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By decision of Pope Leo XIV, announced on July 31, 2025, the British saint John Henry Newman (1801–1890) will soon be proclaimed Doctor of the Church. This title, attributed to only thirty-eight saints to date, highlights not only holiness of life, but also the decisive contribution of a doctrine to the understanding of faith. This event echoes another gesture made a century and a half earlier. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII created cardinal the one who, for a long time, had been suspected and misunderstood. This elevation was not a worldly honor, but a rehabilitation and recognition. Through this gesture, the Pope already acknowledged Newman’s doctrinal stature, as a convert from Anglicanism and an Oratorian, foreshadowing the proclamation that the universal Church now consecrates.
To understand this decision, it may be useful to take a step aside: indeed, one can shed light on how another giant of theology, Henri de Lubac, read and understood Newman1. By bringing Newman closer to Henri de Lubac, one discovers how their destinies and their doctrines respond to each other. Both were suspected and later rehabilitated, both found in the Church their vocation as faithful witnesses. Above all, both transmitted an understanding of the faith marked by the organic nature of the mystery: revelation as a living whole, dogma as its progressive expression, and the Church as the place of this growth. By reading Newman, Lubac found a source of inspiration and comfort; Newman, through Lubac, prepared 20th-century theology and the impulse of Vatican II.
I The first affinities: Newman at the heart of Lubac’s formation
Henri de Lubac immersed himself in Newman’s work (and in his English) during his Jesuit training, at the same time, it seems, as in a continuous reading of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church2. This first contact was programmatic, for, as he would later write in his first major work – itself programmatic, as we know –, Newman had perceived “the question of Scripture and its spiritual understanding” in its “essential link to orthodoxy3.” This “indissoluble” link between the Gospel and the Church constitutes “Catholic fullness4.” Thus, following the former Anglican, he too was seized by the beauty of the Church through contact with its Fathers5.
Later, recalling his progressive awareness “of the capital nature” of the articulation “of the two Testaments upon each other,” he saw it, he wrote, “increasingly dominating the whole history and doctrine of the Church, from the first century to our own; I verified by many examples Newman’s words, saying that ‘there is something magnificent in this arrangement6.’”
Introduced, thanks to the intelligence of his mentors, to the great thinkers of his time who were renewing theology, it is not surprising that he took a keen interest in this theologian who had crossed and helped the modern Church through a crisis7. Would it not be somewhat the same for Fr. de Lubac around the Council? On the eve of World War II, he “re-read” for pleasure the Apologia8, without suspecting that it would later become for him a true source of inspiration and support when, a few years later, he too would have to defend the honor of his faith against slanderous accusations. In his private notes on the “Fourvière Affair,” one sometimes finds a mention of Cardinal Newman scattered among his own tribulations. Such is this brief remark that sums up the whole matter: “Not having been understood: that is indeed the fact9,” wrote Newman, which Lubac cited in his personal notes in May 1955 before commenting:
In a small way, so it has been for me. For a very long time I felt the misunderstandings, without ever having met the person or the circumstance that would have allowed me to explain myself. Many times I was supposed (and far more than I ever suspected) to have committed acts, entertained thoughts, intentions, attitudes, innuendos, that were not mine.
II Parallels of destiny: misunderstandings and rehabilitation
Those close to him seemed unable to resist drawing parallels. Thus Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who, on January 10, 1953, suggested to his friend that he write his own Apologia pro vita sua. But the mere idea of writing an apology seemed quite ridiculous to Fr. de Lubac, who did not consider himself “important enough for that10.”
The ultimate resemblance perceived between the two men, at least until then, appeared when Fr. de Lubac was elevated to the cardinalate. His friend Hans Urs von Balthasar, also called to receive the cardinal’s hat, immediately made the connection: “They will compare you to Newman, which will honor him11.” In fact, the comparison was not long in coming, as with the academician Jean Guitton who, paying tribute to his colleague, called Henri de Lubac “the French Newman”:
Constantly, since his youth, he made me think of Newman. And this week, even more so. Newman, converted from Anglicanism, long suspected under the pontificate of Pius IX and whom Leo XIII made a cardinal when he was about to reach eighty. Paul VI regarded Newman as the inspirer of Vatican II, as Saint Thomas had been for the Council of Trent. One day when I told him of my surprise at such a late “hat,” he replied: “Leo XIII wanted to put the seal of the Church on a man who had honored it. It was good to wait until old age, when the works are nearly complete.” I imagine that Fr. de Lubac smiled when he learned of this surprising promotion. He remembered the first part of his life, before the Council, when he was denounced as a dangerous progressive, and the second, after the Council, when he was described as a very outdated conservative. He had remained himself12.
