The new Catechism and Cardinal Newman

Archbishop Eric D'Arcy

Contents - Mar 1994 - Buy a copy now Townsville Mass attendance document - 'Where have all the parishioners gone?' Books: 'Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church' - Michael Gilchrist (reviewer) The new Catechism and Cardinal Newman - Archbishop Eric D'Arcy

With the English edition of the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' due for worldwide release next month Archbishop Eric D'Arcy of Hobart examines the challenge this presents for Australia's Catholic educators as viewed in the light of Cardinal Newman's writings. The Archbishop has written the following abridgment of an article of his, which first appeared in the international theological journal 'Communio', specifically for 'AD2000'.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) was a providential initiative of the Universal Church. If particular Churches are to capitalise on it fully, they will now need to commission classroom texts and teachers' resources for all the major developmental stages that students attain taking the CCC as the point of reference.

The CCC itself is not meant for the classroom. Its publication completes Stage One of the process envisaged by the 1985 Extraordinary Synod. Stage Two is also essential: producing actual catechisms for the different countries and cultures where the Church lives and teaches.

This is an exhilarating prospect. To catechetical writers and publishers, it holds out the most glorious opportunity in four hundred years. Nevertheless it bristles with difficulties, two of which are particularly formidable.

The first will involve a tension intrinsic to the task. In content, every such local catechism must be completely faithful to the doctrinal substance of the CCC; yet in style and methodology, it must be conceived and expressed throughout in the cultural idiom of the intended users.

In the English-speaking First World, a second difficulty will be particularly acute: many of our most dedicated faith-educationists do not believe the CCC to be a providential initiative at all; they simply do not believe in a systematically doctrinal catechetic. One's heart goes out to those of them who take up the work out of Catholic solidarity, but without much interior conviction.

I want to suggest that the thought and the heart of Cardinal Newman are uniquely fitted to offer them fellow-feeling and congenial leadership. Happily, interest in his writings has been quickened just now because of his being named Venerable by Pope John Paul, soon after learned conferences around the world had celebrated the centenary of his death.

Educationists willing to delve into his mind and heart will come to realise, first perhaps with relief and then with mounting self-confidence, that they are being called to become the vanguard of a whole new catechetical enterprise as the century begins to turn.

For Newman, authentic Christian faith involves both intellect and heart; but heart is much the more important. He chose as his cardinalatial motto, Cor ad cor loquitur ["Heart speaks to heart"]. He detests the idea that "belief belongs to the mere intellect, not also to the heart." For him faith is above all a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

This is why we see such multitudes in France and Italy giving up religion altogether: they have not impressed upon their hearts the life of Our Lord and Saviour as given to us in the Evangelists. They believe merely with the intellect, not with the heart.

This clearly resonates with a painful misgiving felt by many anglophone faith-educationists about the whole project of a CCC. They fear that a systematically doctrinal catechetic will lead to an impersonal, head-without-heart faith-life divorced from experience.

Newman believed passionately in each of two distinct things: the objective truth of the Church's doctrines; and the intensely personal character of the believer's possession of them. He never failed to keep the two clearly distinct; but he developed the creative tension between them.

For many years, however, anglophone catechists and faith-educators have been obliged to work out of a cluster of theoretical attitudes that plumped heavily for the personal, subjective aspect, to the serious detriment of their students' confident recognition of the Church's doctrines as objective truths.

And not only that: Experientialism, in its heyday as a catechetic twenty years ago, engendered a strongly felt loyalty to itself and instinctive suspicions to other 'models'. Even now, when the theory itself has been heavily modified, the reflex suspicions remain, especially of anything perceived as a systematically doctrinal model.

E.D. Hirsch Jr has traced experientialist and kindred theories of education back through Piaget and Dewey to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "Even today," he writes, "Rousseau's principles reappear in the doctrine, straight out of Emile, that a child's positive self-concept is the true key to learning."

His argument against this whole current of thought is summarised at the start of his celebrated book: "Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children's ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences, and too hastily rejected "the piling up of information." Only by piling up specific community-based information can children learn to participate in complex co-operative activities with other members of the community."

