occurred across three pontificates. Pope Benedict XVI beatified the English cardinal in 2010, and he was canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church by Pope Francis in 2019. In making Newman a Doctor of the Church, the pope is acknowledging Newman’s significant contributions to theology and doctrine and joins an august group that includes Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Hildegard von Bingen.
Newman was born on Feb. 21, 1801, in London as the son of a banker and a descendant of the French Protestants known as the Huguenots (something he has in common with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent). He would go on to study classics at Trinity College, Oxford; become a fellow of Oriel College; and be ordained as an Anglican priest in 1825.
As a teenager, Newman was initially a practitioner of evangelical Christianity, but over time he became a committed high churchman in the Anglican tradition. Newman fell in love with the sacraments and liturgical worship, remnants of Roman Catholicism left behind in the Church of England after the Reformation.
That conviction led the English clergyman to become a leader in the Oxford movement, serving as a contributor of the Tracts for the Times. In these religious publications, Newman and others sought to bring the Church of England back to its “catholic” roots, which was defined by Newman as the faithful practice of early Christianity as elucidated by the church fathers. In this, the English scholar set out to forge a middle path between the “popular Protestants” as he called them and the Roman Catholic Church. But to quote William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
Newman’s embrace of catholic tradition would ultimately lead him to see the modern Roman Catholic Church as the rightful successor of the early Christian church. The Englishman’s discussion of that conclusion would be published in 1845, the same year he would finally enter into communion with Rome. After being ordained a priest of the Catholic Church, Newman devoted considerable effort to improving the situation of his fellow Catholics, who faced bitter persecution in England. Newman was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.