Given at the thanksgiving Mass for the canonisation of St John Henry Newman at Newman Catholic College on 30th October 2019.
A colleague was talking about his family. Of his four children, one practices the faith, another is interested but rarely attends church and the other two have no real interest at all. He often asks why this is the case. Did they do anything wrong? Can it only be a matter of taste which relates to different personalities? Of course, this is a question that many Catholic parents face. We can say that faith is a gift but then does this imply that God only gives the gift to some and not to others? Have the others rejected the gift? There are no simple answers yet we face this phenomenon as many children receive communion, some are confirmed and a few continue to practice in their latter teens and into early adulthood. Certainly the wonder of a child brings some back to the Church but it is not always sustained.
In 2016, Stephen Bullivant produced a report on the state of Christianity in England and Wales. The percentage of people who identified as having no religion was 25% which was almost half of those who identified in the 2014 census at 48.5%. On the other hand, we are aware of many different religions around us, especially in this area, Islam and Hinduism. At the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Neasden Temple, Diwali is being celebrated this week. As we look around the world, religion is more passionately debated and defended than it has been for many decades.
Timothy Radcliffe has recently written a book in which he explores the contemporary question of religion and opens up these questions. He is concerned with the opening up of the mind and the heart to the religious question, to wonder, awe and beauty, and the search for the truth. This contrasts with the technocratic and utilitarian approach that dominates so much of our discourse and preoccupies our time: ‘a world simply irreligious’ to quote Neman (The Infidelity of the Future, 1873). How many people miss what is going on around them because they are staring at what they have downloaded on the phone. The danger is that the mind becomes narrower and narrower as its images are reinforced by the downloaded images of choice.
When we reflect on the awakening of religious consciousness and the search for truth, then we can look to our new saint, St John Henry Newman, for inspiration and intercession. Newman contrasts those who fail to see the world through religious eyes with those who do.
At the age of 15, the young John Henry fell ill and had to spend the summer holiday at school, partly because of his illness, and partly because of the misfortunes of his father’s bank at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. During this time he was introduced to various evangelical Christian books and he underwent a strong evangelical conversion. He became aware of ‘the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. He had a deep and heartfelt sense that this ‘would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory’. The experience of the Creator makes one feel very humble and small and so he writes, ‘I thought only of the mercy to myself’. This feeling would fade but the conviction would grow as well as the relentless search for truth and the following of that truth in his conscience. It did give him an unending sense of the experience of visible and invisible worlds. Later he would develop this first grasp of a new understanding:
‘It is otherwise with the theology of a religious imagination. It has a living hold on truths which are really to be found in the world, though they are not upon the surface. It is able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to prove - that good is the rule, and evil the exception. It is able to assume that, uniform as are the laws of nature, they are consistent with a particular providence. It interprets what it sees around it by this previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials. Thus conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion.’ (Grammar of Assent, p117)
The first challenge is to awaken the religious imagination of the students of the college by whatever means possible: art, poetry, music, beauty and then to help them go beyond themselves and open up to the transcendent and spiritual dimension of the personality. Once opened, as the final sentence of the quote indicates, the habits of personal religion – prayer, the sacraments, devotion – deepen the grasp of the mystery and help it to be penetrated. The life of prayer in this college witnesses to the truth that you and I hold in our hearts, that enables us to get up each new day and face its challenges. Our trust is in Jesus Christ.
A second challenge is to hold together an understanding of reality which includes the worlds both visible and invisible. The educational system with an ever narrow focus down to A-levels achieves depth in particular subjects but has the danger of eclipsing a wider perspective, especially in the lives of scientists and mathematicians whose subject focus becomes more empirical or logical. St John Henry argued the interconnectedness of all reality and desired that the university be a place where this reality and its interdependences are explored. Newman wrote that the university should be a place that seeks ‘to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man’ (Idea, p 124).
Interconnectedness is essential to understanding the relationships between the sciences in order to discover the truth of the creation and glimpse the mind of the Creator. I remember that one of the first theology books I read was a small volume that looked at the relationship between creation, theology and evolution. For the college, and education today, the challenge is to continue to teach subjects in depth and at the same time cultivate that spirit of broad enquiry which sees the world as a book to be read and explored in terms of the relationships between particular sciences and subjects.
Our saint writes on the reason for Catholic universities, ‘I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men converse with science all day, and lodge with religion in the evening. It is not touching the evil, to which these remarks have been directed, if young men eat and drink and sleep in one place, and think in another: I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral discipline.’ (Sermons Preached on Various Occasions; 1. Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training)
A third challenge is to deepen the understanding of the importance and dignity of the vocation to serve in Catholic education. Our new saint helps us to understand that he had a call and vocation to educate. He began as a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford. He believed that individual tutoring was much more beneficial for the student than general lectures. His general lecturing impeded effective tutoring. However, this argument was not accepted by Provost Hawkins and he did not have further students assigned to him. In 1832 he writes, ‘An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic system; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron university, and nothing else.’ (Strange, Newman: The Heart of Holiness, 101 quotes from Historical Sketches, iii, p 74). This sentiment is echoed in the words of Pope St Paul VI that ‘Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.’ (Evangelii nuntiandi 41)
Thank you for your service to education and congratulations to Newman College on having a new saint. St John Henry Newman, pray for us.