John Henry Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk is a long open letter of 1875, addressed to England’s leading Catholic layman, answering William Gladstone’s charge that Catholics cannot be loyal subjects of the Crown because their consciences are held by a foreign power. Newman writes as a Catholic priest and Oratorian, but also as an Englishman stung by the accusation, and the letter moves between close legal argument, church history, and something close to autobiography. It is expository prose throughout: an argument conducted in public, with documents quoted and answered point by point.
“I see no inconsistency in my being at once a good Catholic and a good Englishman.”
At the center stands a single question: can a man obey both the Pope and Queen Victoria? Gladstone had raised the alarm over the Pope’s 1864 Encyclical and Syllabus of Errors and the definitions of the Vatican Council of 1870, and had pointed to the Irish bishops’ influence in sinking the Irish University Bill of 1873 as proof that Rome pulls strings in British politics. Newman answers that the case will not hold, and that much of the alarm rests on misreading what Rome actually said.
From Gladstone’s Charge to the Rights of Conscience
A Letter Occasioned by Gladstone
The volume opens with the publisher’s front matter—a title page naming John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory, and an advertisement list of Catholic books—before the letter proper begins. Newman addresses himself to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, and explains at the outset why he writes. The Duke had urged him to do so, and many others had pressed the same request; a friend suggested he ask permission to dedicate the work to the Duke. Newman is careful to insist that the responsibility for what follows rests solely on himself. He sought the Duke’s name because the Duke stands as the special representative of a laity at once zealous for the Catholic religion and patriotic as Englishmen. The Duke consented with some reluctance. Newman, called away from a peaceful life into what he calls a scene of war, counts it a compensation that what may well be his last publication should be associated with a young nobleman full of promise.
The occasion of the letter is Mr. Gladstone’s recent Expostulation. Newman grieves that Gladstone has spoken with extraordinary severity of Catholics, committing himself to a representation of ecclesiastical documents that will not hold. Only the Schola Theologorum can determine the force of Papal and Synodal utterances; their exact interpretation is a work of time. Newman concedes that Catholics may partly have themselves to thank for alienating so religious a mind: some have stated truths paradoxically and stretched principles close upon snapping, setting the house on fire and leaving others to put out the flame. He will neither deny nor conceal the Pope’s claims, and he sees no inconsistency in being at once a good Catholic and a good Englishman, though satisfying others is harder than satisfying himself. Three difficulties stand in his way: the public excitement caused partly by the chronic extravagances of knots of Catholics; the difficulty of getting people to accept scientific distinctions and the traditionary rules of interpretation; and the risk that readers will think him trifling when he takes objections one by one.
The main question he identifies is whether Catholics can be trustworthy subjects of the State, or whether a foreign Power holds a grip on their consciences. Gladstone, he says, goes out of his way to taunt them with the loss of mental and moral freedom, charging them with repudiating ancient history and rejecting modern thought, and saying the Church is refurbishing her rusty tools. Newman calls this unworthy of Gladstone’s character, bringing odium on excellent men whose only offence is their religion, and he notes with some irony Gladstone’s boast that he has done nothing towards importing passion into what is matter of pure argument.
Gladstone’s Grounds and the Irish Bishops
Newman reconstructs the grounds of Gladstone’s alarm: first, the Pope’s Encyclical of December 8 and the accompanying Syllabus of Erroneous Propositions; then the Vatican Council’s Definitions of 1870 on universal jurisdiction and doctrinal infallibility; finally the Irish University Bill of February 1873, rejected through the influence of the Roman Catholic Prelacy of Ireland over Irish Members of Parliament. Newman disclaims any role as champion of the Irish Prelacy or advocate of the Holy See. On the February bill he recalls his own astonishment and dread at one provision, fearing Gladstone had acted on an understanding with the Catholic Prelacy; he notes rescripts from Rome about 1847 favouring a distinctively Catholic institution, a National Council’s decision, rejected Government offers, and munificent contributions—so that deserting principle for a money grant would have stultified a thirty-year contest. He was relieved when the Bishops formally dissented. He defends the Bishops’ conduct in 1873 as the use of common civil rights, and denies that Rome interposed at all: it is bad logic to introduce a hypothetical cause when an act is otherwise accounted for. He compares other interests—railway, publican, Home-rulers, Exeter Hall—and cites the Times’ regret that no English Catholic sat in a new House. The Bishops, he argues, spoke as Bishops of a Catholic nation, not from the Encyclical, Syllabus, or Vatican Decrees; Irish politics have a flavour rather of their nation than of their Church, as with Home Rule at the last general election. He quotes Macaulay on the Puritan and Bishop Doyle to Lord Liverpool—”what have we Catholics to do with the proceedings of Popes?”—interpreting Doyle’s words by their context, and comments on Doyle’s distinction between allegiance to king and Pope, on the Irish Bishops’ Address, and on the Declaration of the Vicars Apostolic. He cites Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, whose 1793 Pastoral notes the Schools-question of Papal infallibility as undecided, individual Catholics free to hold either opinion; he explains that in 1826 the Bishops were educated in Gallican opinions and thought definition impossible, while the Holy See’s entourage thought otherwise—and Gladstone himself says the Popes kept up the claim for well nigh a thousand years. Newman asks why statesmen went to Bishop Doyle rather than to Rome, and recalls Dr. Griffiths, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, declining Lord Derby’s request to be the Catholics’ responsible representative in a West India matter. England’s three-hundred-year official rule of ignoring the Pope was hopeless, he argues; Napoleon advised treating with the Pope as if he was master of 100,000 men, and said that if the Pope had not existed it would have been well to create him. England has absolutely cut Rome.
