It was Paul VI who suggested that Newman was the ‘invisible Father’ of Vatican II, and many other have echoed this. Yet the Council texts contain no references to Newman's work, nor any direct mention of him.Footnote ¹ The origin of this claim can be identified in Newman's passionate insistence on the need to understand revelation as a historical event, encountered first and foremost in the person of Jesus Christ, and subsequently in his indwelling presence, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, in the living communion of the Church. Revelation is encountered as fact rather than as a set of hand‐me‐down propositions. It is the difference between those who claim they possess a truth to be defended and preserved, and those who acknowledge that we are only time‐conditioned pilgrims, struggling onwards with foot‐sore and weary companions towards that fullness of truth which is found in faithful service of the Church's Lord. As such the task of theology is therapeutic,Footnote ² or as Nicholas Lash would have it, interrogative: a consistent probing and challenging of that dangerous tendency so evident in certain schools of doctrine ‘inexorably to absolutize the particular linguistic, ritual and institutional forms in which truth has found expression in the past’.Footnote ³

I want to tease out two interrelated aspects of this theme: in the first place the recognition of ‘the signs of the times’, the point where we stand in history becoming the necessary place for doing theology; secondly, the role which the whole community of the Church is called upon to play in articulating the expression of belief. Newman spelt this out in a set of lectures delivered in the Catholic Institute in Liverpool during October 1853:

For Newman, Revelation, the Johannine Word, is, as it were, incarnate in history. George Tyrrell pointed out that the Church repudiates ‘the notion of a sort of direct “telegraphic” communication between Heaven and the rulers of the Church’.Footnote ⁵ In the sparkling irony of Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine, Newman himself opted for the metaphor of the faithful as mirror ‘in which the bishops see themselves’; adding, as an aside, ‘Well, I suppose a person may consult his glass, and in a way may know things about himself which he can learn in no other way’.Footnote ⁶ The activity of theology is thus to be understood as a process of collective reflection going on within the community of faith and emerging as an expression of the Church's doctrine. This is set out in a passage from the Constitution on Revelation, which echoes in a remarkable way the passage already quoted above from Newman's, Historical Sketches:

This historical‐mindedness marks a significant change of direction. Newman, and perhaps Johannes Adam Möhler in Germany, were the first representatives of what Bernard Lonergan regards as the transition from a classicist to a historical world view. ‘Culture’ is now to be understood ‘as … an ongoing process of self‐realization, as an ongoing process in which the constitutive, the effective, and the cognitive meaning of Christianity is continuously realized in ever changing situations’.Footnote ⁸ Newman, it will be remembered, took as his text for the sermon on the development of doctrine, the last of the University Sermons: ‘Mary pondered all these things in her heart’ (her heart, not her mind, note). Lonergan, who, as a student at Heythrop in the nineteen twenties went through the main parts of Newman's Grammar of Assent six times,Footnote ⁹ explores the difference between the two approaches to doing theology in four important essays published in A Second Collection.Footnote ¹⁰ He well sums up this dynamic turn to the contextualized subject in the third of these pieces:

Such a position is clearly expressed in John XXIII's opening address to the Council on October 11^th 1962. It was also what Newman was trying to tease out in the body of his own writings, already explicit in The University Sermons of 1843:

For Newman, we come to the truth, in ordinary experience, as well as in religious knowledge, by an engagement of the whole person: by an accumulation of probabilities which gives personal certitude: the many, many fibres which, together, make a rope tougher, yet more supple, than a single steel cable. This is the theme he tackled at length in his phenomenological account of the process of knowing explored in The Grammar of Assent (1870) but it underlies all his thinking. This is not an attempt at abstract thought or speculation but, as Aldous Huxley appropriately called the book, ‘an analysis of the psychology of thought’.Footnote ¹³ Newman was attempting to demonstrate that ‘faith gives real assent to a concrete reality’.Footnote ¹⁴ David Pailin spells this out:

This was something he made clear in his early set of letters to The Times, the collection of which came to be known as The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), in a passage he thought so important that he cites it again at length in The Grammar of Assent. Reason might play an important part in our thinking, but there is far more to the mind than mere reasoning. Newman anticipates the approach of later phenomenological analysis:

For Newman truth can only be approached with homage, with preparation of the heart. This is what Newman calls certitude as opposed to certainty:

Truth for Newman is personal and every person has to come by himself, or herself, to such a recognition. Faith is a principle of action, a risk, a venture. The Church presents its faith not in syllogisms but in the love Christians show for each other, in lives of the saints. Perhaps I have wandered rather from my theme, but it is perhaps significant that many bishops experienced the Council as a new Pentecost, and commented that their renewed discovery of the experience of being Church was more important to them that the documents the Council produced. Newman might well have agreed.

Both Newman and John XXIII regarded themselves as historians, rather than theologians. They turned instinctively to positive rather than speculative theology. Newman had taught himself historical theology through the study of the Fathers and was thus a precursor of the later French nouvelle théologie and the ressourcement which provided so formative a context for Vatican II.Footnote ¹⁸ He never found himself at ease with the style of theology represented by the Roman schools of the mid‐nineteenth century which was later to develop into neo‐scholasticism and the Denzinger‐style proof‐text, propositional theology of the manuals. The Roman schools were equally suspicious of Newman for a considerable period after Bishop T. J. Brown had delated him to Rome for his paper ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ in 1859, and the muddle caused by Wiseman and Manning in failing to defend Newman when they visited Propaganda.

The young Angelo Roncalli taught Church History and, in 1906, discovered what might have proved to be his life's work, the 39 volumes of St Charles Borromeo's visitation records of the diocese of Bergamo, offering a picture of how the great post‐Tridentine Cardinal set about the reform of a diocese, which he set about editing: the work was finished only on the eve of his becoming Pope. Like Newman, Roncalli saw ‘history as the great teacher of life’ which he spelt out in his opening address to the Council. This was what gave both such a sense of confidence in the face of the so‐called prophets of doom and gloom. It was for the same reason that John XXIII insisted that Council should look to the signs of the times and be pre‐eminently pastoral in nature. This was not merely a comment about the outcome of the Council texts but about how the bishops and their theologians should prepare the texts themselves. They were to be the product of a process of listening, a dialogue going on within as well as outside the community of the Church.

It is worth reminding ourselves at this point of the concluding sentences of the address which shaped the agenda of the Council:

This is a fine summary of Newman's idea of the development of doctrine. We are reminded of that sentence from The Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: ‘In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’.Footnote ²⁰ It is important to remember the context of this, I think, rather misunderstood quotation:

Newman's view of history is eschatological, not apocalyptic (if one can make such a distinctionFootnote ²²). It is not about end of the world scenarios, the doom and gloom of those John XXIII attacks, nor, it must be said, about mere human, earthly progress, scientific or technological. Newman would certainly have agreed with Joseph Ratzinger's expression of unease over Gaudium et Spes, and an ‘almost naïve progressivist optimism which seemed unaware of the ambivalence of all external progress’.Footnote ²³ Newman comments in the University Sermons:

As we shall see, Newman certainly appreciated and demanded an educated laity; he was certainly not dismissive of science or any other academic discipline, but these played their part alongside faith, each in its proper place. This was something he made clear in The Tamworth Reading Room letters:

Here he cast not so gentle mockery on Peel and Brougham's suggestion that education, an increase in secular knowledge, progress, made men better beings: ‘[knowledge] leaves man where it found him – man, and not an Angel – a sinner, not a Saint; but it tries to make him look as much like he is not as ever it can’.Footnote ²⁶