The first three sentences of this sum up all too well the theory implicit in the dominant catechetic of the last twenty years. The fourth recalls the Church's constant recognition that, if her children are to share in the richly complex co-operative activities of the faith-community, they have to pile up an informed familiarity with the truths of the Faith, and its tribal rites and customs and expectations. The Extraordinary Synod of 1985, when it requested a Universal Catechism, was squarely in line with that constant recognition.

Of course Hirsch insists that Dewey was only half-wrong. He was half-right, often brilliantly so. Every good teacher since Socrates, and every good Christian teacher since Jesus himself, has drawn copiously on experience: one's own; one's pupils; their acquaintance, direct or indirect, with human experience in fact and fiction.

But the other half is also essential. It comprises all that which one cannot discover for oneself, but has to be taught in all the different ways that a community passes on its patrimony of achieved discovery and wisdom and imaginative creation.

This is true of faith-education as well as of secular. I do not experience the changing of the bread and wine into Our Lord's body and blood at Mass, any more than I experience the neuronal changes constantly occurring in my own brain. But a knowledge of the latter is an item of every educated person's general knowledge; a knowledge of the former is an item of every well-instructed Catholic's faith-knowledge; and in both cases one acquires the knowledge, not through experiencing it, but by being taught it by those who already possess it.

Experience is indispensable for making the truths of the faith one's own, for penetrating into their significance at greater and greater depth. This is true above all of experience by prayer: in the liturgy, in private personal prayer and meditation, in popular devotions. But in addition to all these, one must also have articulate doctrinal input at a level comparable with that of the rest of one's education.

However, this is to talk only at the levels of critical thought and empirical familiarity with outcomes. It is at the much more agitating level of strong loyalties and professional peer pressures that suspicion of a doctrinal catechetical operates. At that level Newman is a past master.

We are urgently in need of an up-to-date account of the place of doctrine in a complete education-in-faith. There are few signs that this need is about to be met. But children's lives cannot be put on hold. Writers and teachers cannot suspend operations until such an account is forthcoming. Pending that, they will find in Newman both leadership and guidance. He does not set out a formal account, in the schematic manner of a manual. Rather, he causes it to dawn on us, to grow in us, as we become more familiar with his thought and his heart.

Principle of dogma

In Protestant theology, non-doctrinal and non-propositional theories of faith have been around for centuries. Newman describes vividly how "the anti-dogmatic principle" confronted him as a young Evangelical. In Catholic theology such theories never made much way before the 1960s. Then, however, there was quite a heavy flirtation with them, frequently under the label "non-propositional." This still has deep-seated influence in catechetical practice, though less today in spoken principle.

The Church understands her doctrines to be objective truths, communicable without loss of meaning in propositions of human language. (This neither assumes nor entails a propositional account of Revelation.) There are rich insights available in Newman, ready and waiting, here and now.

Time after time he shows doctrinal knowledge to be integral to an authentic adult faith. "That vague thing, 'our common Christianity,' I discard for the reason that it cannot throw itself into a proposition." "Christianity is faith, faith implies a doctrine, a doctrine implies propositions," And alongside his statement that "Christianity is eminently an objective religion," consider one of the most haunting of all his "analogies": "The dogmatic principle is to Christianity what conscience is to the individual."

Being brought to this conviction changed his whole mind-set for the remaining seventy-four years of his life: "When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured."

The economy of that statement, "I received into my intellect impressions of dogma," proves to be astonishing.

(1) "1 received into my intellect impressions of dogma". One cannot bring oneself to faith, by dint of effort or logic or brilliant insight; one must receive it; it is a gift. This is intrinsic to Newman's epistemology of faith. In his pedagogy of faith, it is tied to the important concept of the deposit of faith: "Those things which thou hast heard from me through many witnesses, says St Paul to Timothy, commit these same to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. This body of truth was in consequence called the depositum, as being substantive teaching, not a mere accidental deduction from Scripture. Thus St Paul says to his disciple and successor Timothy, Keep the deposit, Hold fast the form of sound words, Guard the noble deposit ... What is 'the deposit'? That which has been entrusted to you, not which thou hast discovered; what thou hast received, not what thou hast thought out; a matter not of cleverness, but of teaching; not of private handling, but of public tradition."

