Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk: Citizenship, Church, and Conscience

Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer/Fall 2001): 38-50.

Reverend John T. Ford, S.T.D., is Professor of Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, District of Columbia.*

The Gospel of Matthew presents a memorable confrontation between Jesus and a group of Pharisees and Herodians, who crafted a "plot" to "trap Jesus in speech" (Mt 22:15-22). After a mock display of respect -- "Teacher, we know you are a truthful man and teach God's ways sincerely. You court no one's favor and do not act out of human respect" -- they asked his opinion: "Is it lawful to pay tax to the emperor or not?" Jesus asked his questioners to show him the money used to pay the tax; when they handed him a Roman coin, he asked: "Whose head is this, and whose inscription?" When his adversaries replied that it was Caesar's, Jesus disarmed them with his famous response: "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give to God what is God's."(1)

This reply is remarkable for its simplicity yet problematic in its applicability: the dividing line between the domains of government and religion is notoriously difficult to draw. Indeed, Christian history is filled with church-state conflicts, such as those between Saint Thomas à Becket and King Henry II, between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip the Fair, between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon -- to name but a few classic examples. If one cannot possibly study every case of church-state conflict, it is instructive to reflect on one of the most notable church-state controversies in nineteenth century England, a controversy between William Ewart Gladstone (1809-97),(2) four times prime minister of Great Britain, and John Henry Newman (1801-90),(3) who spent the first half of his life as a member of the Church of England and the second half as a Roman Catholic.

In 1874, Gladstone published a small book, The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance; a Political Expostulation.(4) While it may seem strange today for a British prime minister to be writing about religious matters, Gladstone had maintained an avid interest in theology since his student days when Newman was one of the leading figures at Oxford. Moreover, in 1874, Gladstone had more time for writing: he recently had been forced out of office, in part as a result of the political influence of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops. Gladstone thus had personal reasons for being concerned about Roman Catholic influence on the British government.(5) In addition, he had just returned to England from a visit with Ignaz von Döllinger, the renowned German priest-historian, who had been excommunicated in 1871 for refusing to accept the teaching of the First Vatican Council on papal primacy and infallibility (1870).(6) Thus Gladstone had several reasons for feeling that the pope could command Roman Catholics to disobey civil law and thus for questioning the civic loyalty of British Roman Catholics.(7)

Newman too had long been concerned about the implications of the Vatican decrees. Before the Council, he had privately expressed his concern about what the Council might decide; during the Council, he shared his fears that the Council might issue a declaration about infallibility; after the Council, he felt that its decrees were being interpreted in a maximalist fashion, as if every decision made by the pope came under the aegis of infallibility. Yet for Newman to have spoken out against these ultramontane exaggerations would have brought him into conflict with Henry Edward Manning (1808-92), the Archbishop of Westminster, who, like Newman, was a graduate of Oxford and a convert to Roman Catholicism.(8) In effect, Newman had been holding his tongue until Gladstone's "expostulation" appeared.(9)

Newman was an author who needed a "call" in order to write.(10) For example, his Apologia pro vita sua appeared in response to a cavalier insult that gave him the opportunity of making public his "religious opinions."(11) His Idea of a University was written while he was rector of the Catholic University of Ireland as part of what might be called a public relations campaign.(12) His Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was part of his theological reflections that ultimately led him to decide to become a member of the Roman Catholic Church.(13) As in the case of these other major works, Newman felt "called" to write A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation.(14)

Similar to his other works, Newman's approach in this Letter is pragmatic, inductive, and persuasive. First, his writings habitually had a pragmatic bent; his books and essays frequently responded to a specific situation, even specific persons. Though addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, this Letter was intended for Gladstone and other Anglicans who were suspicious of Roman Catholics, but Newman's Letter was also designed to remind his fellow Catholics that they had duties to their state as well as to their church. In dealing with these practical political issues, Newman was a homilist trying to persuade his audience to appreciate the transcendent implications behind mundane political realities.