Newman had become concerned at the increasing polarization between teachers and taught in the Church. The distinction between the ecclesia docens (the teaching church) and ecclesia discens (the learning church), a theme developed by German canonists and popular catechisms from the mid‐eighteenth century,Footnote ²⁷ had been exacerbated in the in following century by the destruction of the theological schools across Europe by the devastations of Napoleon. His work on The Arians of the Fourth Century had taught Newman that the division between those teaching and those taught was never as clear as later argued: at times those taught were the teachers of faith, and those teaching members of the community of the faithful. In the concluding lines of his On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, Newman could comment:

Inevitably Newman could be rather more unbuttoned and forthright in personal correspondence than in his more formal published writings and his letters provide a useful perspective on his views on authority in the Church and its apparent suppressing of legitimate and creative dissent. As will be sensed from his correspondence at this time, 1863 was a particularly difficult time with the dashing of many of his hopes: the affair of the Catholic University; the fiasco over translating the Bible; being delated to Rome for the article in The Rambler. He is at his most bitter: ‘great minds’, he protested his ‘need elbow room’.Footnote ²⁹ Writing in March 1863 to Robert Ornsby, a married Catholic convert, for whom Newman had sought a job at the Catholic University in Ireland, he commented:

Emily Bowles, like Ornsby, was one of Newman's closest confidents. She received a similar missive:

Newman is concerned here with a vital freedom of discussion within the Church and the legitimacy of different schools of opinion which allow the necessary cut and thrust of opinion as the truth is honed and clarified. He sees the dangers in privileging one particular school of thought: if this becomes the case the magisterium is, in turn, compromised and is in danger of becoming narrowed to a particular theological position rather than accepted as the authentic interpreter of theological opinion.

This was an issue which came to a head in the decades following the definition of infallibility at Vatican I and in the years of the modernist crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. In their joint pastoral letter of 1900 on The Church and Liberal Catholicism, which won the acclaim of Leo XIII,Footnote ³² the bishops of England and Wales taught a sharp distinction between two orders in the Church:

The learning church includes not only the body of the laity, ‘but also of Ecclesiastics, and even Bishops in their individual and private capacity’Footnote ³⁴ with an inevitable narrowing of the teaching church to the Pope and his immediate advisors. It was only a small step to an understanding which regarded the Pope as not speaking as the voice of the Church, but a voice from outside speaking to the Church. The English Jesuit, George Tyrrell, not the least acerbic of critics, wrote of the pastoral:

Tyrrell's is certainly an overstatement, but it is not without point with its emphasis on specialist knowledge as an essential qualification for governing, leaving the governed as mere obedient spectators. Karl Popper, in what he considered to be his war work, exposed in his The Open Society & Its Enemies Footnote ³⁶ the dangers inherent in the insidious power of the notion of guardians/hierarchies developed by Plato in The Republic and Laws.Footnote ³⁷

It was not only the eccentric and unfortunately influential papal confidante, Mgr. George Talbot, who could denigrate the laity in his oft‐quoted quip to Cardinal Manning: ‘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’.Footnote ³⁸ Even as level‐headed a man as Bishop Ullathorne adopted a similar position. Newman thought otherwise. For Newman the laity could not be regarded as merely passive recipients of divine teaching: his approach was so much more subtle. He was to challenge Bishop Ullathorne in conversation, revealing that depth of humour sometimes overlooked in his writings, and, commenting to a friend, remarked ‘He [Ullathorne] said something like, “Who are the laity?” I answered that the Church would look foolish without them –not those words’.Footnote ³⁹ This was a theme Newman had already explored in his first book The Arians of the Fourth Century and was to develop in his important essay On Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine: ‘In all times the laity has been the measure of the Catholic spirit … that is why I am accustomed to lay great stress on the consensus fidelium as an important channel of tradition.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Of course the English hierarchy has been free from the oversight of Propaganda since 1908, but one does not have to look far to see echoes of Newman's comments in even contemporary dealings between the local Churches and Roman authorities. We might think of the process of the implementation of the new text of our liturgy, which leaves many questions unanswered. It is reflected in the recent intervention of the Theological Committee of the American Bishops’ Conference in their inappropriate criticisms of Elizabeth Johnson's fine book, Quest for the Living God, or the more recent castigations made against the integrity of the journal, Theological Studies.

