The forthcoming Beatification of John Henry Newman has provided an excellent opportunity for various liberal writers to claim him as their very own, the one whose doctrine of conscience provided opportunity for dissenters from Catholic moral teaching to claim him as their champion.  This has always seemed to me to have been based upon a misreading of Newman’s contribution to the Catholic understanding of conscience, an understanding which would no doubt have surprised the great man himself.

Well known writer on Catholic affairs and doyen of the liberal party in the Catholic Church, Clifford Longley, seems to have recognised the foolishness of calling John Henry Newman as a witness to the liberal account of ‘conscience’ where contraception is concerned (The Tablet, 29 May 2010).  He acknowledges the obvious, that no one knows “what Newman [died 1890] would have said about Humanae vitae [published 1968]”.  But his assertion that no one knows what Newman would have said about the standing of Catholics who dissent from long-standing authentic Church teaching on contraception is by no means so obvious.

I will return to Longley’s treatment of Newman later.  For the moment let us concentrate on the logic of his article where contraception is concerned.  In essence he is saying this:

1. There was widespread rebellion in the Church among priests and “prominent lay people” against Humanae vitae.
2. The bishops responded reflexively with the heavy hand of discipline.  Some priests were suspended for “criticising the encyclical”, and a doctor was “refused Communion for having prescribed contraceptives”.
3. The bishops felt “uncomfortable” and looked for an easy way out, a way out provided by what Longley now knows to have been a mistaken appeal to Newman and conscience. People were to be left free to follow their own “conscience” in the matter.
4. But the dissenters didn’t want to be left in peace.  They wanted the Pope to admit he got it wrong and to change the teaching.
5. We know the Pope got it wrong because the Pope had been “advised that a natural law argument was untenable”.
6. The Pope rejected this advice, not so much because the advice was wrong, but because he wanted to “avoid discrediting church authority”.
7. The result of the Pope’s misguided desire to protect church authority was that church authority became even more discredited.

In the US in the 1950s and 1960s there were Catholic dissenters from the Church’s teaching about the moral wrongfulness of legally enforced racial segregation.  In 1962 85-year-old Archbishop Francis Rummel ordered full desegregation of New Orleans parochial schools for the following autumn.  That decision occasioned widespread dissent from “prominent lay people” including leading Catholic politicians.  Letters of "paternal admonition" were sent to the dissenters.  One of those dissenters, Mrs. Gaillot, mother of two children in Catholic schools, received a letter which was a "fatherly warning" of automatic excommunication if she continued promoting "flagrant disobedience to the decision to open our schools to ALL."  Her response: "If they can show me from the Bible where I am wrong, I will get down on my knees before Archbishop Rummel and beg his forgiveness."

The point here is that “prominent laypeople” do not always get it right, that the appeal to private judgment (interpretation of the Bible, the natural law) is not the prerogative of journalists, priests, laity, and others, and that the bishops of the Church do well when they, with courage, defend the Church’s teachings.

Of course I am not suggesting a moral equivalence between segregation and the use of the contraceptive pill.  They are very different moral issues.  This is a nuanced argument to show that the authorities to which Longley appeals (personal opinion, “conscience” of individuals, high placed individuals) have often been wrong.  But where the interpretation of the teachings of Christ and the natural moral law are concerned, the Pope (and the Bishops teaching in unity with the Pope) teaches with the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord and God.  Moreover, in specific circumstances he enjoys the charism of infallibility.

But perhaps the most egregious error in the Longley piece, egregious because of its extraordinary arrogance, is the attribution of base motives to the Pope and the idea that he, the Pope, had been corrected (“advised that a natural law argument was untenable”) but stubbornly went his own way.  The suggestion here that the Pope was motivated not so much by the truth in the exercise of his Holy Office as Supreme Teacher, but by a political imperative to protect the Church’s reputation as the authority where Catholic teaching is concerned.  They had advised the Pope that he was wrong and that should have been the end of the matter.  Here the opinions of the dissenters on the advisory committee are raised to the level of Holy Writ, of infallible teaching.  This probably would have come as a surprise to some of those persons because, while they were asked by the Pope for an opinion and gave it, I have no reason to believe that they all thought by virtue of being in a majority on an advisory committee they had the guarantee of truth.

