John Henry Newman's Personal View of the Holiness of the Church: Some Useful Insights for our Times

Abstract

Unlike apostolicity and authority, the topic of the holiness of the church in the thought of John Henry Newman is strikingly undramatic. Yet, by “undramatic” we do not mean unimportant, but rather unchanged. As both an Anglican and a Catholic, the fact that the church of Jesus Christ was holy remained a simple and patent fact.2 The fact that this vision traversed Newman’s dramatic conversion in 1845 reveals all the more how centrally situated it was within his vision of the church. Throughout his life, Newman was deeply invested in the theme of holiness, attuned particularly to the modern demand to render an account of the church’s members’ sins. In his Anglican period, this investment centered principally around the papacy; it was only after his conversion that his interest extended more broadly to the entire church. It was Newman’s perennial consolation to see this sanctity continually radiating from Christ within the very heart of the church: “One living Saint, though there be but one, is a pledge of the whole Church Invisible. Let this thought console us.”3 Newman’s ecclesiology, though seemingly minor to his corpus, was integral to the very architecture of his theology. With affinities to Johann Adam Möhler, it was distinctively personalistic.4 To describe it as such is not to imply any connection