Pope declares Cardinal Newman church doctor, signals Catholic education priority

Vatican City | Pope Leo XIV on Saturday bestowed one of the Catholic Church's highest honours on St. John Henry Newman, the deeply influential 19th-century British convert and theologian, declaring him a doctor of the church and holding him up as a model for Catholic educators.

Only 37 other people have been given the title “doctor” in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. Newman now joins the ranks of such monumental Christian figures as St. Augustine, St. Therese of Lisieux and St. John of the Cross.

The title recognizes that Newman, beloved in both the Anglican and Catholic churches, has universal appeal and made a timeless, eminent contribution to understanding the Christian faith.

A theologian and poet raised in the Church of England, Newman is best known for his writings and sermons on the development of doctrine, truth and the nature of a university. He is admired by conservatives and progressives alike because he followed his conscience at great personal cost when he decided to convert to Catholicism in 1845.

Leo pronounced Newman a church doctor on Saturday during a special Holy Year Mass for Catholic educators and students, during which he was also declaring Newman a co-patron of Catholic education, alongside St. Thomas Aquinas.

It was particularly fitting: It was Leo's namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who made Newman a Catholic cardinal after his conversion, and it was the earlier Leo who declared Aquinas a doctor of the church and patron of Catholic education.

Leo's decision to hold out Newman as a model for Catholic educators and students suggests that Catholic teaching will be a priority for him going forward, especially as he emphasises the ethical use of artificial intelligence for future generations. Earlier this week, Leo penned a new document that cited Newman in his call for Catholic schools to be places for spiritual growth and community, and where the use of technology always keeps human dignity front and centre.

The Catholic Church is one of the world's leading players in education, operating more than 225,000 primary and secondary schools and enrolling some 2.5 million students at Catholic universities around the globe, according to Vatican statistics. Leo was educated by the Augustinians, taught math and physics, and is a member of the Augustinian religious order, which places a special emphasis on St. Augustine's search for truth and the command “Tolle, lege” (“Take up and read”).

A model for the information age

The Rev. George Bowen, the postulator who oversaw Newman's canonisation and designation as a doctor, said Newman too was confronted with the 19th-century equivalent of the information age, when cheap periodicals were readily available and reading rates shot up. Newman insisted on the need for a holistic liberal education that included Catholic theology, but also focused on students and teachers interacting in a relational way in the quest for truth and knowledge, he said.

“Suddenly, the world was swimming with information,” Bowen told reporters. “So Newman's ways of coping with this huge ocean of knowledge and making sense of it, having a connected view, is something very, very relevant today.” Newman was born in London in 1801 to an Anglican family and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825, assigned to minister to students at the University of Oxford. There, he and other friends started the Oxford Movement to counter the trend of religious liberalism in English universities, and he became known as the lead proponent of the “High Church” tradition.

When Newman defected from the Church of England to the Catholic Church in 1845, he lost friends, work and even family ties, believing the truth he was searching for could only be found in the Catholic faith.

A unifying figure cherished by Anglicans and Catholics

And yet even today, he remains beloved in the Church of England, such that his hymns were sung last week in the Sistine Chapel when King Charles III prayed alongside Leo in the historic ecumenical service.

Several important Anglican leaders wrote to the Vatican, supporting his designation as a church doctor, and the Anglican archbishop of York was invited to participate in the service on Saturday. It featured Newman's most famous hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,” which remains a fixture of Anglican services.

“Newman is a big ecumenical figure in the sense that he owes his faith to his upbringing in the Church of England,” Bowen said.

Paul Shrimpton, a leading Newman scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, said it was significant that each of the last popes had promoted Newman in his remarkably quick path to being declared a doctor of the church, underlining his universal appeal to progressives and liberals alike.

St. John Paul II declared him venerable in 1991, in the first step to possible sainthood; Pope Benedict XVI beatified him during a 2010 visit to Birmingham, England; Pope Francis canonised him in 2019 with Charles in the audience, and now Leo declared him a church doctor.

“I think that speaks volumes,” said Shrimpton, who contributed an essay on Newman's influence on Catholic education for the official Vatican dossier, or “positio” that made the case for him to be declared a doctor. “All very different popes show that he is part of the universal teaching of the church.”