Newman and Mary: Models of Faith

It’s natural for young people during their teenage years to seek to understand their personal and sexual identity, the reason and purpose of their life, and even their very existence! It’s not unusual to hear a young person exasperatingly say, “Why was I even born!?” “Why was I born into this family with these parents!?” or “What meaning does my life have anyway!?” One way to help with these weighty issues of adolescence is to focus on young people who are now recognized as saints and who have experienced similar questions and aspects of the faith in profound ways, such as St. John Henry Newman and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Both Newman and Mary experienced God’s call early in their life and responded profoundly, embracing their role and their sexuality as part of God’s divine plan for His people.

St. John Henry Newman. St. John Henry Newman had a circuitous route to the Catholic faith. At the age of 23 he was ordained a minister in the Church of England (1824). It was several decades later that he became a Catholic after arduous study of the early Church Fathers and his attempt to restore some aspects of Roman Catholic thought and practice to the Anglican Church. Feeling the pressure and the call to conversion, Newman resigned his position as vicar of St. Mary’s Church in 1843, leaving behind the Church of England and many of his friends and colleagues. Two years later, in 1845, he was received into the Catholic Church, and two years after that (1847), he was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome. His was a journey across the Tiber not without personal hardship and sacrifice.
 
Newman’s vocational call. Newman, at the age of 14, wanted “to be virtuous, but not religious.”[1] As a young child, he grew up reading Scripture with his family. Newman describes his first spiritual conversion as happening when he was just 15 years old while remaining at boarding school in London during the summer. His father’s previously successful banking business had just failed,[2] and the family was displaced.[3] His three sisters were moved to their grandmother’s house for a time before rejoining their parents, but Newman was left alone at school.
 
It was during this time that he was influenced by the Reverend Walter Mayers and the writings from Calvinist author Thomas Scott. Having been raised by Bible-Christian parents, the sermons by Mayers and the writings of Scott introduced Newman to organized religion. His subsequent study of Calvinism, Mayers’ sermons, and their personal conversations deeply resonated within him. It was during this time that he described having a very personal and spiritual experience which “took possession of him.”[4] He sensed he was called to live a life of celibacy, “as, for instance, missionary work among the heathen.”[5] This call to celibacy, at the age of 15, never left him except for a “month now and a month then, up to 1829, and after that date, without any break at all.”[6]

He didn’t think about organized religion until he met Mayers, whom Newman credits as being the “human means of this beginning of divine faith in me.”[7]

St. John Henry Newman is a wonderful example of a sensitive soul docile to God’s call. As a teenager, Newman had an intense sense of the reality of God and God’s presence in his life. It was during his youth that he describes an intimacy with God as “two and two only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”[8] He didn’t dwell on his personal identity as much as he dwelled on his communion with God.

As an adult, Newman wrote about his deep spiritual sense of mission and communion with God in a series of meditations on Christian doctrine (March 7, 1848). You may have heard parts of it. It goes like this:

The Blessed Virgin Mary. We know little about the infancy and youth of the Blessed Virgin Mary aside from her parents being St. Joachim and St. Anna, descendants from the line of David. Tradition tells us that this married couple was sterile and desirous of a child. Through intense prayer and fasting they were blessed with a baby girl whom they named Mary and whom they dedicated to life in the Jewish temple.
 
Mary’s vocational call. Mary also was a young girl when the Angel Gabriel appeared to her. She was around 15. While many young women her age today may be abandoning their Catholic faith, Mary was abandoning her ‘self’ to God’s will. What a wonderful example of someone who for her entire life dedicated herself to God and waited for the Messiah. She was free of original and actual sin, pure of heart and filled with grace and faith.

When told she would be the Mother of our Lord, Mary’s response was that it “be it done unto me according to thy word.” Her response was one of first believing – then reasoning. As a perfect example of faith, we see Mary keeping all these things in her heart: When the shepherds came to adore the Savior in her arms, when Simeon announced her soul would be pierced, and when she found Jesus at 12 years old in the temple, she kept all these things in her heart.

Like Newman, Mary expressed an abandonment to God’s will and the service she was called to do. She expresses this in her “Magnificat.”

Let’s compare and contrast these two prayerful meditations. In Newman’s meditation, he states that he knows he has a mission but doesn’t exactly know what it is in this world, yet he senses that it is purposeful and unique and that he will “know it in the next.” Mary, on the other hand, seems to completely understand her call, yet she remains humble when she proclaims that “all generations will call me blessed.” Both prayers acknowledge God’s omnipotence with Mary stating that “He has shown the strength of his arm;” Newman simply states, “He knows what he is about.”

Mary’s is an overwhelming response to a long-awaited event – the coming of the Savior. Hers is an outburst of praise and gratitude to God for the miraculous event of being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and filled – quite literally – with God’s life in her. Newman teaches, in one of his sermons, that pious women at the time who believed the prophecy of Isaiah (that a Virgin would conceive and bear the Messiah) sought marriage and were:

But the Savior had to be born of a virgin. Mary had chosen virginity for the sake of the kingdom, something Newman relates in his Meditations on the Litany of Loreto:

Newman’s Writings and Meditations on Mary. Just as Eve was composed from the rib of Adam — the holiest of humanity God had created at the time — Jesus was composed of the flesh of Mary, the holiest creature of all time. Jesus came to us through the fecundity of a woman, and not by any other means, thus acknowledging – and confirming – the Creator’s design for procreation and the capabilities of women.

