Newman and the New Ultramontanism

The All Saints Day proclamation of St. John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church was entirely welcome, if not without a certain irony.

First, the good news.

Newman was one of the most creative Christian minds of the nineteenth century, a truth seeker whose lifelong search for the face of Christ took him from evangelicalism through reformist, High Church Anglicanism into Catholicism. Along that sometimes-stony path, Newman was misunderstood and slandered, frustrated by ecclesiastical bureaucracy and beset by clerical jealousies.