Saint John Henry Newman, inspirer of conversions: Without his legacy, perhaps I would not be Catholic today

Saint John Henry Newman, that converted clergyman who, for years, was distrusted by more than one in London and Rome, stands today as a lighthouse that continues to inspire many to embrace the Catholic faith like him.

“I am personally grateful for Newman’s vital testimony, because without his legacy perhaps I would not be Catholic today,” confesses Ryan “Bud” Marr, renowned scholar of the English saint, to whom Pope Leo XIV will confer the title of Doctor of the Church this Saturday.

Newman’s memorable phrase—“to be profound in history is to cease to be Protestant”—was decisive in his personal conversion story. When he read it for the first time, “I was studying to be a Protestant pastor,” he reveals in conversation with ACI Prensa.

“I immediately realized that I had to read the rest of Newman’s essay to test the veracity of his claim. I couldn’t just ignore that challenge and continue on the path I was on,” he explains.

The expert, former associate editor of the Newman Studies Journalassures that “there are innumerable testimonies similar” to his and that they will continue to grow in the years to come in light of his designation as 38th Doctor of the Church.

For Marr, Newman had a singular gift: “Expressing fundamental truths in short, memorable phrases,” capable of crossing time and touching consciences. Hence, so many people, over more than a century, have found in his writings a path to conversion.

The development of doctrine: its decisive contribution

For Marr, Newman’s most significant contribution to contemporary Catholic theology is his development of doctrine. “It’s not that Newman wrote something completely new,” he explains.

“Other Catholic theologians, especially Saint Vincent of Lerins, had already dealt with the topic of doctrinal development. But Newman synthesized various ideas into a unified and convincing theory, so that any subsequent theologian had to start from his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine when addressing this topic,” he defends.

This vision, he adds, was decisive for the thinking of the 20th century. Newman showed that “the ecclesiastical understanding of revealed truths deepens with time.” “In some cases, the Church offers new formulations—as happened with the Nicene Creed—but these developments always affirm and clarify what has been transmitted,” he emphasizes.

“The deposit of faith is immutable, but our understanding of that deposit truly expands,” he adds. Each generation, Marr insists, must “proclaim the truth of the faith within its own linguistic categories,” but always preserving what is “essential while facing the challenges of its time.”

Consciousness and sense of faith: two axes of Christian discernment

When it was announced that Newman would be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, Marr recalls, “some observers predicted that Pope Leo XIV might give him the title Doctor of Conscience.” It’s not a coincidence. Newman, remember, dedicated some of his most influential texts to the “centrality of conscience in the path to God”, both in his Anglican period and in his new life as a Catholic.

Like Saint Thomas Aquinas, Marr explains, “Newman believed that a person should never act against what his conscience dictates,” because doing so would “undermine the very coherence of the moral life.”

However, the former colossus of Anglicanism, converted to Catholicism at the age of 45, also warned about the human tendency to “self-deception,” explains Marr. The scholar notes that Newman insisted on the need to “form the conscience according to divine and natural law.”

In Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk) of 1874, one of his most famous essays, Newman warned against a “false notion of conscience,” identified with the right to one’s own will, an idea that, according to Marr, “reflects the modern mentality” that values ​​subjective independence over objective truth.

Therefore, he adds, “as Catholics, we must work to restore the true vision of conscience, in line with the teaching of theological giants such as Aquinas and Newman.”

Newman did not understand the sense of faith as “a populist counterweight to the hierarchy”

This theme is intertwined with the concept of sense of faith the supernatural sense of faith given to the baptized: “Newman was ahead of his time in recognizing that the lay faithful have an essential role in the defense and transmission of tradition. The priesthood of all believers means, in part, that the baptized possess a special sense of faith, a capacity that we must strengthen through devotion and study.”

Marr recalls that, for Newman, this meaning also had a community dimension, the sense of the faithfulor sense of the faithful. “I didn’t understand it as a populist counterweight to the hierarchy,” he clarifies. “I knew that the pope and bishops exercise divinely instituted authority, but I remembered that there have been times in history—such as during the Arian controversy—when lay people defended the faith, even when some pastors wavered.”

A prophet against modern apostasy

With prophetic lucidity, says the expert Newman, “he foresaw the growing irreligiosity of the modern world.” In the sermon he preached in 1873 The Infidelity of the Future, Newman warned that the trials of the future would be so great “that they would make even hearts as brave as those of Saint Athanasius or Saint Gregory the Great falter,” according to Marr.

Newman, he details, perceived that the greatest danger of modernity would be precisely the spread of disbelief, a “simply irreligious” society.

However, faced with this dark panorama, “Newman did not call for withdrawal or propose authoritarian strategies.” He bravely confronted the philosophical ideas of his time and offered a convincing explanation of the “reasonableness of the Christian faith,” deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition and in dialogue with modern philosophy, he explains.

Newman and the intellectual mission of the laity

Newman, the expert continues, understood the life of the Catholic Church as something “dynamic”, where “all members of the Body of Christ have an active role in the proclamation of the truth.”

The fathers of the Second Vatican Council took up this vision, presenting it as an urgent call to contemporary Catholics. In any case, the expert warns that it is important to understand this call well: “The laity do not fulfill their vocation by becoming more clerical, but by sanctifying the world according to their own specific mission, bringing the Gospel to education, law, medicine, culture.”