by Edward Short
When we speak of a saint, we usually have in mind someone of extraordinary holiness, someone of heroic virtue, someone animated by God’s love and dedicated to his service. Then, again, we think of someone whose devotion to God is so extraordinary that he commands the public veneration of the faithful.
And yet when we think of actual saints, we begin to see the inadequacy of such general terms. Although they share a common love of the Creator and a common love of his creatures, the saints are so different, so unique. To name saints dear to the subject of this essay—St. Paul, St. Chrysostom, St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory the First, St. Leo the Great, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri—is to be reminded of just how profoundly different the saints are. As Chesterton once observed, “It is a real case against conventional hagiography that it sometimes tends to make all saints seem to be the same. Whereas in fact no men are more different than saints; not even murderers.” Defining them all with one definition hardly does them justice. So our general definitions of sanctity must always be a kind of broad-brush shorthand, even if the personal force of sanctity is unmistakable.
Just a few months ago there was a piece in the Catholic Herald about Father Dominic Barberi, the Passionist who received Newman into the Church, in which the author noted how “Dominic’s encounter with Newman at Littlemore in October 1845 may perhaps be only a small part of his story, but it is important nevertheless. This is because Newman himself tells us that he entered the Catholic Church precisely at that moment because of the supernatural qualities he recognized instantly in the Italian missionary. ‘When his form came into sight, I was moved to the depths in the strangest way,’ Newman wrote years later. ‘His very look had about it something holy.’” Before meeting Blessed Dominic, Newman was intellectually convinced of the truth of the Church but in the presence of Dominic’s sanctity he was able to recognize that his heart had come to the same conviction.
Then, again, when Dominic wrote that the most formidable obstacles to the one true faith in England were “the extreme ignorance and indeed indifference” of the English people to their own salvation, he also gave Newman something of his own mission, which animates all of his Catholic work. In this essay, I shall endeavor to capture something of the specific sanctity that can be found in the life and works of Blessed John Henry Newman, which sets him apart from other saints and yet makes him so entirely at home in the Communion of Saints.
Newman’s humility
The first thing that we should bear in mind about Newman, when it comes to his sanctity, is that there was nothing sanctimonious about it. In 1850, when a woman wrote to tell him how she and a friend thought him a saint, Newman replied with characteristically witty self-deprecation.
I return you Miss Moore’s letter. You must undeceive her about me, though I suppose she uses words in a general sense. She called Newman a saint. I have nothing of a Saint about me as every one knows, and it is a severe (and salutary) mortification to be thought next door to one. I may have a high view of many things, but it is the consequence of education and of a peculiar cast of intellect—but this is very different from being what I admire. I have no tendency to be a saint—it is a sad thing to say. Saints are not literary men, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. I may be well enough in my way, but it is not the ‘high line.’ People ought to feel this, most people do. But those who are at a distance have fee-fa-fum notions about one. It is enough for me to black the saints’ shoes—if St. Philip uses blacking, in heaven.
This confirms something Chesterton once said, in that glorious book of his on St. Thomas, “The holy man conceals his holiness; that is the one invariable rule.”
What gives Newman’s sanctity its abiding appeal is that it is rooted in his recognition that sanctity is not something with which most of us are comfortable. Some of this insight came from his own experience: both his brothers became apostates. One renounced Christianity for the utopian socialism of Robert Owen and the other left Christianity altogether for Unitarianism. Indeed, he even went so far as to advocate euthanasia. Then, again, Newman could see from growing up in the Church of England that many English Christians were only nominally Christian; they professed what they scarcely knew how to practice.
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