Second, Newman's methodology was usually inductive. Instead of beginning with theoretical premises, he almost always began by highlighting the facts of a situation. Accordingly, his Letter to Norfolk may be a bit puzzling to those not acquainted with the historical background presupposed by the text. Yet Newman was not a chronicle writer interested in recording events for posterity, but rather a history instructor who wanted to teach a set of lessons -- these lessons are what make reading Newman valuable today.

Most of all, Newman was a persuasive apologist who realized that historical data can usually be given more than one interpretation. Accordingly, he presented the facts so that his readers would see what he saw. He realized that the "facts" of both British and papal history could be seen in divergent ways, and so he wanted to make his interpretation of these facts as cogent as possible. Newman was then a master rhetorician who could devastate an opponent while simultaneously captivating his audience and persuading it to share his view of the facts in question.

Newman's rhetorical talent is evident in the title chosen for his reply to Gladstone: A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Henry Fitzalan-Howard, the fifteenth Duke of Norfolk (1847-1917), had been a student of Newman at the Oratory School and later was instrumental in obtaining Newman's elevation to the cardinalate.(15) By dedicating his Letter (in fact a small book) to the Duke -- with the latter's readily granted permission -- Newman effectively silenced both Gladstone and Manning with the same stroke of the pen: Gladstone could hardly press his charge that the loyalty of British Roman Catholics was suspect without seeming to attack the Duke of Norfolk, the ranking peer of the realm. His Grace, Archbishop Manning, could hardly challenge Newman's position without implicitly questioning the integrity of the leading Roman Catholic layman, His Grace, the Duke of Norfolk.(16) Newman's choice of title was a preemptive strike.

Newman's reply had to take into account the fact that Gladstone's "expostulation" was a compendium of conventional charges against Roman Catholicism. For example, Gladstone alleged that the Roman Catholic Church had changed Christian doctrine and "repudiated modern thought and ancient history" (Ryan 3). Gladstone also asserted that "Rome requires a convert, who now joins her, to forfeit his moral and mental freedom, and to place his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another" -- the pope (Ryan 3). In short, Gladstone's attack on Roman Catholicism consisted of a catena of anti-Catholic accusations that are still voiced today.

Yet Gladstone's attack was a broadside, incorporating diverse denunciations of varying theological merit. In addition, the sheer number and diversity of his accusations made reply difficult, though in fact many Roman Catholic writers published replies, but none with the success of Newman. At the beginning of his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman focused on what he considered the "main question which Mr. Gladstone has started…. Can Catholics be trustworthy subjects of the State?" (Ryan 78).

In reply, Newman treated a variety of issues raised by Gladstone: the teaching of the ancient and medieval Church, Pope Pius IX's encyclical Quanta cura (1864), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), the (First) Vatican Council (1869-70) and its definitions, and so forth. While each of these topics is interesting in itself, in a sense, they are variations on the "main question": the loyalty of Roman Catholics to the country in which they live. The question of civic loyalty encompasses three major issues: civil allegiance, papal authority, and personal responsibility. Since these three topics -- citizenship, church and conscience -- are still very neuralgic political-religious issues today, it seems instructive to examine how Newman viewed each of them.

Citizenship
At the outset, Newman made his own position crystal clear: "I see no inconsistency in my being at once a good Catholic and a good Englishman" (Ryan 76). His discussion of a citizen's "divided allegiance" (Ryan 110-126) was framed by Gladstone's charge that "every convert and member of the Pope's Church places his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another" (Ryan 111). Newman began his reply by asking rhetorically: "Is there then such a duty at all as obedience to ecclesiastical authority now? or is it one of those obsolete ideas, which are swept away, as unsightly cobwebs, by the New Civilization?" (Ryan 111). Such a question effectively painted Gladstone into a corner: If he answered that Christians owe obedience to ecclesiastical authority, then he would have had to admit that Catholics owe obedience to the pope; if he answered that Christians do not owe obedience to church authority, then he would have been questioning Anglican loyalty to the sovereign, who by law is head of the Church of England.

