St. John Henry Newman to Be Declared Doctor of the Church

July 31^st, 2025, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). The National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) is delighted to announce that Pope Leo XIV has confirmed the affirmative opinion of the Plenary Session of Bishops, Members of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, regarding the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, which will soon be conferred on St. John Henry Newman, Cardinal of the Catholic Church and Founder of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in England.

Newman, one of the greatest and most influential theologians of the nineteenth century—first as an Anglican and later as a Catholic following his conversion in 1845—was born in London (UK) on February 21^st, 1801 and died in Edgbaston (UK) on August 11^th, 1890.

Since the Spring of 2023, NINS has worked closely with the representatives of the Bishops of England and Wales, the formal petitioners of Newman’s cause to be declared a Doctor of the Universal Church, as well as the Postulator for Newman’s cause, Fr. George Bowen of the Brompton Oratory (London, UK). Following an initial phase of writing and petitioning letters in support of Newman’s cause, NINS took a leading role in two of its facets starting in May 2024. The first involved facilitating access to all of Newman’s published works, which members of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints reviewed. Given Newman’s prolific output and tendency to republish works multiple times, this required a coordinated effort on the part of the NINS staff to ensure that the dicasteries had all that they needed. NINS leveraged its world-class resources, from its print library and digital repositories, including the bespoke NINS Digital Collections archival repository and Newman Reader.

The second facet involved coordinating NINS’s international network of Newman scholars to provide contributions to the fourth chapter of the Positio on Newman’s “Eminent Doctrine.” In the end, twenty scholars contributed to this 300-page chapter, including scholars currently affiliated with NINS (Kenneth Parker, Christopher Cimorelli, and Elizabeth Huddleston) and 11 scholars serving on the Newman Studies Journal Editorial Board (including past NINS personnel Ryan “Bud” Marr and Shaun Blanchard). In addition to organizing this critically important fourth chapter, NINS staff contributed a resource of approximately 60 pages to the Positio featuring papal and ecclesial acclamations of Newman, from Pope Leo XIII to Pope Francis. Finally, they played a key role editing and compiling the Positio in coordination with the Postulator. 

Given NINS’s mission to promote the life, thought, and legacy of St. John Henry Newman, the news of the eventual conferral of the title of Doctor of the Universal Church on him is both a joyous and momentous occasion, and the Institute is blessed to have played a critical role in Newman’s cause just several years after his canonization. For inquires about Newman’s cause and NINS’s role in it, please contact the NINS Director, Dr. Christopher Cimorelli (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

[image source: Undated Portrait of Newman Reading "Ecce Homo" (1864) from NINS Digital Collections]