A Rocker and a Doctor Meet in Birmingham

By David G. Bonagura, Jr. ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 06, 2025

On July 30, the city of Birmingham saluted one of its own who, after decades of rock and heavy metal fame (and all the trappings associated with it) came home to rest. Beneath the genre’s stereotypes, a surprising theme runs through much of Ozzy Osbourne’s work: religion. Surfaces references were frequent and the inversion of pious: his first band was Black Sabbath; his nickname was the Prince of Darkness; his “Blizzard of Ozz” album cover featured him gesturing on all fours in a church as he held a cross above his head. Beneath this seeming animosity, his songs probed eternal mysteries with frankness and apprehension. Consider “After Forever,” released in 1971:

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Have you ever thought about your soul
Can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think
That when you are dead
You just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head
Or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name
That you read in the book
When you were in school?

On the following day, the Eternal City sent grand tidings to still-lugubrious Birmingham: its famous adopted son would be named Doctor of the Church, the highest honor a Catholic theologian can receive. Saint John Henry Newman, who sought refuge in Birmingham exactly one hundred years before John Michael Osbourne was born, thought often of his soul. As he expressed in his extended poem “The Dream of Gerontius,” he had no doubt that it could be saved:

Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God
The Omnipotent Father, who created thee!
Go, in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the living God, who bled for thee! ….
Go on thy course;
And may thy place today be found in peace,
And may thy dwelling be the Holy Mount
Of Sion:—through the Same, through Christ, our Lord.

Cardinal Newman and Ozzy Osbourne have more in common than Birmingham. They are both products of the Via Media that the Church of England once purported to be. They both showed by their vastly different lives that this middle way is not viable. Newman took the high road and became Catholic. Osbourne took the low road against which Newman spent his career warning. The rocker shows the doctor’s work, still poignantly relevant, is still needed to bind the wounds of doubt that debilitate the modern age.

In his Birmingham home where he lived the second half of his ninety years, Newman’s epitaph has been etched into the wall: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” / “Out of the shadows and images into the truth.” Seeking the truth, no matter how painful the road to it, was the heart of Newman’s life: it brought him out of the comforts of his beloved Oxford and the Church of England into the socially unacceptable and, in his opinion, the distastefully Baroque Catholic Church. He founded a university for others to share the same pursuit, he wrote books on how to discern doctrinal truth in history and how to assent to truth with the intellect, he defended conscience as the forum to discern the truth’s call.

He fought for truth against its greatest enemy, what he called in his 1879 Biglietto Speech “the spirit of liberalism in religion,” which he defined as “the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste.”

Ozzy sung the doubt that the spirit of liberalism in religion breeds on his heavy metal chords. Recorded a century after Newman’s famous speech, “I Don’t Know” expresses an existential uncertainty that generates paralysis in the present and terror toward the future:

Everyone goes through changes
Looking to find the truth
Don’t look to me for answers
Don’t ask me, I don’t know (Know...)

How am I supposed to know
Hidden meanings that will never show?
Fools and prophets from the past
Life’s a stage and we’re all in the cast.

Ozzy stated in an interview that he was a Christian, though, having imbibed the spirit of liberalism in religion, added that he didn’t take much interest in it. On another occasion he announced, “I believe in God. I don’t go to church, but I don’t think you have to ... go to church to believe in God.”

For Ozzy and so many of his contemporaries, religion, in the words of Newman, is “a private luxury, which a man may have if he will.” It serves no real purpose nor answers any real questions because it is not directed at anything real. It is rather akin to an accessory pill purchased at a health store: it may make a person healthier, but there is no way to know that for sure; so take the pills if you like. Ozzy, knowing the game, stuck with the placebo.

Newman, by contrast, grew to have no doubts: religion expressed the truth that God Himself has revealed and entrusted to His Church. In fact, one of Newman’s most enduring lines reinforces this conviction: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” A century later, “Suicide solution,” which appeared on Ozzy’s first solo album in 1980, would be a cruel oxymoron to Newman who knew life was a journey to eternal happiness with God who is love.

A product of the postmodern age, Ozzy collapsed into the doubt that Newman’s certitude sought to combat. As he sang in “Paranoid,”

I need someone to show me
The things in life that I can’t find
I can’t see the things that make
True happiness, I must be blind

Make a joke and I will sigh
And you will laugh and I will cry
Happiness I cannot feel
And love to me is so unreal

And so as you hear these words
Telling you now of my state
I tell you to enjoy life
I wish I could but it’s too late

The Catholic Church has honored Newman in the hope that men and women experiencing the turmoil that Ozzy lived may overcome it with the aid of the saint’s assured writings. Through them they may learn the real joy of life before it is too late.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. is an adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic International University. He is the author of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and the translator of Jerome”s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. He serves as the religion editor of The University Bookman, a review of books founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. See full bio.

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