Will the new Leo elevate Leo XIII’s Cardinal Newman to a Doctor of the Church?

Fr James Bradley• May 15, 2025

On 12 May 1879, Pope Leo XIII raised John Henry Newman to the Sacred College of Cardinals. The biglietto which he received from the Secretariat of State notifying him of the Holy Father’s decision caused Newman to make one of his most significant speeches in reply.

It was the plan of the Duke of Norfolk, one of Newman’s advocates in England, to ask Pope Leo to acknowledge Newman’s loyalty to the Roman Church –  which had been unjustly called into question by some of his fellow Catholics – by making him a cardinal. Yet even before his election to the papacy, then then-Archbishop Pecci had come to know of Newman’s influence through the Oxford Movement.

In 1845, just after Newman had been received into the Catholic Church at Littlemore outside Oxford by the Passionist priest, Blessed Dominic Barberi, Archbishop Pecci met with Barberi in Belgium, where he was serving at the time as Apostolic Nuncio. Ian Ker, Newman’s biographer, has suggested that Pope Leo intended to make Newman his very first cardinal after his election to the Chair of St Peter, but that this was foiled because others “said he was too liberal”.

In his biglietto speech responding to Pope Leo XIII raising him to the dignity of the sacred purple, Newman famously addressed this point. Standing in the Palazzo della Pigna, the residence in Rome of Cardinal Edward Henry Howard, Newman professed: “I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.”

Newman described this liberalism as “the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.” It is clear that Newman steadfastly opposed this notion his whole life, as he sought out and followed the “kindly light” of truth, first by the rejection of his old life, and in time by a fulsome embrace of a new and more profound life with Jesus Christ in the full communion of Catholic Church; “the one true fold of the Redeemer”.

A few days ago in the Sistine Chapel, another Leo took up Newman’s cause, making his own the profession of St Peter to the Lord in St Matthew’s gospel, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The result of Peter’s confession, Pope Leo XIV said, is that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God: the one Saviour who alone reveals the face of the Father.” In this, our own Pope Leo made with Newman a commitment to the uniqueness and truth of the Gospel, and to the full and complete path of salvation which is alone offered to the human race in and through the person of Jesus Christ, by communion with and in his mystical body, the Church.

Others have already commented on the consistently Christocentric tone of Pope Leo XIV’s early words: from the Loggia of Benedictions following his election – speaking the words of Christ himself; words of peace to the Church and the whole world – in his homily in the Sistine Chapel, and in his remarks to the College of Cardinals. Speaking to the cardinals he described the events of the past weeks as showing “the true grandeur of the Church, which is alive in the rich variety of her members in union with her one Head, Christ, ‘the shepherd and guardian’ (1 Peter 2:25) of our souls.” Again, Christ is himself the “one Head,” the only and true God; the way, the truth and the life.

Insofar as he set out the priorities for his pontificate, in the same speech Pope Leo noted from Evangelii Gaudium themes to which Newman himself contributed much: “the return to the primacy of Christ in proclamation; the missionary conversion of the entire Christian community; growth in collegiality and synodality; attention to the sensus fidei, especially in its most authentic and inclusive forms, such as popular piety; loving care for the least and the rejected; courageous and trusting dialogue with the contemporary world in its various components and realities.”

Pope Leo XIV is a son of St Augustine, whom Newman described as “a man whose slowness to begin a course was a pledge of zeal when he had once begun it.” The phrase might in some sense be applied also to its author, whose journey to the Catholic Church was careful and considered, but which in time spurred on the greatest revival of English Catholicism in 400 years.

The comparison between Augustine and Newman is far from new, but it may be worth revisiting as an Augustinian takes up the Petrine Ministry. And it will be especially interesting to see the extent to which this manifests itself, not least as the successor-in-name of the one who made John Henry Newman a cardinal, is expected, in time, to name him a Doctor of the Church.

RELATED: A history of popes called Leo and what Pope Leo XIV means for the Church today

Photo collage: Pope Leo XIV (Getty) / John Henry Newman (Getty).