John Henry Newman was mostly a theologian and educator. He was never at any time directly involved in political affairs. When he wrote on social issues his main preoccupations were religious.
He once wrote to a friend, “it never has been my line to take up political or social questions, unless they came close to me as matters of personal duty”.
Scholars have usually portrayed him as a conservative in politics and some have lamented that he lacked a social conscience.
In his first published book Stephen Kelly, a young researcher from UCD, challenges these common assumptions and aims at providing a more nuanced portrait of Newman’s political and social thought.
He rejects the claim that Newman was not aware of political and social problems and, moreover, that he continued to be a conservative over his life.
Withdrawn
Kelly acknowledges that in his years in Oxford Newman remained withdrawn from contemporary political and social affairs but with his conversion to Catholicism Newman acquired a stronger social conscience.
Although he was neutral of party politics, in some of the controversies he was involved (papal infallibility, separation of Church and state, temporal power of the Pope) he defended a more liberal perspective.
Kelly relies extensively on Newman’s letters and maintains that even if throughout his life the English cardinal retained a strong bond with the principles of conservatism he cannot be labelled as a Tory.
In the most valuable chapter of this book, published as an article last year in the quarterly Studies, Kelly argues that Newman’s experience in Dublin and the involvement of some members of the Young Irelanders in the new established Catholic University of Ireland brought him to reconsider his disbelief in democracy.
Unfortunately the same level of detail and accuracy that Kelly shows in his account of Newman’s years in Ireland is not employed in the rest of the book.
Liberal
Sections are dedicated to the Church-state relations, to the idea of liberal education and to Newman’s analysis of the British constitution from an ‘Old Tory’ perspective.
In a chapter on ‘Newman the historian’ Kelly surprisingly claims that objectivity and rational analysis was always of secondary importance for Newman as he was unable to detach himself from his theological beliefs.
In spite of his ambitions Kelly is not always convincing. The main limitation of his work is that he uses the simplistic conservative/liberal opposition to explain and understand complex phenomena.
For instance, if in Newman’s times the life of the Church was simply a battle between liberal Catholicism and Ultramontanism, as Kelly portrays, and therefore Newman stood on the liberal side in his understanding of papal infallibility as it was recently defined by the first Vatican Council, the logical conclusion would be that also Pius IX, who was ultimately responsible for the dogmatic formulation, was a liberal.
Spiritual loyalty
Newman’s political views didn’t change so much if towards the end of his life, in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in 1875, he could write: “No one can dislike the democratic principle more than I do. No one mourns more than I, over the state of Oxford, given up, alas! to liberalism and progress … All I know is, that Toryism, that is, loyalty to persons, springs immortal in the human breast; that religion is a spiritual loyalty; and that Catholicity is the only divine form of religion. And thus, in centuries to come, there may be found out some way of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with ‘Progress’ and ‘Liberalism’.”
And yet, according to Kelly, this letter “boosted Newman’s reputation as a champion of an elegant and reasonably liberal-minded Catholicism”!
This is not the first full-length attempt to study Newman’s political and social thought, but the only one produced after the complete publication of his letters and diaries.
Even considering the limitations just briefly noted, this work gives insights to the teachings of an original and influencing thinker.