World’s leading authority on St. John Henry Newman says Pope Francis is 'causing confusion'
Summary
What would St. John Henry Cardinal Newman have thought about Pope Francis? Well, in this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, you re going to find out. Father Ian Kerr is the world s leading authority on our new saint. Father Kerr is an Oxford professor who has authored 20 books on Cardinal Newman, including the definitive biography. LifeSite News intrepid producer Jim Hale was blessed to nab Father Kerr for a quick interview in Rome, and Father Kerr was very open indeed about his views on Pope Francis and what Cardinal Newman would have said about the current papacy.
Transcript
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What would St. John Henry Newman have thought about Pope Francis?
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Well, in this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, you're going to find out.
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Father Ian Kerr is the world's leading authority on our new saint.
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Father Kerr is an Oxford professor who has authored 20 books on Newman,
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including the definitive biography on St. John Henry Cardinal Newman.
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LifeSite News intrepid producer Jim Hale was blessed to nab Father Kerr for a quick interview in Rome.
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And Father Kerr was very open indeed about his views on Pope Francis
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and what Newman would have thought about the current papacy.
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I just heard a talk the other day, somebody claiming that certainly Newman's essay on the development of Christian doctrine
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means that he would be all on board with ordination of women and the end of priestly celibacy
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and all these things that are kind of being floated around now.
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Well, my response would be that that's nonsense, that Newman says that famous sentence in the essay on development
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Now, that sentence is always quoted by the liberals, you see, but they don't quote the sentence before,
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which is to the effect that Christianity changes, yes, in order to remain the same.
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It's exactly that principle of change and continuity that Pope Benedict spoke of in that famous speech,
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Father, what's your advice to those who are really, there's almost a sense of gloom now
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amongst so many faithful Catholics because they feel like the church is revolutionizing at a pace that's just too fast.
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What is your message to Catholics who are extremely concerned right now?
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Well, it's a very strange pontificalist because it's really a throwback to the 1970s
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It's astonishing because the present Pope is really a 1970s Jesuit, in other words, a liberal.
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And so he has created great doctrinal confusion in the church right from the beginning when he said,
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He's there not to judge the people, but the sin.
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I mean, and then saying crude, vulgar things like,
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And, of course, he's very like President Trump in many ways.
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He sacked Mueller, and Cardinal Mueller from Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith,
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and Cardinal Mueller said he'd been treated with the most unchristian discourtesy.
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The only difference between him and Trump is that Trump's got a beautiful wife, and he hasn't.
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Well, it's very grim, but Newman says, you know, it's just always survives these things, and we're just going through what I regard.
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Of course, the Pope is very popular with the people who don't know what's going on, you know,
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because of these symbolic gestures he makes, like carrying his suitcase over.
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But actually, that caused considerable inconvenience, apparently.
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Well, right, it's like some of the merchants around here are out of business now because he doesn't want to wear the vestments anymore.
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Well, the truth is, you look at the seminaries, the seminarians are uniformly orthodox today in every country, in every western country that I know of.
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I mean, you see, what I find very, I mean, what's so disturbing is another, when I was at the English college in Rome in the 1970s,
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which is a very liberal college, you see, typically, and, well, I suppose most seminarians probably thought Paul VI was too conservative,
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but they would never have spoken disrespectfully about it.
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But the seminarians are here at the English college, North American college, called the Pope Fat Frank.
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I mean, nobody would have spoken, however much opposed you were to John Paul II, or Benedict, you would never have spoken disrespectfully about them.
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Do you sympathize with those who feel that kind of frustration?
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Well, we don't, because he went, of course, he's also very vindictive in a way that John Paul and Benedict never were.
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He's denied the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who's got five million Catholics in his diocese, more than the whole Catholic population of England.
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He hasn't made him a cardinal because he's Opus Dei.
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The Archbishop of Philadelphia, who I know, and is a very nice man, he hasn't given him the red hat either, because he's conservative.
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And he's made these appalling appointments, but he's also, of course, making cardinals in all these, for instance, the Archbishop of Stockholm is a cardinal.
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Well, he's got about 20,000 Catholics or something.
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So we really don't know, except I would have thought that the third world countries where he's from, they would tend to be conservative, I would think.
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But it's very hard to remember, we don't really know what they think, you see.
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I mean, we know what these American cardinals that he's appointed think, I mean, they're dreadful.
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Because he tweeted this night-night darling, and he claims it was sent to his sister.
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He had an Italian model staying in his residence.
