In his spiritual biography of John Henry Newman, The Spiritual Journey of Newman, Fr Jean Honore (a future cardinal and Archbishop and member of the committee which supervised the writing of the Catechism of the Catholic Church) told us that Newman had seen the problems the Church (and all Christian churches—in my opinion) was having in dealing with the questions raised in the modern world. And he thought, as do I in a more qualified way, that Newman knew how to address those questions.
So there is reason to believe that Newman had responded more openly and more truly and more honestly than other modern Catholic thinkers to God’s story which is this world. I raise the question:
Why hasn’t John Henry Newman been yet recognized as a saint?
I know the standard answer: the miracles haven’t yet come about. I also know enough statistics to know the canonization process has very likely become a popularity contest, unless one accepts the strange theory that God performs miracles as some sort of indirect message that so-and-so is a saint. Spontaneous remissions of cancer and spontaneous healing of decayed joints and the like seem to occur at random, unless we make a lot of assumptions that few—if any—competent Christian theologians would support in any but a highly qualified, hand-waving argument. The God who causes the rain to fall on the fields of good men and bad men may or may not intervene directly in response to prayers for healing by the pious who adore the—pardon me—rock stars of the Catholic Church. Or—far more likely under Christian beliefs as well as those of modern scientists, those healings might be just as random as the similar unexplained recoveries which occur to the best and the nastiest of human beings of all sorts, even to those who hate God. Who’s to say? We can say the pious, especially those who have the piety of superstitious peasants, will pray to a dead rock star more often than the typical admirer of Augustine and Aquinas and John Henry Newman. And there are far more of those we can that first sort of pious Catholic than there are of those who value reason, perhaps even overvalue it.
I can’t find the quote with simple Google searches, but, sometime in the past few decades, a modern thinker not friendly to Christian beliefs somewhat famously noted that Newman was unusual among Christian thinkers for sounding sane even when discussing and supporting the strongest of Christian beliefs. Those who believe that the God of Jesus Christ is truly the “God of Reason” who created this world have to see much good in that. There was once a time when Christianity produce great thinkers who were taken seriously by non-Christians; in recent centuries, the number of Christian thinkers in such a position is small and includes Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Joseph Ratzinger, and not many others. This might be partially a sign of anti-Christian bias but it’s also a sign that Catholics rarely go forth from their intellectual ghettos without leaving their minds behind and presenting only hearts and hands to the larger human world. Or else, if they take their minds and express opinions, they sound like lunatics.
So, the possible saints who appeal to the pietistic, often the baptized pagans—to be both cruel and fair, attract a lot of prayers for healing and some of those who are the intended beneficiaries have certifiable remissions of an unusual but far from unknown sort. I’m not arguing against the canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II, though I think it was too early to have definitively decided if both men, or either one, really was a proper exemplar for the Church as She moves forward, independent of any personal holiness found in them. I am arguing against the system which raised John Paul II so quickly to recognized sainthood while the cause yet lingers of the man who tried to warn the Church about how and how not to respond to the modern world.
Let me make very general statements under simplifying assumptions of the statistical nature of extremely unlikely medical recoveries. Most controversially, I assume that extremely unlikely (but not impossible) medical recoveries happen and there are no doctors or parents or spouses or Catholic Curia bureaucrats who can determine if God intended a particular such recovery to be an endorsement of a particular cause for sainthood. I do tend to believe it morally irresponsible and blasphemous for those Roman functionaries to pretend to be able to determine such a matter. If they could do so, they would be able to explain why God typically doesn’t bring about such recoveries and why it is that unlikely events of all sorts inflict so much suffering on the innocent and guilty alike. To put it in other words: it is the height of dishonesty to think I or any Roman functionary can go through descriptions of unlikely events and take credit—in God’s name—for those which meet with our pietistic approval. Being willfully dishonest about God and His relationships with us or any part of Creation is blasphemous.
I’ll suggest that our better and more truly pious strategy for recognizing sainthood is to look for signs of one who was in some special communion with God and fellowmen and was also serving God and fellowmen, probably restricting such to those who will be good public exemplars. Such a strategy would use knowledge which human beings can gain with an appropriate effort and wouldn’t allow any hubristic claim that we can accept any events in God’s Creation which meet with our approval and ignore any which lead to that yucky suffering stuff, unless the person suffering is a would-be saint of masochistic tendencies—and there seem to have been more than a few true saints with such tendencies as well as nearly all other admirable and undesirable human tendencies. Even Newman, hyper-rational by current standards of Catholic thought and most Christian thought, was a self-flagellant for some (probably short) period.
Let me take the issue of a Catholic “rock star” who is generally popular but especially among those with what has been labeled an “Italian peasant piety”—by many including Jean Honore when speaking of Newman’s followers who turned on him because of his commitment to human reason. He’s being investigated for sainthood as the investigation of John Henry Newman, who died more than a century ago, lingers while they wait for miracles. If there are, say, a hundred extremely unlikely medical recoveries among pious Catholics each year and the photogenic pope has 15 million praying to him while Newman has 15,000 praying to him, then there is, with simplifying assumptions I won’t state, a (15,000,000/15,000 =) 1,000 times as great a chance of any extremely unlikely medical recoveries occurring to the photogenic pope. In most years, none of those cures will be attributed to a fellow such as Newman and that for reasons having doubtful connection to his holiness or his importance to the Catholic Church, to Christianity in general. I think the ratios are worse than that and the odds still greater for various reasons having to do with the difference in those inclined to be sure that the popular pope is a saint vs those inclined to be sure Newman is a saint.