Newman used another argument that appealed to the Christian convictions of a devout Anglican like Gladstone: Obedience to God is taught by Scripture; thus, the real issue is who has the authority to interpret Scripture. For Newman, the pope is the "only person" who has the authority to interpret Scripture definitively: "If we give him up, to whom shall we go?" (Ryan 112). In contrast to Gladstone, who considered the pope's authority "either a slavery to his subjects, or a menace to the Civil Power" (Ryan 112), Newman emphasized that in both church and state, "the Law directs our conduct under the manifold circumstances in which we have to act, and must be absolutely obeyed" (Ryan 113).

In other words, law has a parallel role in both church and state: "The State, as well as the Church, has the power at its will of imposing laws upon us, laws bearing on our moral duties, our daily conduct, affecting our actions in various ways, and circumscribing our liberties; yet no one would say that the Law, after all, with all its power in the abstract and its executive vigour in fact, interferes either with our comfort or our conscience" (Ryan 113). Theoretically of course, given the "numberless laws" that constitute a "shadow that cleaves to us, go where we will," Newman conceded that seemingly "Three-fourths of my life are handed over to the Law" (Ryan 113f).

This concession is used to press the point that life under law would be intolerable were it not for the "glorious uncertainty of the Law" (Ryan 113). Just as citizens may avail themselves of a variety of sources of legal advice, similarly "in difficult questions a variety of opinions are given, with plain directions, when it is that private Catholics are at liberty to choose for themselves whatever answer they like best, and when they are bound to follow some one of them in particular" (Ryan 114).

Since such discussions may become exceedingly complex, Newman insisted: "So little does the Pope come into this whole system of moral theology by which (as by our conscience) our lives are regulated, that the weight of his hand upon us, as private men, is absolutely unappreciable" (Ryan 115). Accordingly, to Gladstone's accusation that "the Pope virtually claims to himself the wide domain of conduct, and therefore that we are his slaves," Newman replied that "the amount of the Pope's authoritative enunciations has not been such as to press heavily on the back of the private Catholic" (Ryan 116).

Where, however, did Gladstone get the impression that the "political and civil life" of Catholics is "at the Pope's mercy" (Ryan 117)? Gladstone based his suspicions about the political loyalty of Catholic citizens on his interpretation of the First Vatican Council's constitution Pastor Aeternus (1870): "pastors and people of whatsoever rite or dignity, each and all, are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, not only in matters which pertain to faith and morals, but also in those which pertain to the discipline and the regimen of the Church" (Ryan 117).(17) What was overlooked in this interpretation by Gladstone was the standard distinction between papal authority and papal infallibility: while papal authority extends to discipline and regimen, Pastor Aeternus restricted the papal exercise of infallibility to doctrina de fide vel moribus.(18) Nonetheless, the extension of infallibility to include "discipline and regimen" was commonplace among ultramontanes such as Manning.(19) Their interpretation provided additional grounds for Gladstone's charge that three-quarters of Catholic life came under papal control. With an eye to ultramontane exaggerations, Newman observed that "disciplina and regimen are words of such lax, vague, indeterminate meaning, that under them any matters can be slipped in which may be required for the Pope's purpose in this or that country" (Ryan 118).

Newman thought that infallibility was not applicable in regard to disciplina et regimen: "discipline is in no sense a political instrument, except as the profession of our faith may accidentally become political"; rather, disciplina is properly used to describe "divine worship, sacred rites, the ordination and manner of life of the clergy" and like matters (Ryan 118). Similarly, though "[t]here are indeed aspects of the Church which involve relations toward secular powers and to nations, as, for instance, its missionary office," regimen "has a definite meaning, relating to a matter strictly internal to the Church" (Ryan 119). Ultimately, for Newman, the issue was not political, but theological: "the Gospel is no mere philosophy thrown upon the world at large, no mere quality of mind and thought, no mere beautiful and deep sentiment or subjective opinion, but a substantive message from above, guarded and preserved in a visible polity" (Ryan 120).

