Sensus fidelium: Newman and the people of God

Newman teaches us that if we have accepted the truth of Christ and committed our lives to him, there can be no separation between what we believe and the way we live our lives. Our every thought, word and action must be directed to the glory of God and the spread of his Kingdom. Newman understood this, and was the great champion of the prophetic office of the Christian laity. He saw clearly that we do not so much accept the truth in a purely intellectual act as embrace it in a spiritual dynamic that penetrates to the core of our being. Truth is passed on not merely by formal teaching, important as that is, but also by the witness of lives lived in integrity, fidelity and holiness; those who live in and by the truth instinctively recognize what is false and, precisely as false, inimical to the beauty and goodness which accompany the splendour of truth, veritatis splendor.[1]

Pope Benedict XVI

Newman never envisaged lay people teaching theology, but he thought they could and should study it, for he wanted a church in which faith and intellect were both valued. As he wrote, “I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.”[2] But this was a minority view in the nineteenth-century church, which sharply distinguished the clerical ‘teaching church’ (ecclesia docens) from the passively receptive ‘learning church’ (ecclesia docta).

In 1859 Newman published a challenge to this polarity in a controversial article On Consulting the Faithful in matters of Doctrine, arguing that, during the Arian crisis of the fourth century, the ordinary magisterium of large sections of the episcopate had failed, as many bishops embraced or tolerated the Arian heresy, and the Catholic faith was preserved by the rejection of Arianism by the body of the faithful. He provocatively quoted St Hilary’s claim that “the ears of the people are holier than the hearts of the bishops”.[3]

Newman maintained that devout believers had an instinctive recognition of the difference between truth and error, and a recoil from heresy; this instinct was the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he believed that the infallibility of the Church inhered not in the hierarchy alone, but in the whole body of the faithful, a “conspiratio” (i.e., breathing together) between pastors and flock which safeguarded the deposit of faith.[4] He drew corroboration of his argument from the fact that Pius IX had consulted the opinion of the local churches before defining the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Critics were horrified at the suggestion that the hierarchy needed to consult the faithful about matters of dogma, and he was delated to Rome for heresy. Such critics did not recognise the highly nuanced and organic view of the Church that Newman was espousing, a view that perceived mutually enriching gifts by its various members, particularly those deeply immersed in the life of faith and blessed with a supernatural instinct.

Newman’s stress on the active role of the sensus fidelium in matters of faith received little support in the nineteenth century, but was increasingly influential on Catholic theology in the twentieth century, and was endorsed by the Second Vatican Council, generally in its emphasis on the active role of “the people of God”, and explicitly in its formal recognition of the “conspiratio” of bishops and people in section 8 of Dei Verbum, which defined that growth in understanding of the deposit of faith comes by the inspiration of the Spirit, “through contemplation and study by believers, who ‘ponder these things in their hearts’” as well as through the preaching of the bishops.[5]

After Vatican II, Newman’s integral ecclesial vision has gained new resonance and relevance in the understanding of the Church as “communio”, highlighting the importance of all the members of the body of Christ according to their specific vocation and mission. Newman’s contributions here are essential for the Church as she contemplates what it means to be synodal.

[1] “Address of Pope Benedict XVI at the Prayer Vigil on the Eve of the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Hyde Park, London” (18 September 2010), in AAS, Vol. 102, no. 10 (2010), 645.

[2] John Henry Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 13.

[3] Qtd. in John Henry Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” Rambler (July 1859): 198-230 (at 218).

[4] See Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful,” 228.

[5] See Dei Verbum, § 8, in The Basic Sixteen Documents Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, ed. Austin Flannery (New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), 102.