By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

The big Newman moment of the summer was the declaration by Pope Leo XIV that St. John Henry would soon be declared a Doctor of the Church. I had another Newman moment a few weeks beforehand in a cinema watching, of all things, The Life of Chuck.

A Stephen King novella adapted for film, it's not a horror flick but the tale of an accountant, Chuck Krantz, who dies at 39. Chuck has led an unremarkable life, quietly admirable but not inspiring. No one much noticed him when he was alive; few would remember him when dead. The movie moves backward through a 39-year tale of Chuck learning how to live in and getting ready to die.

Learning how to live meant, for Chuck, in part, learning how to dance. As a boy, Chuck's grandmother taught him; from her he learned the confidence, the shared emotion, the sheer fun of dancing. Dancing broke into the monotony, brought a bit of color to a monochrome world.

Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck, and the actor loves to dance; clips of his exuberant dancing delight viewers on the Internet. He was cast as Chuck because his dancing makes people smile and shift and shuffle, and feel better about things. It is possible that the entire screenplay was written to allow Hiddleston to dance in a splendid five-minute number, evocative of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. It is the heart of the film.

The narrator explains that Chuck, already suffering from a terminal diagnosis and from the enervating emptiness of his professional life, experienced an evanescent ecstasy in that moment of spontaneous dancing in the street:

Later [Chuck] will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife's name. What he will remember - occasionally - is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

I heard that and thought Cardinal Newman would agree.

It is possible that all of Creation was for one moment, one moment of joy, one moment of dance?

Trinitarian theologians might be inclined to answer: Yes. They have a fancy word, perichoresis, which aims to describe the relationship and of love and life, harmony and intimacy, glory given and glory received among the three Persons. A long time ago my professor summarized perichoresis in one word: dancing.

The Trinity dances, which is harmony and intimacy, round and round in glorious celebration and expressive joy. If creation extends the love and life of the Trinity outside of the Godhead, why shouldn't it all exist for a moment of dance?

I was likely the only person in the theater who heard "that is why God made the world" and thought of Newman. The passage that came to mind is well known, from his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, where Newman insists that "the Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest."

How evil is man's rebellion against God? The Church must "anathematize it" with such severity that Newman was pleased to repeat a formidable formulation he had earlier fashioned:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

About a year before he died, Christopher Hitchens debated Tony Blair in Toronto on whether religion was a force for good in the world. Hitchens, a more able debater than Blair, took the position that religion is "twisted and immoral" and is plagued by "essential fanaticism."

To that end he introduced - as evidence from "no mean source" - the Newman quotation above. Newman was no jihadi suicide bomber, but the most refined intellect of his time. Nevertheless, he wa...