"Guard the deposit" (1 Tim 6:20), "Guard the noble deposit" (2 Tim 1:14): how Newman's words anticipate the opening of the Apostolic Constitution with which Pope John Paul II gave the CCC to the Universal Church. It is entitled Fidei depositum.

Guarding the deposit of faith is the mission which the Lord has entrusted to his Church and which she fulfils in every age ... The principal task entrusted to the Council by Pope John XXIII was to guard and present better the precious deposit of Christian doctrine in order to make it more accessible to the Christian faithful and to all people of good will.

Recently, however, the concept of "the deposit of faith" has suffered something of an eclipse in English-speaking faith-education theory.

It is a grievous loss. Appreciation of the Church's patrimony in architecture, in the visual arts, and in music waxes strong, thank God; that of her doctrinal patrimony has waned. In the CCC, the Church calls us to entrust teachers and students once more with that deposit which is their rightful inheritance.

(2) "I received into my intellect impressions of dogma": education-in-faith must educate the intellect, along with the other faith-powers. This too is crucial in Newman's account of faith. It has nothing to do with being an intellectual, no suggestion that real faith is the preserve of an educated Žlite. He is intensely interested in the question, What count as good reasons for Christian faith in a factory girl, or a working man, or a washerwoman? He notes, "An accurate knowledge of the catechism is a motivum credibilitatis."

He says: "[Gospel] faith is what even the humblest member of the Church may and must contend for; and in proportion to his education will the circle of his knowledge enlarge ... and, according as his power of grasping the sense of [the Creed's] articles increases, so will it become his duty to contend for them in their fuller and more accurate form."

A sound high school education must involve the whole person. A sound education-in-faith must involve all of one's faith-powers: not only the affective and the conative, but also the cognitive. An educated Christian needs a clear and coherent belief-system, articulated in keeping with his or her stage of personal development, and organically open to further growth along with the developing maturity of all his or her faith-powers. A faith development whose cognitive powers are deprived or retarded in comparison with the rest of one's development severely handicaps one's growing towards a full and confident Christian adulthood.

As Newman said: "I want a laity ... who know their faith, 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, and who know enough of history to defend it. I want an intelligent well- instructed laity ... And one immediate effect of your being able to do all this will be your gaining that proper confidence in self that is so necessary for you."

Data bank

In his day this was an impossible dream: few anglophone Catholics had a high school education, and few teachers could carry through such an ambitious program. Today, however, it is a familiar reality; in God's providence hundreds of thousands of young Catholics complete thirteen years of Catholic schooling or C.C.D. Dozens of Catholic faculties of education now enjoy equal recognition with their secular peers. And now, for those who must prepare the texts and resources that these students and teachers and faculty members need, the Universal Church provides the CCC, a uniquely authoritative doctrinal 'data-bank.'

Hence we will now be able to empower students to discover for themselves that the doctrinal infrastructure of the faith is just as intellectually serious, just as well grounded and articulated, as are the other things they study. Newman calls such faith-education of the intellect "natural, excellent and necessary": "It is natural, because the intellect is one of our highest faculties; excellent, because it is our duty to use our faculties to the full; necessary, because unless we apply our intellect to revealed truth rightly, others will exercise their minds upon it wrongly."

(3) "I received into my intellect impressions of dogma." It was Newman especially who rediscovered the character of God's revelation as Self-revelation, and the character of faith as the response of the Christian self to God's immediately communicated Self. No-one writing in English, before or after Dei Verbum, has brought this home as piercingly as Newman. But he did not overreact. Excitement at this momentous rediscovery did not stampede him into laying down the doctrinal aspect of faith: "From the age of 15, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion: I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ... What I held in 1816, I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God, I shall hold it to the end."

And so he did, at every stage of his long life. For example, preaching as an Anglican on the doctrine of the Ascension he said: "[L]et us jealously maintain this and every other portion of our Creed, lest, by dropping jot or tittle, we suffer truths contained therein to escape." And again, a little later: "... Gospel Faith is a definite deposit: a treasure, common to all, one and the same in every age, conceived in set words, such as admit of being received, preserved, transmitted."

