Please note that as the catechists-elect KNEEL on the hard, very hard and uncomfortably hard concrete, to have the “ministry” of Catechist conferred upon them by Pope Leo XIV. How glorious would it be for all of us to kneel at papal and non-papal Mass to have the Most Holy Eucharist conferred upon us as we receive our Lord in the most solemn and reverential way possible! It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to see communicants kneeling for Holy Communion, no?
“Cor ad cor loquitur”: Newman to Become Doctor of the Church
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum
At the conclusion of the Eucharistic celebration for the Jubilee of Catechists, Pope Leo XIV surprised the faithful with an announcement destined to leave its mark on the history of the Church. “I have the joy of announcing,” he declared from the steps of St. Peter’s, just before the Angelus, “that on November 1st, in the context of the Jubilee of the Educational World, I will bestow the title of Doctor of the Church upon Saint John Henry Newman, who contributed in a decisive way to the renewal of theology and to the understanding of Christian doctrine in its development.”
The Pope’s words resound as the confirmation of an intuition that has run through recent Church history: the figure of Newman, marked by conversions, contradictions, and an enduring fidelity to conscience, emerges today as a necessary teacher in a cultural and ecclesial season that vacillates between relativistic subjectivism and rigid dogmatism.
Conscience, the echo of truth
For Newman, conscience was never a synonym for personal whim. On the contrary, it is “the echo of God’s voice in the innermost being of man.” This image, recurring often in his writings, frees the conscience both from the illusion of being a private tribunal deciding in isolation, and from the opposite temptation of reducing it to a mere external application of norms.
In the Apologia pro vita sua, Newman recounts his own inner journey not out of autobiographical vanity but to show how conscience was both compass and wound, light and cross. Faithful conscience does not guarantee immediate peace: it requires purification, discernment, and the willingness to change. This is why Newman endured the struggle of leaving Anglicanism and, after years of study and conflict, embraced Catholicism. In our own age, where conscience is often confused with feeling or calculation, Newman’s lesson is a powerful correction: truth and freedom do not oppose each other but call each other forth. Authentic freedom is that which allows itself to be educated by truth, while truth never imposes itself except by respecting the freedom of the listener.
Faith and reason, a fruitful bond
The Oxford University Sermons were the workshop where Newman explored the relationship between faith and reason. Faith, for him, is not a blind leap into the void, but a real assent born from the interweaving of clues, experiences, testimonies, and reflection. Newman distinguished between implicit and explicit reason, showing that human life is constantly sustained by unformalized yet decisive rationalities. This vision challenges both rationalism, which seeks to reduce faith to syllogism, and emotionalism, which reduces it to sentiment. Newman thus offers a balanced perspective: faith is reason enlarged—reason that does not censor the experience of mystery, but integrates and illuminates it.
Holiness and everyday truth
Another essential aspect of Newman’s spirituality appears in his Sermon on Evangelical Holiness. He distinguishes between natural virtue and Christian holiness. The former may express nobility and discipline, yet remains incomplete without the gift of the Spirit. Holiness, by contrast, is not aesthetic or moral perfection but a life shaped by the cross. Here Newman grasped something radically evangelical: truth is not mere intellectual possession but interior transformation, daily choice, fidelity in the ordinary. His insistence that truth is transmitted from person to person—more than from book to book—explains his celebrated motto: cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks to heart.”
The Idea of a University: an integral educational project
The proclamation of Newman will take place, significantly, within the context of the Jubilee of the Educational World. This is no coincidence. With his Idea of a University, Newman left one of the most prophetic works of the 19th century. There he insists that theology is an essential part of knowledge: excluding it mutilates intelligence, fragments reality, and destroys unity. In the discourses collected in that volume, Newman warns against knowledge reduced to mere technical skill, devoid of vision. True education, he argues, forms not only experts but persons capable of judgment. And such judgment is born from the habit of connecting disciplines, of reading reality synthetically, of recognizing that without God, knowledge collapses into mere instrumentality.
His educational project is therefore no academic ornament but a spirituality of the mind: to form men and women able to think freely, discern rigorously, and choose with conscience. This is the decisive point of contact between Newman and the theme of the Jubilee that Pope Leo XIV wishes to highlight.
Why Doctor of the Church
What does it mean, then, to proclaim Newman Doctor of the Church? It is not an erudite recognition, nor a posthumous prize for a brilliant intellectual. It acknowledges that his thought has given the Church enduring criteria for walking through history.
Newman is a Doctor because he offered a theology of conscience able to safeguard believers both from relativism and legalism. He is a Doctor because he showed that the development of doctrine is not betrayal but dynamic fidelity—like a seed growing into a tree. He is a Doctor because he united faith and reason in a harmony that today appears more urgent than ever, in a world at risk of severing the link between intelligence and spirituality. He is a Doctor because he understood education as the heart of the Church’s mission: not indoctrination, but the formation of free and responsible consciences.
For Leo XIV, Newman is not only a 19th-century theologian but a companion for the 21st century. At a time when the Church itself must rethink its relationship with truth, education, and freedom, the thought and witness of the English cardinal offer a path of discernment.
A Doctor for all time
On November 1st, the Feast of All Saints, the Church will not only proclaim a new Doctor. It will recognize that Newman’s voice—with its insistence on conscience, truth, doctrinal development, and education—remains a living and necessary voice. His motto, cor ad cor loquitur, is not a slogan but the synthesis of a method: truth passes through persons, faith matures through integral education, and holiness is built in the unity of reason and heart.
This is why Newman deserves the title of Doctor: because he handed down to the Church not only pages of theology but a spiritual and intellectual criterion of life that remains strikingly relevant.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum
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