Doctor for the Classroom, Newman and Escrivá, Part 2

The Doctors of the Church are not museum pieces. They are teachers still at work.

Today, October 9, the whole Church keeps the feast of St. John Henry Newman, for the first time as a Doctor of the Church. It is the anniversary of that rainy night in 1845 when, at Littlemore, Newman knelt before Blessed Dominic Barberi and asked to be received into the Catholic Church. And this is the first year his memorial stands on the General Roman Calendar, so that Catholics everywhere may celebrate him.

Both honors came last autumn, when thousands of teachers filled Rome for the Jubilee of the World of Education. In the space of five days, Pope Leo XIV gave Newman two great titles.

On October 28, 2025, the sixtieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Christian education, Gravissimum Educationis, the Pope published an apostolic letter titled Drawing New Maps of Hope. In it he named Newman co-patron of the Church’s educational mission, together with St. Thomas Aquinas. There is a lovely symmetry here. It was Pope Leo XIII, the last Leo, who named Aquinas patron of Catholic schools and universities in 1880, the year after he made Newman a cardinal. Now the new Leo has placed the two side by side.

Then on November 1, the Solemnity of All Saints, at the closing Mass of the Jubilee, Pope Leo proclaimed Newman the thirty-eighth Doctor of the Church.

Why this man? Why an Englishman of the nineteenth century, for the schools and universities of the twenty-first? And why might a reader who loves St. Josemaría Escrivá find in Newman a kindred spirit?

A founder who did not “succeed”

The surprising answer begins with what looks like a failure. In 1851 Archbishop Paul Cullen asked Newman to found a Catholic University in Ireland. Ireland was still bleeding from the Great Famine, and many resented the English. Some bishops did not want the university at all. Newman, an Englishman, was asked to establish it and run it.

He accepted while moving his Oratory to Edgbaston, settling a dispute with the new London Oratory, and standing trial on a charge of libel. For three years he waited while the bishops debated. The university finally opened in November 1854 with twenty students.

Newman threw himself into it. He drew up the plans of study and hired professors. He used his own money to repair buildings and to build a University Church. In 1855 he opened a medical school, because Dublin had very few Catholic doctors. He wanted lay men in the professorial chairs and in charge of the finances, and he was blocked. In 1858, worn out, he resigned. By his own count he had crossed the Irish Sea fifty-six times.

And yet the seed grew. The Catholic University became University College Dublin. Above all, the lectures he wrote for it became The Idea of a University, still read on campuses throughout the world.

What Newman could not do in Dublin, another founder did a century later in Pamplona. On October 17, 1952, St. Josemaría Escrivá’s small college opened with a Mass of the Holy Spirit and forty-one students; in 1962 it was recognized as the University of Navarra. Escrivá entrusted it from the beginning to lay professors, single and married, men and women. Like Newman, he soon added a medical school, and he urged its doctors to see and serve Christ in their patients. Newman had opened a door that his own time kept closed; Escrivá walked through it.

Knowledge as its own end

Newman’s first great claim is that knowledge is worth having for its own sake. “Knowledge is capable of being its own end,” he wrote. A university does not exist first to train workers, but to form minds: minds that see things whole, that grasp principles and relations, not merely facts.

That formation, he added, turns out to be very useful. A well-trained mind serves society, politics and the Church. But usefulness is the fruit, not the root.

Pope Leo took up this very point in his letter. With Newman as his guide, he warned against an approach to education that measures everything by function and practical use. Anyone who has watched a philosophy department close, or heard a student ask only “will this be on the test?”, knows how timely that warning is.

Escrivá approached the same question from the side of the soul. For him, study well done is a student’s professional work, an offering that can be placed before God. “An hour of study, for a modern apostle, is an hour of prayer,” he wrote in The Way (n. 335). Newman defends the dignity of knowledge; Escrivá shows how the hours spent pursuing it can be sanctified. Here the two differ in emphasis: Newman held that the direct end of a university is knowledge, while Escrivá saw the Christian formation of its students as part of its very mission. But both refused to let learning be reduced to a mere tool.

The circle needs its center

Newman’s second claim is that all knowledge forms a circle. Each science completes the others. Theology belongs in that circle, not as a guest but as a member. Leave it out, and other disciplines will try to answer the questions it was meant to answer. Physics will pronounce on purpose; economics will pronounce on the human person.

Escrivá said much the same in his own direct way: “A man who lacks religious formation is a man whose education is incomplete… A university from which religion is absent is an incomplete university” (Conversations with Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer, n. 73). Both men fostered study in every field without fearing the truth, and both respected the legitimate autonomy of each science. Truth is one because God is one.

Learning is not holiness

But Newman was no naive admirer of education. He knew that a cultivated mind can be an ally of faith or, because it resembles virtue so closely, its subtle enemy. Liberal education, he said, produces a gentleman, not a Christian. Then he wrote one of his most famous sentences:

“Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”

That is why, for Newman, what makes a university Christian is not only its curriculum but its people. He placed young tutors in small houses of students so that learning could grow into friendship. Heart speaks to heart, cor ad cor loquitur. Teachers form students as much by who they are as by what they say.

Escrivá called this the apostolate of friendship, and he too saw that it needed a home. On a visit to Oxford he took a marked interest in its residential colleges and tutorial system, and he went on to open university residences in many cities. He also warned students against living a “double life,” with prayer on one side and study, work and family on the other. The Christian vocation, he told them on the Navarra campus in 1967, consists in “making heroic verse out of the prose of each day.” Both men believed that virtue opens the mind to truth, and that friendship with good people helps a young person grow in both.

Doctor and saint

It is fitting that Newman was declared a Doctor on All Saints’ Day. The Church does not give that title to brilliant minds alone. A Doctor of the Church must be eminent in teaching and in holiness. Newman’s teaching on conscience, on the development of doctrine, and on the university came out of a life of prayer, sacrifice and obedience, including the hard obedience of Dublin.

The Doctors of the Church are not museum pieces. They are teachers still at work. With Newman, the Church has given its schools and universities a Doctor who knew the classroom from the inside: the tutor who sat with struggling students, the rector who worried about salaries and leaking roofs, the priest who prayed for each of his pupils by name. And in the universities that St. Josemaría inspired, from Pamplona to Bogotá, Manila and Nairobi, Newman’s idea has found unexpected new homes.

For this feast

On this feast, here are three ways to honor our newest Doctor. Pray for one teacher you know, and tell that teacher you are grateful. Read one discourse of The Idea of a University; the fifth, on knowledge as its own end, is a good place to start. And offer your next hour of study or work to God, asking St. John Henry Newman to help our Catholic schools and universities become what he dreamed of: places where faith and reason, mind and heart, are friends.

St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church and patron of educators, pray for us.

GO TO PART I

Source: cardinaljohnhenrynewman.com