Thus, in defending the compatibility of Catholicism and good citizenship, Newman brandished a double-edged sword against both Manning and Gladstone.(20) Against Manning's view that the papal exercise of infallibility extends to a wide range of cases, including civil and political matters, Newman argued that papal authority in disciplina et regimen is ordinarily an internal ecclesiastical concern; thus, a collision between church and state is possible, but only accidentally and indirectly. In contrast, Manning's extension of infallibility to disciplina et regimen would make church-state conflicts much more likely. To Gladstone, Newman emphasized that Manning's opinion need not be accepted; simultaneously, Newman pointed out that conflicts between church and state are most likely to occur when either church or state tries to enhance its power and privilege at the expense of the other.(21)

Church
In treating the relationship of "the Pope's supreme authority … in its bearing towards the Civil Power all over the world," Newman did not hesitate to acknowledge: "That collisions can take place between the Holy See and national governments the history of fifteen hundred years teaches us; also, that on both sides there may occur grievous mistakes" (Ryan 120). Yet if the state is frequently the aggressor and the church the victim, Newman pointedly acknowledged that some British-Vatican conflicts were the fault of some of his fellow Catholics:

There are those among us, as it must be confessed, who for years past have conducted themselves as if no responsibility attached to wild words and overbearing deeds; who have stated truths in the most paradoxical form, and stretched principles till they were close upon snapping; and who at length, having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of putting out the flame. The English people are sufficiently sensitive of the claims of the Pope, without having them, as if in defiance, flourished in their faces. (Ryan 76)

How can church-state conflicts be avoided in the future? As a preliminary step, Newman recommended that the Civil Power "should treat the Holy See as an independent sovereign" (Ryan 120): "if the Holy See were frankly recognized by England, as other Sovereign Powers are, direct quarrels between the two powers would in this age of the world be rare indeed" (Ryan 121). Such a recommendation needs to be understood in its historical context: Until September 20, 1870, when Rome was seized by the Kingdom of Italy, the pope had been an "independent sovereign" ruling the Papal States; but at the time that Newman was writing and until 1929, when a concordat recognized the independence of Vatican City, the pope was a "prisoner in the Vatican."

Newman next considered the alleged "divided allegiance" of Catholics. For Newman, Catholics "are not only bound to allegiance to the British Crown, but have special privileges as citizens." Accordingly, "till there comes to us a special, direct command from the Pope to oppose our country, we need not be said to have 'placed our loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another'," as Gladstone charged (Ryan 122). Nonetheless, a "collision of jurisdictions" is still possible (Ryan 123). In such instances, should Catholics obey the pope or the civil power?

On the one hand, Newman considered the case of Parliament passing a law "bidding Catholics to attend Protestant service every week"; if "the Pope distinctly told us not to do so, for it was to violate our duty to our faith: -- I should obey the Pope and not the Law" (Ryan 123). This case was not as hypothetical as it might seem today: mandatory attendance at Anglican services was part of the Elizabethan Reformation, and there were severe penalties for Catholics who did not attend. In addition, there were instances in the nineteenth century when Roman Catholics in the British military were punished for not attending Anglican services. In effect, Newman was reminding Gladstone that the British government had a long history of using coercion against Roman Catholics.

On the other hand, Newman questioned: "could the case ever occur in which I should act with the Civil Power, and not with the Pope?" (Ryan 123). Newman considered a possible case: Could "members of the Parliament, or of the Privy Council, take an oath that they would not acknowledge the right of succession of a Prince of Wales, if he became a Catholic" (Ryan 123)? Newman felt that a Catholic, while remaining in office, could not obey a papal command favoring the Catholic succession -- though he allowed that a Catholic official might work for the repeal of anti-Catholic legislation. Once again Newman's example had a rhetorical edge: on the one hand, Gladstone had criticized Roman Catholics for being less than loyal citizens; on the other hand, Roman Catholics were (and still are) legally barred from the throne -- the highest position in the realm.

Newman, perhaps with tongue in cheek, asked: "What is the use of forming impossible cases?" His response proposed a modus vivendi:

When, then, Mr. Gladstone asks Catholics how they can obey the Queen and yet obey the Pope, since it may happen that the commands of the two authorities may clash, I answer that it is my rule, both to obey the one and to obey the other, but that there is no rule in this world without exceptions, and if either the Pope or the Queen demanded of me an 'Absolute Obedience,' he or she would be transgressing the laws of human nature and human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither. Further, if ever this double allegiance pulled me in contrary ways, which in this age of the world I think it never will, then I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule, and must be decided on its own merits. (Ryan 125)

Again Newman's response has a double edge. English law is the result of decisions in individual cases -- is not this also the way that Christians must make their moral decisions? If faced with a conflict between religious duties and civil law, Newman declared that he would consult theologians and bishops, clergy and friends, but "if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then I must rule myself by my own judgment and my own conscience" (Ryan 125).