Newman is credited with writing thirty-four separate meditations on Mary and her attributes[12] and teaches about her in numerous other writings such as in his defense of Mary to his colleague, Dr. Edward Pusey, a colleague during the Oxford Movement years, where he called Mary “Eve’s Advocate” and the “second Eve.”[13] He states that as:

He goes on to quote Tertullian and St. Irenaeus as saying that:

Reading the Church Fathers convinced Newman of her exalted place. He writes in his Memorandum on the Immaculate Conception again quoting St. Irenaeus:

Mary, through her complete femininity, was able to undo the sin that Eve had committed, and, in her full maternity, she shared her body, her flesh and her blood, in the miraculous event of the Incarnation.

In another meditation on “Mary as the Gate of Heaven,” Newman wrote:

In a letter to Dr. Pusey, Newman cited St. Augustine, who wrote that Mary was “more exalted by her sanctity than by her relationship to our Lord.”[18] She was imbued with grace, what “the [Church] Fathers teach, a real inward condition or superadded quality of soul” and not a “mere external approbation or acceptance, answering to the word ‘favor,’” as commonly assumed by Protestants.[19]

Newman writes in his Meditations on the Litany of Loretto that:

Newman, while a Church of England clergyman, sought to understand Mary’s elevated place in the Catholic faith, at first denying the “extreme honours” paid to her,[20] yet after studying the writings of the Church Fathers, his heart was opened to the understanding of the privileged and exalted position of she who was chosen to be the Mother of our Lord. Even before becoming Catholic, Newman wrote a piece titled “The Reverence due to the Blessed Virgin Mary” (March 25, 1832). Showing keen insights into the qualities Mary must have possessed, he wrote:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? If to him that hath, more is given, and holiness and Divine favour go together (and this we are expressly told), what must have been the transcendent purity of her, whom the Creator Spirit condescended to overshadow with His miraculous presence? What must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom He was bound by nature to revere and look up to; the one appointed to train and educate Him, to instruct Him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature.[21]

And to answer why we know so little about Mary from scripture, he writes it is because of our weakness [as creatures] that we might be tempted to focus on her instead of our Lord due to her “heavenly beauty and sweetness of the spirit.”[22]

Mary’s presence in Newman’s life. Newman had always been surrounded by Mary’s presence. He wrote, “I have ever been under her shadow, if I may say it. My college was St. Mary’s, and my Church; and when I went to Littlemore, there, by my previous disposition, our Blessed Lady was waiting for me.”[23]

Prior to his conversion to Catholicism, Newman worked as a fellow at Oriel College. The formal title for Oriel College is the House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford. “The University Church where Newman was vicar is the Church of St. Mary the Virgin; and his church at Littlemore is dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Nicholas.”[24]

At his Confirmation on Nov. 2, 1845, Newman’s devotion to Mary was evident in his choice of her as his Confirmation saint.[25] Four years later, and after he became a Catholic priest, he founded the Oratory Church in Birmingham and named it “The Oratory Church of the Immaculate Conception.”

Newman’s pastoral nature. Newman’s university sermons at Oxford (while an Anglican priest) were written to inspire and form students with topics concerning faith and reason, justice, willfulness, and sin.[26] He spent a considerable amount of time corresponding by post with a wide range of people offering pastoral advice through sometimes lengthy handwritten letters.[27] As the founder of the Oratory in Edgbaston, Newman spent up to four hours a day hearing confessions.[28] He was known for the practical and plain over theory or a “smart syllogism,” writing in A Grammar of Assent (1870) that “if I am asked to convert others…I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts.” (425 [273]).[29]

“Cor Ad Cor Loquitur” or “Heart speaks to Heart” was the motto he adopted upon receiving the scarlet biretta as a Cardinal of the Church, because for Newman, the way to conversion and a more intimate relationship with Christ was through personal relationships – one heart touching the other.

The Assumption of Mary. We need to remember what our Church teaches about Mary being assumed — body and soul into heaven. We are a body/soul unity, and our Catholic faith teaches that even in death we will be united with our bodies at the resurrection.

Here, St. John Paul II’s teaching on the resurrection is applicable. He teaches that we all will be resurrected as either male or female in the fullness of our masculinity or femininity. No matter how hard we try to change our sexual being from male to female or vice versa in what we believe ourselves to be, or with surgery, or medicine, we will always throughout eternity be either male or female. He writes:

Human bodies, which are recovered and also renewed in the resurrection, will preserve their specific masculine or feminine character and the meaning of being male or female in the body will be constituted and understood differently in the ‘other world’ than it had been ‘from the beginning’… The words Christ spoke about the resurrection [“When they rise from the dead, they take neither wife nor husband,” Mk 12:25] allow us to deduce that the dimension of masculinity and femininity — that is, being male and female in the body — will be newly constituted in the resurrection of the body in that ‘other world.'”[30]

Mary has gone before us as our model of purity, showing us God’s eternal plan of unity of the body and the soul. Newman teaches that Mary experienced physical death, but that she was “speedily united to her soul again, and raised by our Lord to a new and eternal life of heavenly glory.”[31] He cites this as not outside the power of God who raised many from the grave upon our Lord’s death on the cross, citing the Gospel of Matthew that “the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints that had slept’ – that is, slept the sleep of death, ‘arose, and coming out of the tombs after His Resurrection, came into the Holy City, and appeared to many.”[32] Like our Lord who rose from the dead, Mary too, who was without sin, rose in her resurrected body, as female, and mother to all the living and the dead.

It’s important to reflect on this teaching; our sexuality is either male or female for all eternity and that eventually, though there may be some young people who are suffering from issues of gender identity now, there is hope that with a deeper understanding and trust in God’s design for humanity, young people can attain an integral peace and harmony with their personal and sexuality identity, knowing God does not make mistakes and He will love you for all eternity just the way you are.