Did he allow himself thus to be compared to one of the men he most admired? Certainly not: “you are wrong to mention in my regard the great name of Newman; there is only one point on which I accept the comparison, and on this point I win: when he was made cardinal, he was 7813.”
Towards the end of 1989, following a serious fall, Cardinal de Lubac was placed with the Little Sisters of the Poor. Greatly diminished, the Jesuit would hardly be able to write anymore and, although perfectly lucid, would suffer from aphasia. “A material detail struck the visitors of Fr. de Lubac at the end of his life: Newman was present to him in the unexpected form of a photograph14!”, “the only one he thus kept until the end15.” He always kept before his eyes the portrait of Saint Cardinal John Henry Newman16, with whom, up to a point we may never be able to describe, he lived this final gift of himself, for the love of Christ and the Church.
III A shared organic vision of faith
In this love lies, without a doubt, the greatest resemblance between the two priests. A love that makes one feel and taste the organicity of dogmatic development. Impressed by the University Sermons of the London cleric, whose “generosity of spirit17” he also admired, Henri de Lubac cites this passage in his work on The Christian Faith:
Beliefs and dogmas are alive in the Real Idea they aim to express and which alone exists in itself; they are necessary only because the human mind cannot reflect on such an Idea except partially and is incapable of grasping it in its unity and fullness, without dividing it into a series of aspects and relations… They are, in short, only the symbols of a Divine Fact which, far from being entirely encompassed by this series of propositions, would neither be exhausted nor fathomed in its depths by thousands of others18.
Newman here expresses an essential idea to which Fr. de Lubac returns a few pages later: “this great ‘Divine Fact’ of which Newman spoke, this great Fact of which the different dogmas are only ‘a sort of projection,’ […] ‘would neither be exhausted nor fathomed in its depths by thousands of others19.’” To designate this “Divine Fact,” which Newman also indicated by speaking of “Catholic fullness20,” Henri de Lubac, throughout his writings also marked by this organic unity of the doctrine of faith, speaks equally of the “Dogma,” the “Whole of dogma,” the “Fact of Christ,” the “Mystery.”
This is the “Mystery of Christ,” in the Pauline expression (Eph 3:4), and through him, the “Mystery of God.” Dogmatic development receives from this “Divine Fact” its organicity, by virtue of which it can progress within the fullness of Revelation closed at the death of the last Apostle. In this understanding of faith, the Oratorian reversed perspectives by embracing the dogmatic question from the Divine Mystery to which dogmatic propositions refer, thereby ensuring their unity. In a letter of August 29, 1963, to Fr. Stern, Henri de Lubac underlined this essential contribution of Newman’s doctrine of development, “to allow escape from a difficulty from which many theologians cannot get out, because they do not see the unity of the revealed Object, or even because they positively deny it21.”
No more than the “Oxford convert” did Henri de Lubac wish to be a “theologian,” if by that was meant someone who claimed to have grasped the Mystery of God, rather than to recognize himself as grasped by the One who remains ungraspable22.
This “reversal of perspective” that Newman carried out in his way of considering dogmatic development from its divine Origin inspired Fr. de Lubac’s own reflections in his theology of dogma. Even if he did not turn to Newman’s writings when he devoted an article to it in 194823, he said much later about this article that, “in substance,” he was “in line with Newman24.”
History and Spirit, from 1950, also generously cites the author of the Essay on Development who, precisely in this work, noted that “the use of Scripture in its spiritual sense is one of the principal characteristics of teaching in the Church25.” So much so that “the fate of mystical interpretation and that of orthodoxy are linked26.” Newman, who also appreciated Origen, had understood that “one could not, so to speak, make a map of Scripture.” Everything we think we know about Scripture rather assures us that “at the end of our life,” it will still be a virgin forest27.
It is, however, in the Meditation on the Church that one will find the greatest number of allusions to John Henry Newman, always “great” in his eyes, he who turned to the Catholic Church because of what it is, and not because of any attraction to the men who compose it. He knew well that among them, he could never be anything but a “pariah.” On a strictly human level, then, “it was absolutely towards the desert” that he turned when converting to Catholicism. And Fr. de Lubac comments: “yet he did not foresee all the thorns that would wound him in the crossing of this long desert28!” However little comparable to Newman he might feel, Fr. de Lubac certainly found in this tried Oratorian a source of spiritual comfort of great scope. And it is “to the famous peroration of the Sermon of St. Mary, in which Newman presented his sad farewell to the Anglican Church,” that Lubac alluded, but in a “reversed” way, when he expressed his “humble and trusting supplication” to the Church his Mother in these terms:
Clear-sighted Mother, whatever shadows the Adversary strives to spread, she cannot fail one day to recognize as her own the children she has engendered, she will have the strength to rejoice in their love, and they, they will find security in her arms29.