Conscience
For Newman, conscience is innate: "when He [the Supreme Being] became Creator, He implanted this Law, which is Himself, in the intelligence of all His rational creatures" (Ryan 127). Basing himself on Augustine and Aquinas, Newman eloquently asserted: "Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas" (Ryan 129).(22)

Yet Newman was well aware that "words such as these are idle empty verbiage to the great world of philosophy now" (Ryan 129):

When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. (Ryan 130)
Since "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," Newman felt that conscience had been "superseded by a counterfeit," namely, the "right of self-will" (Ryan 130).

Accordingly, Newman took issue with Gladstone's contention that papal authority as "absolute" violated the liberty of conscience as the justifiable prerogative of each person. In contrast, for Newman, conscience is first "a dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us." Second, in the words of Aquinas, conscience "is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as evil." Consequently, insofar as conscience is "a practical dictate, a collision is possible between it and the Pope's authority only when the Pope legislates, or gives particular orders, and the like"; such a collision seems unlikely in practice, insofar as "a Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy" (Ryan 134).(23)

In practice, Newman felt that in case of doubt, obedience must be given the pope: "Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon the Papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin in disobeying it" (Ryan 136). This is not to say that "the Pope is ever to be obeyed," nor is it to say that there are no exceptions to obeying the pope, "for exceptions must be in all concrete matters" (Ryan 138).

Newman summarized his teaching on citizenship, church, and conscience with a rhetorical flourish that reflects the British custom of saluting the monarch at banquets (24): Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink, -- to the Pope, if you please, still to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards. (Ryan 138)

Reflections
The boundary line between the realm of Caesar and the Kingdom of God continues to be difficult to draw. Some have tried to erase the line entirely: Modern theocratic regimes try to subsume the political under the divine; modern atheistic governments attempt to deny the existence of the divine. Although obviously radically different in their premises, both types of government fail to achieve an appropriate balance between two important dimensions of the human: the religious and the political.

Yet as a reading of Newman's Letter to Norfolk suggests, finding such a balance is a perennial challenge. On the one hand, Gladstone felt that the civic loyalty of Roman Catholics was suspect because they accepted the teaching of the First Vatican Council on the "infallible magisterium" of the pope. Manning, on the other hand, pushed papal authority to the limit by insisting that practically every papal pronouncement was tantamount to an exercise of infallibility. Newman undertook the ever-difficult task of elaborating a via media, a mediating position which recognized the claim of religious principles, which he saw, not as super-imposed from above, but as "realized" in concrete situations -- if the principles are transcendental, their realization partakes of all the limitations and imperfections of the human condition.

For Newman, every citizen has duties to both Caesar and God. Both church and state are legitimate lawmakers, and a continual challenge for Christians is to find ways of "obeying two masters." Sometimes, as Newman readily admitted, this simply cannot be done; sometimes one must make a hard choice by obeying one rather than the other. But such choices are not always clear: laws have a "glorious uncertainty." (Indeed, if either the laws of Caesar or God were unequivocally clear, then presumably there would be no need for either lawyers or theologians.)

These practical difficulties in applying general norms -- whether legal or religious -- in specific situations can and do lead to "collisions" between church and state. Some of these collisions are inadvertent and unforeseeable. Other collisions, however, occur because either the state or the church refuses to yield the right-of-way when it should: a government may intrude into the sphere of religion when it has no business doing so; the church may claim political privileges to which it has no justifiable claim. In Newman's view, most collisions between church and state could be avoided, if the state respected the rights of the church in religious matters and if the church acknowledged the legitimate authority of the state in civic matters.

