by Fr. Benedict Kiely.

St. John Paul II once said that in "the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences." It is therefore providential that Pope Leo XIV has decided to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church, more than one hundred and forty years after his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, named Newman a Cardinal in 1879.

When the newly created Cardinal received the official news, the 'Biglietto' on the morning of the 12th of May, 1879, in the residence of Cardinal Edward Henry Howard in Rome, one of the first things he said, in what was to become known as the 'Biglietto Speech,' was that one reason Leo XIII had for giving Newman the honors, was that it would "give pleasure to English Catholics."

To declare St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church will not only give pleasure to the entire Anglosphere, but also to a Church that needs to return to faithful theological reflection. It is to be hoped that the somewhat turgid leadership of the Church in England will respond with vim and vigor to this joyous and important news.

Already, and to be expected, various figures in the fractious and divided world of Catholic "influencers," of both conservative and liberal leanings (or even of both categories with heterodox leanings) are either claiming Newman as one of their own - the heterodox liberals - or that his doctrine of "development" was the foul alchemical brew that caused the faults of Vatican II. And further, that this designation is a sign of modernism (for the oddball right).

Perhaps it would be wise to let St. John Henry Newman speak for himself, and for that, there is nowhere better to go than the 'Biglietto speech.'

It would be fair to call it both a testament. or even another "apologia" for his life, especially his life as a Catholic, and a rebuttal for all, even then, who claimed him for either of their camps.

Newman stated, as the most important point of his speech and apologia, that there was "one great mischief," which he had from the "first opposed - the spirit of liberalism in religion."

The word liberalism, in the century since Newman's death, has taken on various meanings which it might not have had then, or at least with a different emphasis. Simply put, and simply needed, Newman defined the concept as "liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another."

From that starting point, the saintly Englishman continued, flow some very 'modern' concepts: the false notion of 'tolerance,' the privatization of religion, "personal and peculiar," and, most profoundly, as the Western world attempts to build a society without Christian foundation, the destruction of that society.

Newman called this whole movement the "great apostasia," the same everywhere, but in each country differing in detail.

Sadly, and prophetically, he feared that, in his native land, it would have "formidable success." Fast forward to a country where the monarch is still the head of the National Church, a theatre prop or stage-set with a vacuum behind it, passing legislation to kill the elderly and the sick, and murder the unborn up to the moment of birth. Truly, the great apostasia has been formidably successful in a post-Christian, or anti-Christian, England.

The Church typically has several reasons for declaring one individual a saint, while many other holy people may not receive that official designation. Saints, of course, must have lived lives of great holiness, but they are also exemplars, the real "influencers," who are meant to provide evidence that holiness of life is always possible and in all walks of life.

A Doctor of the Church, man or woman, is not only a saint and exemplar, but someone whose teaching or theology serves the worldwide Church. They also need to have a quality that appears, superficially, paradoxical: they must be relevant to their own particular time, but also perennial, for all times and seasons. St. John Henry Newman is such a...