Salve Iohannes Doctor et Magister

Fr. John Hunwicke

Fr John Hunwicke blogs :  For me, one of the most sacred spots in England is the little Oratory which is part of his Study within the Oratorian Palazzo in Birmingham. One side of the partition is the collection of his more personal books, memorials of the long life of study which linked his Anglican days with his Apostolate in the Catholic Church  … a life which he insisted was an unbroken continuum of opposition to Liberalism and Relativism. On the other side, accompanying him every morning to the Altar, was the art-work done for him by one of the closest of his life-long friends, Maria Giberne.

Everybody has their favourite Newman book. I love the wickedly satirical Loss and Gain with its portrait of 1840s Oxford … and his Development of Christian Doctrine. His sermon about the Second Spring still gets the tears pricking behind my eyes. And his Grammar of Assent seems to me to anticipate the insights towards which some philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century so laboriously  trudged. And his analysis of the Syllabus Errorum meticulously, ‘surgically’, analyses the magisterial status of that document and of every paragraph within it. Rarely read now, it is a superb example of S John Henry’s fierce conviction of the necessity of obedience towards the Successor of S Peter, combined with a cold and almost rationalist approach to exercises of the papal magisterium.

And Newman was a pastor; witness the care he took with souls who were much troubled by the hypersuperultrapapalists and their ridiculous exaggeration of the authority of Pio Nono.

S John Henry had to wait for the Election of Papa Pecci before he received proper honours. May we hope for a Leo XIV? Subito!