Newman turned from this essentially adversarial metaphor of sheep and shepherd, with the shepherd as gatekeeper and guardian over the truth, to the patristic model of pastors as primarily witnesses to the belief of their churches. His thinking on the ideal functioning of the Church was sketched out in an extended 1877 introduction to the two volume collection of Anglican essays published as The Via Media, the first volume containing his essay On the Prophetical Office of the Church.⁴¹ Newman grounds his discussion of coming to the truth of faith in the Church as a consensus between pastors and people, ‘the “pastorum et fidelium conspiratio” which is not in the pastors alone’.Footnote ⁴² He fills this out by invoking the model of the munus triplex, the triple office of Christ, already touched on in a sermon of his Anglican days, ‘The Three Offices of Christ’.Footnote ⁴³ This itself is an interesting concept because, although it is a theme which was touched on in the work of Eusebius and St John Chrysostom,Footnote ⁴⁴ it emerged only with the appearance of the great mediaeval University centres, adding the Studium to the previously existing Sacerdotium and the Regnum,Footnote ⁴⁵ and owes its development to John Calvin and the Reformed Tradition.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was a theme which thus came late to Catholic thinking in Newman and von Hügel: it was picked up by the Catechism of the Council of TrentFootnote ⁴⁷ but only came to the fore – I suspect independently of the thought of Newman – in the writings of Matthias Scheeben.Footnote ⁴⁸ It appeared for the first time in Papal teaching in Pius’ XII's Mystici Corporis Christi of 1943, drafted of course by the Dutch theologian Sebastian Tromp, as well as in Lumen gentium for which Tromp was to play a formative role in initial versions of the text.

Newman pictures the Church as consisting of a threefold inter‐related skein of priestly, prophetic and regal offices. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. None can stand alone, and needs completing and complementing by its fellows. The priestly office, which belongs primarily to pastors and their flock, represents the call to holiness in the Church and has as its guiding principle devotion; its instrument emotion; but it can all too easily succumb to the danger of superstition. This is opposed by the regal office which belongs to the papacy and curia. Its task is to preserve the catholicity and unity of the Church, with its guiding principle expedience or order; its instrument command, even coercion; its danger tyranny and ambition. A mediating role is provided by the prophetic office which is the function of theologians, ‘theology [being] the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The task of theologians, guided by reason, is to preserve the apostolicity of the Church. Guided by the pursuit of truth, its danger is a fall into rationalism. Newman calls for the creative dynamism of dialogue in the life of the Church, itself a keynote of Vatican II which also put to the fore the idea of collegiality and the appropriate subsidiariaty of life and thinking in the local church, a theme still remaining more popular in the realms of moral and social thought within the Church than in that of ecclesiology, and something which pertains particularly to the contribution made by the community of faithful in the life of the Church.