The Church’s Independence as Her Note
Against Gladstone’s charge that Catholic claims menace civil peace, Newman retorts that the charge is very paradoxical. Our Lord and His Apostles, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Cyprian of Carthage, St. Laurence of Rome, St. Alexander and St. Paul of Constantinople, St. Ambrose of Milan, and Popes Leo, John, Sylverian, Gregory, and Martin—all members of the undivided Church—hardly cultivated peaceful relations with Rome’s government, and were counted enemies of the human race despite themselves. When was the State not jealous of the Church? Under Decius and Dioclesian, when Athanasius was banished to Treves, when Basil answered the Imperial Prefect, when Chrysostom was sent to Cucusus to be worried to death by an Empress. This independence is one of the Church’s Notes or credentials; the Psalmist’s “I spoke of Thy testimonies even before kings” rose up, Dr. Arnold said, against the Anglican Church; the Oriental Churches lie in bondage under the Czar or the Sultan; Rome is the one faithful representative and heir of the free-spoken Church of old. This fidelity was the luminous fact that turned Oxford minds forty years ago toward Rome; the Tracts for the Times were founded on antagonism to Erastianism or Caesarism, holding the Church a divine creation, the Ark of Salvation, the Oracle of Truth, the Bride of Christ. Newman recalls Mr. Keble’s British Critic passage rebuking a reviewer who said the Church was united to the State as a believing wife to a husband threatening to apostatize; Keble calls such an alliance not only fatal but monstrous. Mr. Froude translated the letters of St. Thomas Becket; Mr. Bowden wrote the Life of Hildebrand. Many Church of England members remain faithful to the doctrine proclaimed in 1833, differing from Catholics only in locating powers in Bishops and Priests rather than in the Holy See. After establishment, Emperors bowed before Bishops: Constantine at Nicaea blushed and would not sit till bidden, and kissed the Confessors’ wounds; Emperors’ wives served at table; penance was done; laws favoured the Church; Bishops judged Bishops; St. Ambrose was consumed by arbitrations; St. Austin and Theodoret complained of secular engagements; heretics’ books were burned and chapels razed. Ranke is quoted on the separation of Church and State as Christianity’s most influential peculiarity. The Pope is heir of the Ecumenical Hierarchy by default—no one else claims its rights; the Patriarch of Moscow or Constantinople, or an Anglican Bishop, does not recall St. Ambrose, St. Martin, or St. Basil. To believe in a Church is to believe in the Pope. Gladstone’s real aversion is a Church, not a Pope; Mr. Bowden notes the Pope’s titles were once every Bishop’s. Concentration was not the Pope’s work but the result of Vandal and Saracen devastations and other changes, and it benefited Europe. Dean Milman is quoted on the Papacy as the only power not prostrate, with Gregory the Great its real father. From Gregory I to Innocent III is six hundred years of good; the rusty tools were the very weapons civilizing Europe. Alison describes Napoleon’s snow-penance after Pius VII excommunicated him. Newman does not contend that Popes are never wrong; Urban VIII, about 1641 or 1642, blamed the policy of preceding Popes toward England.
