On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine: From Newman to the Second Vatican Council and Beyond

Abstract

340 Studies • volume 106 • number 423 On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine: From Newman to the Second Vatican Council and Beyond Fáinche Ryan If a check be not placed on the laity of England they will be the rulers of the Catholic Church in England instead of the Holy See and the Episcopate … the laity are beginning to show the cloven hoof. … They are only putting into practice the doctrine taught by Dr Newman in his article in the Rambler. ... What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all, and this affair of Newman is a matter purely ecclesiastical. … Dr Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.1 Thus wrote Monsignor George Talbot (Papal Chamberlain to Pius IX and canon of St Peter’s) from Rome to Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, in April 1867. ‘The laity have no right to meddle in ecclesiastical matters’: this paper will interrogate that claim. While it begins with John Henry Newman (1801–90), its ultimate aim is to explore the locus of authority in the Catholic Church, a Church guided by the Holy Spirit. It is not about the laity, and ‘their’ role, but a paper in ecclesiology, about the theology of the Church. It is an exploration of the concept of the Church and how its authority is, and might be, exercised internally, and thus implicitly an exploration of how the Church might impact society today. In 1859 Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, in a meeting with Newman, asked the famous question ‘Who are the laity?’, to which the reported response was, ‘The Church would look foolish without them’. This paper will ask: who is the Church? Is the Church the ‘priests and people’, those ordained with authority and those ‘lay’ who are to be ‘consulted’ or not, depending on the subject matter? Or perhaps there is another way to be the Body of Christ in the world, a way in which the fact that all share the one baptism into the priestly, Fáinche Ryan Studies • volume 106 • number 423 341 prophetic and kingly roles of Christ is clearly made manifest. The first section of the paper will outline the article, appearing in a Catholic periodical called The Rambler, that resulted in Newman being termed ‘the most dangerous man in England’. Newman has also been called the ‘Father of Vatican II’. The second section of the paper will ask to what extent The Second Vatican Council has contributed to a deepened ecclesiological understanding of the question of the locus of authority in Church. The third section will bring into the discussion recent theological explorations of the concept of the Church by the International Theological Commission, the Catholic Theological Association of the United States and recent theological work in Germany. Part One: ‘On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine’ (1859) Newman, an Anglican divine, was a very active member of the Tractarian movement (the Oxford movement). In 1845 he was received into the Catholic Church. In 1847 he was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome. He spent a couple of years (1854–58) in Dublin as (a very unhappy) Rector of a fledgling Catholic University of Ireland. In July 1859, back in England again, he published ‘On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine’ in The Rambler. As John Coulson notes in his introduction to a 1961 republication of the article, ‘this work is fundamental not only to a fuller understanding of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development, but to an appreciation of the importance he attaches to the laity in his theology’.2 The background to the article is significant. We are in a very particular era in the history of the Catholic Church in England. Catholic emancipation is recent (1829). In the English Roman Catholic Church at this time we have the recusant Catholic families, who had never converted to the established Church, significant numbers of ‘new’ Irish emigrant Catholics, and, most significantly, the many converts from Anglicanism of which Newman...