Herbert Rose Barraud / Internet Archive
Pope Leo XIV announced July 31 that he will name Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman a Doctor of the Church, making him the 38th saint and only the second Englishman in Church history, after Saint Bede the Venerable, to enjoy the rare honor.
Cardinal Newman was a prominent Anglican prelate and a leader in the Oxford Movement, a group of Protestant scholars who sought to reconnect modern Christian thought with the writings of the Church Fathers.
It was in the context of his work in that movement that Newman shocked the Anglosphere with the announcement that he would defect from the Church of England and join the Roman Catholic Church.
“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant,” he famously explained.
Here are five other quotations, including a couple of prayers, from this saint and soon-to-be Doctor of the Church:
- “God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”
- “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.”
- “With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.”
- “Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. …Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”
- “Dear Jesus, help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with Thy spirit and love. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of Thine. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Thy presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus. Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be a light to others. Amen.”