Yet however neatly church-state conflicts may be diagrammed from a theoretical viewpoint, what are Roman Catholics to do when they find themselves caught between Caesar and God, when they are faced with an apparent conflict between civil law and ecclesiastical command? Newman offered some practical norms for the proverbial person in the pew: neither Caesar nor pope are a priori entitled to "absolute obedience"; rather, each dilemma must be resolved on its own merits. Accordingly, Newman asserted that sometimes a Roman Catholic ought to obey the pope, but in other instances ought to obey the State. In coming to such a decision, a Roman Catholic might well appeal to the opinions of theologians, just as a citizen might well seek the counsel of a lawyer. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for making a decision rests on the individual's conscience. Newman, of course, was well aware that an appeal to conscience opens a Pandora's box to all sorts of relativism and subjectivism. Conscious that some claims to freedom of conscience were counterfeit, Newman was quite careful to categorize conscience as the "voice of God within" -- in contrast to various brands of self-indulgence and individualism that are often paraded as "conscience."

Nonetheless, there is an Achilles' heel to Newman's appeal: how could any respectable Victorian gentleman admit that he had no conscience? In other words, Newman's appeal to conscience was made at a time when, in spite of their other differences in doctrine and practice, Anglicans and Roman Catholics acknowledged a set of absolute truths and shared a common standard of morality. In effect, Newman's appeal to conscience as a basis for civic loyalty presumed a commonality of religious belief and moral values. By implication, if a similar appeal to conscience is to be made today, one must find a common basis, however minimal, of belief.

Thus, even if one grants that conscience is "the voice of God within," one must acknowledge that this voice has difficulty in making itself heard above the cacophony of competing claims to religious authority. The sensus fidelium -- the "awareness" of a set of shared religious values -- was already beginning to wane in Newman's day. Certainly such a sensus is less apparent -- and some might even say nonexistent -- in today's multicultural and pluralistic world. Consequently, even if one postulates a fundamental level of common human values, it is difficult today to find a common language to express such values and to find common ground for realizing these values in contemporary society.

One has good reason to believe that Newman would have engaged in such a dialogue with commitment as well as conviction; after all, his Grammar of Assent is in part a dialogue with the non-belief of his age.(25) Nonetheless, Newman recognized that there are limits to dialogue: On occasion, he refused to continue in dialogue when he felt that his conversation-partner was insincere; on other occasions, he regretfully felt compelled to abandon dialogue when he could find no common ground to serve as a basis for communication.

Were Newman alive today, one suspects that he would actively engage in discussing issues of religion and politics as he did in his own day. Yet in seeking to find common ground with his dialogue partners, he would assuredly demand mutual honesty and sincerity. Indeed honesty and sincerity may well be the essential catalysts that are needed in contemporary discussions about the relationship between church and state in general, as well as about particular church-state issues. Although the conditions that prompted Newman to write his Letter to Norfolk are history, his conviction that being a good Catholic and being a loyal citizen are not in conflict but complementary may be even more urgent, since the challenge of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's is pervasively present. •


Notes

1. Text from the Saint Joseph Edition of The New American Bible (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1970).

2. Cf. V. McClelland, "William Ewart Gladstone," in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (NCE), ed. William J. McDonald, vol. 6 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967) 503.

3. The biographical material on Newman is immense. In addition to the definitive biography by Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), two very readable biographies are those by Meriol Trevor, Newman's Journey (Glasgow: Collins, 1974), and Brian Martin, John Henry Newman: His Life and Work (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982).

4. (London: John Murray, 1874), republished with an introduction by Alvan Ryan in Newman and Gladstone: The Vatican Decrees (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1962) 1-72. References to Gladstone's work will be given in the text using Ryan's pagination. For a useful summary of the historical background, see Josef Altholz, "The Vatican Decrees Controversy, 1874-1875," The Catholic Historical Review 57 (January 1972): 593-605. For an extended treatment, see John R. Page, What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry Newman and Papal Infallibility, 1865-1875 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical P, 1994).

5. See Hilary Jenkins, "The Irish Dimension of the British Kulturkampf: Vaticanism and Civil Allegiance 1870-1875," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30 (1979): 353-377; David Nicholls, "Gladstone, Newman and the politics of pluralism," in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James Bastable (Dublin: Veritas, 1978) 27-38; J.P. Parry, "Religion and the Collapse of Gladstone's First Government, 1870-1874," The Historical Journal 25 (1982): 71-101.