The Pope’s Desolate State and the Limits of His Political Power
Whatever must be conceded to Gladstone on this point, Newman argues, it does not justify the passionate invective against the Holy See and Catholics individually which Gladstone carried on through sixty-four pages. Catholics have a manifest right to expect lawyer-like exactness and logical consecutiveness in his impeachment; the heavier the charge, the less it needs a great orator’s exaggerations. If the Pope’s conduct toward England three centuries ago righteously wiped out the memory of earlier benefits, the Pope should still have a fair trial; the greater his former solitary greatness, the greater the consideration owed him in his present temporal humiliation, when the concentration of ecclesiastical functions in one man makes him, before the haters of Catholicism, what a Roman Emperor contemplated when he wished all his subjects had one neck to destroy by one blow. Newman had hoped for gravity, measure, and calmness of tone—not a pamphlet written as if on impulse, defending an incidental parenthesis, multiplied in 22,000 copies and appealing to the lower classes as a sixpenny tract, its low price indicating wide circulation. Nana Sahib, he says, will get more justice from the English people than has been shown to the Father of European civilization.
The Holy See, Newman notes, is desolate: the Pope is humanly at his enemies’ mercy and morally a prisoner in his palace. Such secular feebleness cannot last forever; in divine mercy a change will come, and the Vicar of Christ will no longer be a mark for insult. But a return to the universal religious sentiment and public opinion of medieval times cannot occur except by almost miraculous interposition. The Pope himself calls those centuries the ages of faith.
Conscience and the Authorities Behind It
Newman builds his case on conscience by lining up the weight of Catholic moral theology behind him. An unnamed authority, quoted in Latin, holds that an erroneous conscience still binds—whether the error is invincible or vincible—and that to act against it is sin; Thomas and the whole Scholastic tradition follow. Busenbaum, the Jesuit casuist, goes further: a heretic who judges his own sect as deserving of belief as any other is not obliged to believe, and men raised in heresy who are persuaded that Catholics are idolaters and deceivers cannot with a safe conscience hear them. Antonio Corduba, a Spanish Franciscan, says it is never lawful to act against conscience even when a law or superior commands it; Natalis Alexander, a French Dominican, says that if conscience judges a superior’s command displeasing to God, one must not obey. Cardinal Jacobatius, writing on Councils, applies the principle to the Pope himself: if a precept seems sinful, one must first try to put off that sense; if one cannot conform to the Pope’s judgment, one must follow one’s own conscience and patiently bear the punishment. Newman asks whether Gladstone could produce confirming passages, and remarks that he would drink to the Pope—but to Conscience first.
The Old World of Church and King
Turning to the Encyclical of 1864, Newman argues that modern Rome is not alone in keeping old Imperial traditions alive. In the Anglican establishment the king replaced the Pope but the Pope’s principles remained: England held one true religion from Revelation, supported to the disadvantage of private judgment and personal conscience. Puritans and the school of Laud held these principles, as did the Scotch Presbyterians; the Stuarts went, but their principles stayed in force. Men of the present generation are shocked to see in the Papal system the ways of their grandfathers—yet within Newman’s own lifetime that old world was alive. He asks whether the plea of conscience was as effectual sixty years ago, whether the Press had such elbow-room, whether monster processions and Sunday manifestations were possible, whether savants could insinuate atheism, whether prints could war against religion. Law and public opinion would not suffer it; this was called Toryism, now it is called Popery and reviled. The State had a conscience; the Chief Justice pronounced Christianity the law of the land; the cry was “Church and king.”
Blackstone is cited at length to prove it: belief in a future state underlies judicial oaths; affronts to Christianity deserve punishment; the statute of William III penalized denying the Christian religion or the Holy Scriptures, or denying any Person of the Holy Trinity, with incapacity for office, incapacity to sue, and three years’ imprisonment, dischargeable upon public renunciation within four months. Absenting from established worship through irreligion forfeited a shilling to the poor each Lord’s day and twenty pounds to the king for a month’s default; keeping an irreligious inmate forfeited ten pounds a month. Reviling the Church’s ordinances was grosser than non-conformity, involving indecency, arrogance, and ingratitude. The Corporation and Test Acts were bulwarks—the one requiring the sacrament before election to office, the other a declaration against transubstantiation, excluding Jews from privileges. Such laws gave a tone to society. Dr. Watson called Paine “a child of the devil and an enemy of all righteousness”; Cumberland reproached a Jewish writer for ingratitude; Gibbon looked down on Priestley, whose “Socinian shield” was pierced by Horsley’s spear.
