we cannot let it go unremarked that Bishop Harries is eager to claim Cardinal Newman as one of his own. Newman’s essay on the Development of Doctrine is a seminal, nuanced and powerful piece of theological writing. The essay’s essential point is that the Christian faith can develop in understanding, but not in a way that contradicts the core teaching of the Apostles. Instead of any intellectual argument, Bishop Harries grabs the title of Newman’s essay, and uses it, and Newman’s reputation as a propaganda piece to bolster innovations in the Church of England which would have astounded and scandalized Newman. Is it possible that a person of Bishop Harries learning and experience is blind to the fact that Newman’s whole spiritual journey was a repudiation of the kind of Oxford, hoity toity faux Catholicism that Bishop Harries represents?
Can Bishop Harries really have missed the entire point of Cardinal Newman’s pilgrimage to Rome? Does he not see that the great man stepped down from the heights of his career in Oxford and in the Church of England to take the very step into the Catholic Church that Bishop Harries sneers at?
Lord Pentregarth is honest in choosing not to become a Catholic, but if he does not want to be a Catholic why does he keep masquerading as one? Most of all he should resist the temptation to kidnap a figure as great and good as Cardinal Newman and hold him to ransom for his own progressivist agenda.
Father Longenecker is entirely correct, except that Lord Harries is not Lord Pentregarth, but Lord Harries of Pentregarth. But then, no one is infallible. 🙂
#1: We hereby depose you for gross contumacy, disrespect and heresy.
H.H. Pope Azusa I
Why, thank you. When one of the episcopi vaganti supposedly elected by a TEC faux diocese presumed to ‘depose’ a friend of mine, I wrote him a congratulatory letter on the additional distinction conferred upon him.