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What was he doing having an Italian model staying there?
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And if you could just comment on, sort of personally, what this moment means to you,
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One, the first way is because it was, um, seeing one of the EWTN programs that I made
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Um, it got Jack Sullivan in Massachusetts praying to Newman.
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And then Melissa, the lady in Chicago, what I said interested her.
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And, um, so when she felt very gravely ill, she began praying.
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And they both had, I forgot, they both had the same experiences, you know.
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I can't see if there's any particular Newmanian significance in that.
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But there's also the fact that this will enable Newman to be, uh, declared a doctor of the
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And I consider that he's the, the doctor par excellence, or he will be, of the post-conciliar
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Just like St. Robert Bellamin is the, is the great doctor, doctor par excellence of the
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Why do Catholics today need to know about St. John Cardinal Newman?
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Well, why is it important for, um, all the thousands who are gathered here and the Catholics
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throughout the world to understand who this man was?
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Well, because I say he was the, he's the great, uh, in my last book, Newman on Vatican
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II, I talked about how, how he anticipated the council and how he also provided a very interesting
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hermeneutic of what happens likely to happen after council.
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So he could have predicted the confusion that followed Vatican II.
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Yeah, that wouldn't have surprised him in the least bit.
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And also, there'd be many people converted by his writings.
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I mean, I know of an American bishop who's converted by reading Newman.
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So, what is it about Newman that, that stands out in the, in the, the last 200 years of the
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Well, he wrote the great classic on university education, the idea of university.
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He wrote what is one of the great theological classics, the essay on the development of Christian
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He wrote what was one of the great classics of the philosophy of religion, his grammar
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And fifthly, his Anglican plain and parochial sermons, which are quite widely read by Catholics,
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one of the great classics of Christian spirituality.
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Oh, he's also a great, one of the greatest writers of English prose.
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When you were researching him, what, what did you learn about Newman, perhaps, that surprised
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Well, I don't, well, I don't know that anything particularly surprised me.
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I mean, in my biography of Newman, I was trying to, um, one of the things, one of my
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goals was to, um, was to show just how he never lost his sense of humor, even in the
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Because, unfortunately, his first big biographer, Wilfred Wald, was very good on his theological
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But, um, but he, he painted this picture of, of a gloomy, hypersensitive Newman, which
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And there were no doubt times when he was hypersensitive.
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Because he was a sinner, like, you know, saints are still sinners.
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I think, from what I've read, a lot of people don't really understand the significance of
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Newman's conversion and what it meant at the time.
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Well, it was, of course, also an incredible thing to do in those days in this country.
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There were very, very few Catholics until the Irish immigration began, of course, in
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Catholics who'd hung on to the faith, mainly up in Lancashire, in the north of England.
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Um, well, first of all, it was considered to be an intellectual impossibility.
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The typical Englishman would say, you can't possibly believe all those doctrines of Catholicism.
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Secondly, um, there was a very racist attitude towards Catholicism, because in those days,
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the English, the English intellectuals thought that, um, the, the, um, what you call it, the,
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The Anglo-Saxon countries were the top countries.
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And especially Germany, they thought Germany was the most cultured, civilized country in
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Of course, they got a horrible shock when the first, well, they were dead by then.
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But, of course, the First World War dispelled that with the German atrocities.
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And, of course, even more so, the Second, the Second World War.
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Um, so, so, they, they thought the Celts and Latins were racially inferior.
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The reason why they were inferior was because they were under the yoke of the Catholic priesthood,
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And then, thirdly, of course, the whole, the, just like the, um, the Soviet Union was built
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upon this myth that there'd been a great uprising of the people, which is completely untrue,
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Similarly, in this country, the, um, the general, the assumption was that people in this country
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had risen up to throughout the church, which, of course, was complete nonsense.
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It was the King Henry VIII who wanted a divorce.
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And he built up support for himself, of course, by confiscating the monastery lands,
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and giving them to the, um, giving the barons money.
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But, of course, it wasn't really until it, Eamon Duffy in his book, The Stripping of the Altars,
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That, in fact, this was, I think, was the most Catholic country in Europe at the time.
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And, um, um, to show that the ordinary people, you know, that it was very unpopular, the Reformation.
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Father, why do Catholics need to read Newman today, in this time that we're in now,
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which certainly seems to be like a time of considerable confusion?
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Well, it's because his writings convert people, and his writings also, hopefully,
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correct the errors of some of our people who get things wrong.
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I think they are one of the things that we know that we make these things wrong.