The Melting of Disabilities
Such was the position till recently, when disabilities melted away like snow at spring-tide. Newman admires the superseded principles but sees they could not be maintained: cultivated intellect develops into a thousand shapes. The State had a conscience; George the Third had one, but others at the head of affairs had consciences too, bringing a dead-lock under his successor; no government could be formed if religious unanimity were a sine qua non. Thus the whole theory of Toryism came to pieces, and not a hundred Popes could have hindered it without a miracle. The Pope has denounced the sentiment that he ought to come to terms with “progress, liberalism, and the new civilization”; Newman does not dispute his words, leaving the problem to the future. No one dislikes the democratic principle more than he, and he mourns over Oxford given up to “liberalism and progress,” forfeiting its motto “Dominus illuminatio mea.” Yet Toryism, loyalty to persons, “springs immortal in the human breast”; Religion is a spiritual loyalty, and Catholicity the only divine form of Religion. In centuries to come some way may be found of uniting what is free in the new society with what is authoritative in the old, without base compromise with “Progress” and “Liberalism.” The revolution in law since 1828 shows that Englishmen who within fifty years kept up the Pope’s system are not the parties to throw stones at the Pope for keeping it up still.
What the Pope Actually Said
Newman goes further: the Pope has not said what Gladstone makes him say. Gladstone claims the Holy See has “condemned” the maintainers of “the Liberty of the Press, of conscience, and of worship,” and that the Pontiff has condemned free speech, free writing, a free press, toleration of non-conformity, liberty of conscience. Newman calls this wholesale and unfair; the real question is in what respect and measure the Pope has spoken against liberty, since the grant of liberty admits of degrees. Blackstone shows how much more liberty the law allowed in his day, but never pretends that the law condemned liberty itself.
The Syllabus as an Index
Gladstone’s claim that the Syllabus is bound to the Encyclical of December 1864, and that its errors fall under the infallible judgment pronounced there, Newman calls untenable. The Encyclical reprobates and condemns the wrong opinions “specially mentioned in these letters”—about ten of them—and there is no word showing the Pope alludes to the Syllabus. The only connections are external: time and organ, since Cardinal Antonelli sent both to the Bishops with one letter. The Syllabus is an index, an index raisonné, not a dogmatic document, no more de fide than a table of contents; Newman compares it to counsel’s opinion listing statute and case references. Its value lies in its references, which Gladstone neglects. Newman objects to calling a list of errors “extraordinary declarations” and “stringent condemnations.” He examines several propositions: the sixteenth, on establishing Catholicism in Spain, where the Pope spoke of one State, protested a Concordat breach, and used no condemnation; the eighteenth, on Progress, Liberalism, and New Civilization, where the Allocution of March 18, 1861 contains no formal condemnation; the fifteenth, on Temporal Power, where the Pope only warns and reproves; the seventeenth, on public exercise of other religions, where Gladstone omitted “hominibus illuc immigrantibus” and the Pope referred to New Granada. He notes the Lima priest’s book, Professor Nuytz’s work, Cardinal Soglia and Fleury on ecclesiastical punishments, and explains the noise the Syllabus caused: its size, arrangement, misunderstanding of ecclesiastical language, the abstract wording by Cardinal Antonelli, theology as a science, the Abyssinian Orders controversy, and Secret Societies.
Moral Unanimity and the Council
On the Vatican Council, Newman denies reports that he nearly joined Dr. Dollinger, and quotes his letter of July 24, 1870, on the definition’s moderation and the question of moral unanimity. If the Council continues sitting, dissentient bishops take part in its acts, a new Pope continues the present policy, and the Council ends without reversing or modifying the definition, then there is good reason to say moral unanimity has not been shown wanting. If the definition is consistently received by the whole body of the faithful as valid or as expressing a truth, it claims assent by the dictum “Securus judicat orbis terrarum”—a broad principle ratifying acts of the Church’s rulers, without which past Councils might reasonably be questioned.
The Letter to a Troubled Friend
Newman reproduces a letter to a troubled friend dated July 27, 1870. Nothing shall make him say that a mere majority in a Council, as opposed to moral unanimity, itself creates an obligation to receive dogmatic decrees—that is a point of history and precedent—and he cannot see that a majority in the present Council can rule its own sufficiency without external testimony. But other means can oblige him: clear primitive and uninterrupted tradition; a high probability from Scripture or Tradition partially confirmed by the Church; or, if nothing sufficient from Scripture or Tradition contradicts a definition, a legitimate Superior’s defining may oblige internal assent. He has held the Pope’s infallibility as theological opinion since becoming a Catholic; he sees nothing in the Definition contradicting Scripture, Tradition, or History, and the “Doctor Ecclesiae” bids him accept it—receiving it not on the Council’s word but on the Pope’s self-assertion. God’s long allowance of the Head of the Church virtually asserting infallibility is a great argument for its validity. Another ground: the Merciful Lord would not let the visible Head and so many Bishops lead the faithful into serious error—accepting the doctrine indirectly from the Council, but rather from the Pope and many Bishops, per “Fieri non debuit, factum valet.”