I’ll be uncharitable and claim that those inclined toward some form of piety are inclined to emphasize the human heart and perhaps concede a great importance to the human hands while downgrading the importance of the human mind. Human being, most especially human communal being which is ultimately the Body of Christ, is truly God-like only when there is a proper development of mind and heart and hands—at which point there will be no distinction between thinking and feeling and doing as is true of God. It is, in fact, the mind which works more in the future than the present and thus guides the processes by which individual and communal human being is incorporated into the Body of Christ. It is the heart which points in that direction but the current confusion has led modern Christians, Catholics and others, to ignore the importance or the very existence of communal human being and so it is that so many see Heaven as some sort of perfected amusement park in which individuals go about seeking pleasurable experiences for time without end. This has given us the extremely confused idea that Heaven is a place which any human being could enjoy if he were put there. Following Newman, as historian even more than as theologian and spiritual guide, would have helped us to avoid these mistakes which will take many generations to work out of the thoughts of Christians—many generations once the cleansing of thoughts begins and I see no reason to believe it will begin any time soon.
“Is so-and-so a saint?” Should this be decided by a popularity contest? Should it be decided by a multi-generational effort to determine if someone was not only personally holy but was truly serving God in an important way or was maybe in a conversation with God which is of public importance? Suppose that conversation with God involved a movement toward special knowledge of how Christians should respond to a complex and turbulent world of opportunities and problems? If some of those opportunities would turn into problems if Christians didn’t respond properly?
Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me that someone who had insights which could have guided the entire Body of Christ to develop properly, to have matured, to have traveled toward state of completion and perfection, just might have been a true saint, one in a communion with God which was more direct and deeper than what the rest of us experience in this mortal realm.
I’m raising this question not so much to question the canonization process—that is a purely secondary consideration.
My primary aim in raising this question to try to put a stop to Christian pep-rallies in a world where we’ve utterly failed to properly deal with the problems which have been eating into the Catholic Church and all other Christian churches and has demolished Christian civilization. John Henry Newman proposed a general attitude toward Creation which would have allowed these problems to have been avoided or at least greatly mitigated. To be sure, the very inclination of Church officials and the bulk of religious and priests and laymen to participate in these pep-rallies celebrating themselves as much as they celebrate the alleged saints leaves me wondering if anything but a century or more of harsh experiences will wake the leaders and teachers of Christianity up so that they can begin to do their job. Almost all that we have done in shaping hearts and minds and hands of the younger generations, almost all of our cultural stuff we have bequeathed to them, will need to be purged, burned out of them, during the process of re-establishing Christian civilization. We have little reason to feel good about ourselves.
At this time, I’ll just claim that there is plenty of evidence that Newman did his job as an historian of Christian doctrine, as a teacher, as a writer. If the leaders of the Church, or even a number of local leaders, had truly paid attention, they could have truly solved, to some significant extent, the problems emerging in Newman’s time, problems he addressed in the specific ways of such a historian. His work could have been expanded and corrected so that we could have paid proper respect to modern biology for what it can tell us about what God is saving and to other modern sciences for what they can tell us about Creation, including what “What does it mean to be saved?” and that question I once proposed: What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven?. Such questions must be asked for us to make proper progress in the maturing of our own minds and our communal mind in the Body of Christ. There is even a psychological reason for such speculations: it keeps in our mind the truth that there is but one Creation and one Creator and the truths of Heaven are perfections and completions of the truths we can discover about this mortal realm.
Historians have a major role in the reformation of Christian civilization or perhaps a long, painful process of building a new Christian civilization from new foundations. Philosophers, poets, novelists, physicists, biologists, politicians, teachers, parents, and so on have other roles. Popes have still other roles and their greatness as popes, which is certainly part of sainthood for men in that role, can only be determined over a long period of time. I’d suggest that, at this time, we have only hints going either way as to whether John XXIII and John Paul II were great popes in the same sense as Gregory the Great and Leo the Great. Each came into the papacy during times of trouble and met more problems emerging. We now know what Gregory and Leo accomplished. We know those two men and John and John Paul were all holy men. So were most popes, including those not canonized. Most weren’t considered for sainthood not because of lack of holiness but rather because they lacked the courage or toughness or perhaps the proper understandings to do the needed job.
We know that John Henry Newman, John XXIII, and John Paul II were holy men. We know that Newman did his job, and we know that the problems he saw continued to develop because of a failure of Church intellectuals and teachers and leaders to understand or act upon his insights which he largely derived from his studies of the development of Christian doctrine (among other accomplishments). We do not yet know if John XXIII and John Paul II did well at the jobs they took on, though we know that John XXIII was reverenced for daring to try to bring the Church back to the world God has created and similar comments can be made about John Paul II as well as comments about his efforts to reunite Christian churches, starting with Western and Eastern Sacramental churches. Yet, as I noted, the Catholic Church is dealing with great problems at this time and it’s far from clear we’ve found the way to deal with those problems. Newman, and others, pointed in the right direction but we’re—at best—wandering off to the side and through brier patches while celebrating how wonderful we are. And we like photogenic popes as much as we like to build memorials to dead prophets.