By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Traditional religious believers in the U.S. may have been shocked over the last decade or so when government began openly telling them to violate their faith in major ways.
In 2010 the Obama administration was altering traditional legal terminology away from “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship.”
People could believe as they pleased within their houses of worship, but step outside onto the sidewalk and here comes government requiring the death of conscience and the taxpayers’ funding of, for instance, permissive abortion and contraception.
I noted this in a front-page article I wrote for the March 1, 2012, Wanderer about one of the debates for that year’s national campaign headlined, “Arizona Presidential Debate Reveals Nuggets of Truth Too Dangerous to Obama.”
That president and his media acolytes tried falsely to spin the issue as one of Republicans forbidding contraception rather than the actuality of Democrats imposing immorality on religious believers as political policy.
Government hoped to decide who their ministers could be and what should count as important in their faith. If this sounds like today’s control of religion in Communist China, what a coincidence.
What started with a vengeance under Barack Obama still is afoot, with “progressives” trying to oppress people. Under the headline “Will left-wing legal activists ever stop targeting Catholic nuns?,” writer Nicole Russell posted at the Washington Examiner on October 4, “The Little Sisters of the Poor are back in court for what seems like the billionth time.”
Russell added: “That Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, should actually believe it’s in the state’s interest and best use of taxpayer resources to sue nuns for not providing birth control when it’s accessible elsewhere is one of the most demonstrative examples of the toxic liberal agenda currently circulating through the court system.”
As remarkable as such attempts at compulsion by Democrats may seem today, well over a century ago an English Catholic cardinal who died at age 89 in 1890 already foresaw such foundations being laid in his native land, even by well-meaning people.
That would be Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, scheduled to be canonized a saint by Pope Francis on October 13.
Newman was born into an English Protestant family in London in 1801, was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825, and became “an incredibly famous preacher all throughout England” even though his pulpit manner was far from spellbinding, an instructor for the Institute of Catholic Theology (ICT) told an audience on October 5 looking forward to the canonization.
Instructor Aaron Martin, who attended the Catholic University of America and obtained bachelor’s and licentiate degrees in philosophy, is an attorney as well as serving as a sacristan at Phoenix’s St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, where the ICT is based.
Preaching for 45 minutes to an hour, Newman sounded “very monotonous…not an engaging person, by any means,” Martin said, but his words made their mark.
Newman considered Roman Catholics to hold “the conservative position” and evangelicals the liberal one, Martin said, while his own Anglicans’ “middle way” was “the best.” However, after studying the early Church Fathers, Newman concluded that the Catholic Church had best held true to Christianity, while his “middle way” actually was a heresy, Martin said.
In 1845, “just about halfway through his life,” Newman converted to Catholicism and was ordained a Catholic priest two years later, Martin said.
Although changing denominations today may be considered unremarkable, Martin said, in Newman’s day it meant that he not only lost friends and his important status in society but also his job, because a professed Catholic wouldn’t be allowed to teach where he was, at Oxford.
But what Newman had lost with his conversion he was more than to recover in the second half of his life. In his seventy-eighth year he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, in 1879. Leo had ascended to the papacy only the previous year, 1878, and often is regarded as desiring the Church to cope with the modern age without forsaking its rootedness in the truth.
Martin didn’t speak about current political issues as they relate to Newman’s thinking, but he did note that Newman sounds as if he might be addressing our own time.
Newman’s “Biglietto Speech,” which Martin distributed to his listeners, was composed to thank Pope Leo for his selection to the cardinalate. Newman also took the occasion to restate his decades of opposition to “the spirit of liberalism in religion,” which, he said, more than ever needed to be rejected as “an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole Earth. . . .
“Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily,” Newman warned. “It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. . . .
“Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man,” he said. “If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.
“Hitherto the civil power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that: ‘Christianity was the law of the land’,” Newman continued. “Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity.”
This “liberalistic theory” had good elements, Newman said, until a person noticed that it was intended to replace religion.
Much in this theory “is good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence, which, as I have already noted, are among its avowed principles, and the natural laws of society,” Newman said. “It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supersede, to block out, religion, that we pronounce it to be evil.
“There never was a device of the Enemy so cleverly framed and . . . with such promise of success,” he said. “And already it has answered to the expectations which have been formed of it. It is sweeping into its own ranks great numbers of able, earnest, virtuous men, elderly men of approved antecedents, young men with a career before them.”
Still, Newman said, although he deeply lamented it “because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls,” he had confidence that it could not prevail. “Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now.”
A Well-Instructed Laity
Although Newman was a champion of lay participation in the Church, he wanted a well-informed laity, Martin said. Before his conversion, he thought that Catholics “bordered on the superstitious” and believed that was confirmed for him during a visit to Rome “in the way people understood their faith.”
Martin also distributed a page with a little of Newman’s poetry and his hopes for knowledgeable laity.
Newman said: “I want a laity not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity.”
More than a decade before he became Catholic, Newman reflected on trusting God’s unfolding guidance in his Lead, Kindly Light, which included the words, “Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene — one step enough for me.”
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