PLACES OF ENCOUNTER
This Sunday,
13 October, John Henry Cardinal Newman will be declared a Saint by Pope Francis
in Rome and among the thousands who will witness the event will be Charles,
Prince of Wales. The prince writes these
words in the Times, ‘Newman could
advocate without accusation, could disagree without disrespect and perhaps most
of all could see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion’. He had an inquiring mind and was always ready
to listen and to weigh what others said.
Charles has
written a beautiful tribute to a great man. Newman grappled all his life – he
was 89 when he died - with pressing issues of education and faith. He had the intellectual ability to think
through – and to pray through – questions that emerged in a century where
reason and science posed serious challenges to long-held beliefs. Outstanding
among his contributions was his assertion about the development of doctrine and
the place of the laity in the Church. The essentials of doctrine do not change but
the way they are expressed can undergo evolution and development.
He made a
detailed study of the Arian controversy in the fourth century. The priest Arius
held that Jesus, Son of the Father, could not be equal to the Father and so was
subordinate to him. This view had serious implications for our understanding of
‘salvation’. If Jesus is not God then we
are left high and dry. No man could do what he did and does for us. The Council of Nicea, in 325, condemned Arius
and affirmed the absolute equality of Father and Son. But opinion remained divided
and the Christian emperors of the period oscillated between Nicea and Arius and
the bishops were inclined to follow their lead. It was “a time when the
fidelity of the laity had ensured the Church’s continuance ‘when the body of
the bishops failed in their confession of the faith’.” Newman believed therefore that the Church was
healthiest when able to encourage people to an intelligent grasp of the faith,
and weakest when only requiring of them an ‘implicit faith in her word, which
in the educated classes will terminate in indifference and in the poorer in
superstition’.” [1]
Perhaps this
gives us a taste of the sort of man Newman was and the point of making him a
saint is to make him more widely known and his contribution to faith and
culture more easily accessible. It is not just the dictators of our age but
even the duly elected leaders who govern our lives who could learn about ‘places
of encounter’ in contrast to ‘places of exclusion’. We still live with too many
walls – both physical and mental – that exclude others and so hold us back from
welcoming those who are different and benefitting from the meeting.
13 October
2019 Sunday 28 C
2 Kings
5:14-17 2 Timothy
2:8-13 Luke 17:11-19
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