This theme is explored at length in works by both Jerome Hamer. O. P., and Yves Congar, O. P..Footnote ⁵⁰ The latter's magisterial study of lay people in the Church, Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat expounds Congar's rich theology of the laity in terms of the triple office. Hamer is more circumspect following more closely the rather narrow, and primarily juridical emphasis of Mystici Corporis Christi, which ties the triple office to the apostolic mandate of the bishops.Footnote ⁵¹ In his The Church is a Communion, while offering a fine exposition of Newman's On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine in an appendix, he, too, relates the triple office to what he terms the hierarchical ministry,Footnote ⁵² which of its nature excludes the laity as such.Footnote ⁵³ Congar acknowledges this hierarchical principle but goes much farther in his positive evaluation of the function of the laity in the Church, commenting that ‘the Church's solid tradition has always to join with the hierarchical principle (structure) that of communal agreement (life)’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is consonant with the seeds of development to be found in Pius XII's great encyclical on liturgical renewal, Mediator Dei (1947) which, refering as many as twenty‐five times to Mystici Corporis Christi, offers something of a commentary on it. Here the Pope insists on the centrality of baptism for membership of the mystical body and by which ‘as by common right … they participate, according to their condition, in the priesthood of Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This, in turn, was taken up by the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in firmly rooting the triple office of Christ in the sacrament of baptism, Footnote ⁵⁶ and confirmed by the beautiful prayer in the new rite of baptism, which echoes the words of St John Chysostom referred to above.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is in his master‐piece, True and False Reform in the Church, that Congar comes nearest to developing this theme, and realizing Newman's attempt to construct what Avery Dulles terms ‘the dialectic between structure and life in the church’, and in offering the reader a guide to necessary reform in the community of the Church.Footnote ⁵⁸

Both Newman and Congar agree that the faith of the Christian community is something active ‘and not solely in the realm of morals or mysticism but also in the order of thought, for faith itself has an intellectual content’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The faithful bring their own lives to bear in living out the truths of faith as they pray together, study together, and, above all, engage with the text of the Scriptures. Newman in particular is concerned with regulating the ordinary life of the community of Christians, pastors and faithful, and offers the triple office as a mechanism which provides the checks and balances, the mutual process of listening, which brings harmony to the Church. Sometimes of course the hierarchical magisterium most appropriately performs its task by listening and by affirming what it hears. One thinks of the response of Gregory XI in returning from Avignon to Rome at the behest of St Catherine of Siena in 1377. One thinks of the naming of several women, including Catherine herself, as doctors of the Church, a powerful affirmation of the role of the laity as teachers in the ways of faith. One thinks of Ignatius of Loyola's enjoining a process of ‘sentire cum Ecclesia’, which is far from a matter of submissive listening: Congar reminds us that what Ignatius in fact wrote was ‘“sentire vere in Ecclesia militante”[Have a sense of the church bravely acting in the world], which restores to the faithful of the church their part in the life of the body’Footnote ⁶⁰

Although Lumen gentium prioritized the theme of the participation of the Christian in the munus triplex through her or his baptism, John Mahoney sees teaching of the Constitution on the Church as remaining ‘rather unilateral’ and ‘still reflect[ing] a view of the church as sharply divided between the teachers and the taught’ in contrast to the ‘perhaps more mature Conciliar Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which recognises … a strikingly more than passive role’ exercised by the laity:Footnote ⁶¹

In conclusion, it is suggestive to compare Newman's ecclesiological vision to that of a young theologian, who had in fact studied Newman in seminary. Brought to Vatican II as a peritus by Cardinal Frings, he published a series of pamphlets one after each session of the Council which were brought together and republished in 1966. He saw the spiritual awakening of the bishops as Church to be far more important than the texts the Council produced, and, writing strongly in favour of collegiality, claimed that:

He pointed to the need for decentralization and looked to the development of what he called a ‘horizontal Catholicity’, emancipating the body of bishops and restoring the fruitful interplay between periphery and centre using the resources of bishops’ conferences to revive the synodal structure of the ancient Church and an Episcopal council in Rome to provide a counterpart to the Curia together with the rediscovery of the pope's patriarchal role, which would help to reaffirm the normal situations of the Church's life as the proper domain of the working out of collegial responsibility. He found what he felt to be the most significant example of what was to come in the first document to be promulgated by the Council, the document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which handed over to the local bishops’ conferences the right to make decisions relating to the liturgy, seeking only a recognitio from the Holy See for its work. And the name of this radical and far‐seeing peritus?– Joseph Ratzinger.Footnote ⁶³ Following in Newman's steps, he sets us an exciting agenda. We live in hope.