A Council’s definition has a virtual claim on reception even if not passed conciliariter but indirectly, a Council’s object being to declare the Church’s judgment. Newman cites the third Ecumenical Council: the question was settled before certain bishops arrived, with a protest of 68 against 82; when 43 more arrived they anathematized the Fathers who carried it, 124 against 111, and the Council ended in disunion. Its definition was valid by after events—correspondence among party heads, differences arranged after two years. Anglicans fierce against the Vatican but respectful toward Ephesus should consider why they swallow the third Council while straining out the nineteenth. The Ephesus minority thought the faith imperilled by the definition, fearing it encouraged opposite errors; twenty years later a Council under the majority’s successors carried those very errors triumphantly, but St. Leo interfered, the innovating party was stopped, and its acts were cancelled at Chalcedon, held under the Pope’s guidance, which without touching the Third’s definition completed it and excluded those errors. Nothing in the Vatican definitions can be reversed, but should need arise to correct a false interpretation, another Leo will be given—”in monte Dominus videbit.”
What Infallibility Actually Claims
The most original stretch of the letter narrows the vast, frightening word “infallibility” until it fits what the Vatican Fathers actually defined. A pope speaks infallibly only when he speaks ex cathedra—as universal teacher, in the name and authority of the Apostles, on faith or morals, intending to bind all the faithful. Everything else he says is the speech of a private doctor. Newman piles up authorities to make the point: Billuart and Fessler on the pope out of the chair, Perrone on councils erring in their reasons and their prefaces, the case of a pope quoting the Areopagite as genuine or condemning Galileo, neither of which binds belief. Even in the chair, the defined proposition must be referable to the Apostolic deposit; the pope judges whether it is, but professing to abide by that reference is itself a limit. The church is not inspired as the Apostles were; she is guarded, kept from error in the final definition as a traveller is kept from pitfalls, while the human work of arriving at it remains human and fallible. In morals the field is narrow—the pope could not command lying or revenge, could not forbid a man his dinner—and in condemnations the church tells us only that a proposition is heretical or rash, leaving theologians to work out precisely why.
The Pope as Heir of the Free Church
Against Gladstone’s picture of a restless foreign potentate, Newman sets a different history. The church’s independence of the state is her oldest credential: the martyrs and bishops of the undivided church—Ignatius, Cyprian, Ambrose, the popes whom emperors exiled—were counted enemies of the human race for refusing to bend. That same defiance, he says, is what turned Oxford minds toward Rome forty years earlier; the Tracts for the Times were founded on antagonism to Erastianism, on the conviction that the church is a divine creation and not a department of state. The papacy inherited the rights of the whole episcopate by default, because no one else claims them; the concentration of authority in one man was not papal ambition but the work of Vandal and Saracen devastation, and it benefited Europe. The “rusty tools” Gladstone scorns were the very weapons that civilized the continent. Newman concedes that popes have been wrong—Urban VIII, he notes, blamed the policy of his predecessors toward England—but the office, not the man, is the point.
Conscience First, and the Tory World That Passed
Newman’s deepest move is to claim conscience for the Catholic side. Citing Aquinas and the Scholastics, Busenbaum, Corduba, and Cardinal Jacobatius, he argues that an erroneous conscience still binds, and that if a superior’s command seems sinful one must follow one’s own conscience and bear the penalty. He would drink to the Pope, he says, but to Conscience first. The irony he presses home is that the England now shocked by papal intolerance kept the pope’s own principles after throwing off the pope: Blackstone’s laws penalized denying the Trinity, fined absenteeism from the established worship, and barred dissenters from office. That world melted away within Newman’s lifetime, and he does not pretend it can return; not a hundred popes could have stopped it. He mourns Oxford given over to “liberalism and progress,” yet holds that loyalty springs immortal in the human breast, and that some future age may join what is free in the new society to what is authoritative in the old.
Why the Letter Still Matters
The Letter is the classic modern statement that a Catholic can be a whole citizen—that conscience, rightly understood, is not a foreign allegiance but the ground of all obedience. Its method is as important as its conclusion: Newman reads documents instead of slogans, distinguishes what is defined from what is merely said, and refuses both the ultramontane who would make every papal word a dogma and the Protestant who would make every dogma a threat. He ends by sheltering himself under Molina’s account of how councils come to define more clearly over time, and by trusting that if a false reading of the Vatican decrees ever needs correcting, another Leo will be given. The letter remains a model of loyal dissent—fierce in defense of his church, unsparing toward her clumsy defenders, and confident that the truth, carefully stated, can bear the weight of an Englishman’s honesty.