Writing as a Catholic, in the work that took twenty years of drafting and rewriting, he said: "[Doctrinal] propositions may and must be used, and easily can be used, as the expression of facts, not notions, and they are necessary to the mind in the same way that language is ever necessary for denoting facts ... Again, they are useful in their dogmatic aspect as ascertaining and making clear for us truths on which the religious imagination has to rest. Knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections."

No wonder Newman reported himself unsurprised by James Mozley's failure to persevere in Anglicanism "because he never held it as a doctrine, as a truth, but merely as an ethos."

In the Essay on Development he singles out nine specimens of Christian principle which "are as patent and operative in the Latin and Creek Christianity of our day as they were in the beginning." The first two are:

1. The principle of dogma, that is, supernatural truths irrevocably committed to human language, imperfect because it is human, but definitive and necessary because given from above.

2. The principle of faith, which is the correlative of dogma, being the absolute acceptance of the divine word with an internal assent.

All the same, for those who are to write local catechisms using the CCC as the point of reference, the words that will mean more than any others are those in which Newman, while refusing to undervalue secular scholars' dedication to truth, firmly distinguishes it from, "that true religious zeal which leads theologians to keep the sacred Ark of the Covenant in every letter of its dogma, as a tremendous deposit for which they are responsible." These words are all the more weighty when contrasted with the lightness of touch throughout the rest of the long paragraph where they occur. And if they are true of theologians, how much more so of those who write and publish catechetical texts for Christ's young!

Cultural idiom

Newman is quite certain that the hold on a doctrinal truth will be the stronger, the more completely the doctrine is expressed in the believer's own cultural idiom: "[I]f Christianity be a universal religion, suited not simply to one locality or period, but to all times and places, it cannot but vary in its relationships and dealings with the world around it, that is, it will develop. Principles require a very various application according as persons and circumstances vary, and must be thrown into new shapes according to the form of society which they are to serve."

Here again Newman's oeuvre inspires us powerfully to that great end, for he is one of the masters of English prose. Once at a meeting in Rome I incautiously quoted Frank Sheed's claim, that, since St Augustine, God had given no man both a vocation to the priesthood and great literary talent. "Oh?" objected Cardinal Ratzinger, "then what about Newman?"

The point was well taken. The prose style that Newman commands is not a mere supervenient bonus, like the bloom on the cheek of the youth in Aristotle's account of pleasure. There is a cautionary passage in Evelyn Waugh's Helena; the Christian historian/apologist Lactantius says: "Suppose that in years to come when the Church's troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus, and the soul of an animal ... He might be refuted again and again, but what he wrote would remain in people's minds even after the refutations were quite forgotten. This is what style does ...".

Gibbon, Voltaire and Rousseau exemplify this all too well; but what about a writer for the Christian truth? Newman is a splendid case in point.

Support for this claim may be taken from a somewhat unfriendly source. The novelist A.N. Wilson delights in debunking Newman, sniggering over a report that the boys at the Oratory school nicknamed the octogenarian cardinal "Jack," gloating over the claim that Cardinal Manning considered him "not only a dangerous liberal, but also an impossible man," and claiming that in a well-loved photograph he looks like the spry inmate of a female geriatric ward." He thinks Newman's churchmanship feeble in comparison with Manning's and declares himself bored by the content of his "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" controversies.

And yet Wilson generously confesses: "Newman's religious temperament was highly developed - for some Laodicean readers, disconcertingly so - but in English a religious mind has seldom been gifted with such a capacity for self-description. In the English language, I know no author except Wordsworth who can match him in this particular field, and few to rival him as a prose stylist. But then, I am drunk with the Newman music ...".

Utter fidelity to the doctrinal substance of the CCC, conceived and expressed in our own cultural idiom, at all the different developmental stages our students reach: it is a tall order. But it is certainly not undervalued by Newman: "There is no greater mistake, surely, than to suppose that a revealed truth precludes originality in the treatment of it ... The reassertion of what is old with a luminousness of explanation which is new, is a gift inferior only to that of revelation itself."

There, Newman was speaking of the inventive fertility of theology in the patristic and the medieval periods, in contrast with the theological sterility of the centuries which preceded each of them. But, given the awe in which Newman holds revelation, can one doubt what he will think of such authentic originality in catechetics?

Editor: Details on references quoted from in this article are available on request from AD2000.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 7 No 2 (March 1994), p. 6