Marie-Gabrielle Lemaire
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1 This text substantially reprises the author’s article published in 2019 in the Bulletin de l'Association de Lubac.
2 Georges Chantraine, Henri de Lubac, t. II, Les années de formation (1919-1929), p. 102. Il ne se rendra à Oxford qu’en 1974. Il en visite les magnifiques collèges universitaires, rempli du souvenir de John Henry Newman (CAECHL 679).
3 H. de Lubac, Catholicisme (1938), OC VII (désormais C), p. XII, où Newman, comme ailleurs dans l’œuvre lubacienne, est cité avec Moehler [...], C, p. 442.
4 C, p. 433.
5 Cf. H. de Lubac, Méditation sur l’Église (1952), OC VIII, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2003 (désormais ME), p. 213.
6 Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits (1989), OC XXXIII, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2006 (désormais MOÉ), p. 149.
7 On sait par exemple que le P. Rousselot a été un inspirateur décisif pour le P. de Lubac […].
8 CAÉCHL 69955 H-G 23.06.39 ; « il y a là des pages qu’on ne se lasse jamais de relire ».
9 Propos que tient Newman, le 8 janvier 1860 […], Cahiers de Fourvière, p. 571.
10 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lettres intimes […], Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1974 […].
11 Lettre du 5 janvier 1983, CAÉCHL 5708.
12 Le Figaro du 17 septembre 1983 ; Henri de Lubac, t. IV, p. 687.
13 CAECHL 633 (H – l’abbé Germain Mac’Hadour 11.02.83). Henri de Lubac, t. IV, p. 675-676. Lubac, lui, fêtait le 21 février 1983 ses 89 ans, l’âge auquel Newman décéda.
14 Pierre Clavel, président de l’Association française des Amis de John Henry Newman, Études newmaniennes n°9 (1993), p. 5.
15 Témoignage du P. Joseph Paramelle, dans les Études newmaniennes n°9, p. 5.
16 Voir notamment le témoignage du P. Marcel Audras, Henri de Lubac, t. IV, p. 730.
17 H. de Lubac, Les Églises particulières dans l’Église universelle, suivi de « La Maternité de l’Église » (1971), OC X, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2019, p. 116 et 321.
18 Discours universitaire du 2 février 1843, cité dans H. de Lubac, La Foi chrétienne. Essai sur le Symbole des Apôtres (1970), OC V, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2008, p. 275.
19 H. de Lubac, La Foi chrétienne, p. 283. En vertu de cet unique Fait divin, « tout dogme, quelle que soit son importance relative, s’impose absolument », commente le P. de Lubac.
20 C, p. 393-395 publie un texte de Newman sous le titre « La plénitude catholique ». On retrouve l’expression dans H. de Lubac, Le Mystère du surnaturel (1965), OC XII, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2000, p. 211.
21 Jean Stern, « Souvenirs d’un disciple », Études newmaniennes n°9 (1993), p. 9.
22 Le P. de Lubac recopiait une phrase latine de Newman, le 10 mai 1965 : « Cum bene mihi sim semper conscius me non esse theologum… » ; « Comme je suis toujours bien conscient de ne pas être théologien ». Il commentait : « C’est par ce genre de “non-théologiens” que la théologie reçoit les greffes les plus vivifiantes », MOÉ, 174 ; CAÉCHL 58503 ; Henri de Lubac, t. IV, p. 412.
23 H. de Lubac, « Le problème du développement du dogme », RSR 35 (1948/1), p. 130-160, qui ne cite Newman qu’au début et incidemment.
24 MOÉ, p. 64. Jean Stern fera sous la direction du P. de Lubac une thèse doctorale sur Bible et Tradition chez Newman. Aux origines de la théorie du développement, Paris, Aubier, 1967, coll. « Théologie » n° 72. Il témoigne dans le numéro des Études newmaniennes déjà évoqué.
25 H. de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit. L’intelligence de l’Écriture d’après Origène (1950), OC XVI, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2002 (désormais HE), p. 38.
26 HE, p. 104, faisant référence à « la remarque de Newman ». […] « en allégorisant les textes bibliques, les Pères reprenaient un usage dont l’Écriture elle-même a donné l’exemple », HE, 403 (90).
27 Cf. HE, p. 329 (218) et 433 (209), citant Newman, Développement du dogme chrétien, c. 2, sect. I, n. 14.
28 ME, p. 269, citant la lettre de Newman à Kebbe (21 nov. 1844). Voir aussi ME, p. 273-274.
29 MOÉ, p. 308 ; ME, p. 238.