The Pope was faced with the need to consider traditional Catholic teaching in the light of new developments in contraceptives, specifically the oral contraceptive pill.  In the light of the Church’s constant moral tradition the Pope provided that teaching having first sought and taken advice.  To suggest, as Longley does, that the Pope was governed by a desire to protect the Church’s teaching authority even though he knew better, represents detraction at its worst.  And it is none the better for it having been so self-righteously asserted without a skerrick of evidence cited in support of it.

What lies behind the Longley piece is the ineffable sense of the infallibility of the liberal ‘intelligentsia’.  “We are right and the Successor of St Peter has got it wrong!”  And this in 2010 when we have abundant evidence that the prophecies of social misery that Pope Paul VI (Humanae vitae n 17) warned about have come to pass!

Indeed contemporary attempts in the UK to impose contraception and abortion based sex education on the young are a graphic reminder of the Pope’s warnings:

Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favouring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

At the beginning of his article, Longley indulges in a remarkable piece of intellectual sophistry.  Both progressives and conservatives are guilty of what he calls the “fundamentalist fallacy”.  This “fallacy” he describes as “an assumption that a sort of infallible magic belongs to the words on the page”.  But nowhere does Longley provide any evidence at all that the various interpretations of Newman are based on any such assumption.  Both sides are attempting to understand what Newman meant when he said what he said.  But Longley smugly positions himself as intellectually above all the “others”, although he singularly fails to tell us what is his preferred hermeneutic and why it is better than everyone else’s.  Is it that Longley believes that since the author is dead his words can be made to mean whatever we would like them to mean in our present time?  He doesn’t say.

So why not let Newman be allowed to speak for himself on the matter of conscience:

Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a licence to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church, to go to chapel, to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them. Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will. (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, section 5 on Conscience)

Newman may well have been writing in the nineteenth century, but his words are even more apt in the twentieth century.  Humanae vitae may not have been around for Newman to have been able to consider it.  But the fundamental teaching of the Church on contraception certainly was, and was widely accepted throughout the Christian world.  It was not until 1930 when the Anglicans proposed a weakening of that teaching that the Catholic moral position on contraception was seriously challenged.  So Newman would undoubtedly have supported the Catholic moral teaching and would have been surprised that anyone would have thought to associate his name with dissent from it.

Finally, Longley attributes cowardice to the English bishops who settled, he says, for an easy life by allowing people to make their own decisions in the matter.  He sort of excuses their alleged moral cowardice by saying they really didn’t have much choice.  “Sackings of hundreds of dissenting priests and the excommunication of thousands of dissenting laity would have been a disaster for the Church.”  A disaster?  Really?  Why so?  Did not hundreds of dissenting priests and thousands of dissenting laity leave anyway?  And despite the moral failings of Mediaeval Christians at the time of the Reformation, the Church still continues her faithful witness to the truth.

When Jesus taught about the graphic reality of the Eucharist, that we would be eating his flesh and drinking his blood, “many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66).  And when in 1968 the Vicar of Christ reiterated the Church’s moral teaching on contraception, many Christians drew back and no longer went to Church.  To be sure in a sex obsessed, hedonistic, and selfish culture the words of the Church seemed to many to be “hard”, just as the words of our Lord on divorce (Matthew 19:10) and the Eucharist were seen as “hard” sayings.  When Jesus noticed that many drew back from him he asked the Twelve whether they wished to go as well.  Simon Peter, who it could be reasonably said speaks for faithful Catholics now as then, said: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Clifford Longley’s contribution to muddled thinking notwithstanding, Newman remains an intellectual giant whose teaching on conscience continues to challenge us all.  And if Newman reminds us that not every opinion of every Pope is right and to be followed, he does not dissent from the need for a person’s conscience to be informed by the Gospel as it is presented to us in the authentic and universal Magisterium of the Catholic Church.  And if “infallibility” does not attach to every opinion of a Pope, then a fortiori neither does it attach to Clifford Longley’s opinions when he dissents from authentic Church teaching.  For which, Laus Deo!