6. For an extensive treatment of the differences between Döllinger and Newman, see Wolfgang Klausnitzer, Päpstliche Unfehlbarkeit bei Newman und Döllinger (Innsbruck-Vienna-Munich: Tyrolia, 1980).

7. See Victor Conzemius, "Acton, Döllinger and Gladstone: A strange variety of Anti-infallibilists," in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. Bastable 27-55.

8. For Manning's position on infallibility, see Robert Ippolito, "Archbishop Manning's Championship of Papal Infallibility 1867-1872," The Ampleforth Journal 77/2 (Summer 1972): 31-39. In recent years, a new view of Manning has emerged; for example, see James Pereiro, Cardinal Manning: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998).

9. See C.S. Dessain, "What Newman taught in Manning's Church," in Infallibility in the Church, A.M. Farrer, Robert Murray, J.C. Dickinson, C.S. Dessain (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965) 59-80, and J. Derek Holmes, "Liberal Catholicism and Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," Clergy Review 60 (1975): 498-511.

10. Henry Tristram, ed., John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957) 272.

11. An edition of the Apologia pro vita sua with useful notes and supplementary articles has been edited by David DeLaura (New York: Norton, 1966).

12. The Idea of a University with a helpful introduction and notes has been prepared by Martin Svaglic (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1982).

13. J.M. Cameron provides a useful introduction to the original (1845) edition of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Baltimore: Pelican, 1974). There are many republications of the third (1878) edition; a critical analysis is provided by Nicholas Lash, Newman on Development: The search for an explanation in history (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos, 1979).

14. (London: B.M. Pickering, 1875). Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk is reprinted in Newman and Gladstone, ed. Ryan 73-228; references to Newman's Letter will be given in the text using Ryan's pagination. Also see J. Derek Holmes, "Factors in the development of Newman's political attitudes," in Newman and Gladstone, ed. Bastable 57-87.

15. See N. Williams, "Norfolk," NCE, vol. 10, 495.

16. According to protocol, both dukes and archbishops are addressed as "Your Grace."

17. The Latin text is given by Henricus Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 31st ed. (Barcelona-Freiburg-im-Breisgau-Rome: Herder, 1957) n. 1827: "cuiuscumque ritus et dignitatis pastores atque fideles, tam seorsum singuli quam simul omnes, officio hierarchicae subordinationis veraeque oboedientiae obstringuntur, non solum in rebus, quae ad fidem et mores, sed etiam in iis, quae ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiae per totum orbem diffusae pertinent."

18. Denzinger n. 1839.

19. See John T. Ford, "Different Models of Infallibility?" Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 35 (1980): 217-233.

20. One wonders whether Newman knew that Gladstone, who purportedly feared the intervention of the pope in British affairs, had as prime minister at the time of the First Vatican Council proposed to his cabinet that the British government intervene in the affairs of the Council. See Ward White, "Lord Acton and the Governments at Vatican Council I," in Lord Acton, the Decisive Decade, 1864-1874, ed. Damian McElrath (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970) 157-158.

21. For a contemporary American discussion, see Robert T. Kennedy, "Contributions of Dignitatis Humanae to Church-State Relations," in Religious Liberty: Paul VI and Dignitatis Humanae, ed. John T. Ford, Pubblicazioni dell'Istituto Paolo VI (Brescia, Italy: Istituto Paolo VI: 1995) 93-113.

22. Newman's idea of "conscience" figured prominently in his Grammar of Assent, ch. 5, sect. 1; see John Jago, "John Henry Newman and Freedom of Conscience," in Shadows and Images: The Papers of the Newman Centenary Symposium, Sydney, August, 1979, ed. J. Cross (Melbourne: Polding, 1981) 61-74.

23. Newman also seems to have been challenging Manning's view that infallibility extended to most papal decisions; such an ultramontane extension made "collisions" between conscience and authority much more likely.

24. See the toast to "Church and king," Newman and Gladstone, ed. Ryan 140.

25. See William Fey, Faith and Doubt: The Unfolding of Newman's Thought on Certainty (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos, 1976).