Thoughts on Newman’s new honor

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 01, 2025

The news that St. John Henry Newman will be declared a Doctor of the Universal Church has a lot of people excited, and rightly so. Newman has been an inspiration for us at Catholic Culture for years, and even an official part of our mission since the day he was canonized in 2019. Back then, we launched two new podcasts in his honor: Catholic Culture Audiobooks (which now features recordings of dozens of sermons and lectures by Newman) and Way of the Fathers (which is now covering the Doctors of the Church, meaning it will feature Newman soon).

Newman is a personal inspiration for me, as a writer (my favorite prose writer in English), thinker, and saint. On a visit to England in 2023, I visited sites connected with him in Oxford, including the house at Littlemore where he was received into the Church (the picture below is of me holding his rosary at Littlemore). In my bedroom/office are two images of Newman that I touched to his relics there. I also went to the Birmingham Oratory with its Newman museum—the oratory house there contains Newman’s personal library and his preserved private room and chapel, and many of his personal effects are on display in the museum.

What is wonderful about Newman’s preaching is that he is very relatable and modern in his psychology—good at explaining the twists and turns of the human mind—and in some ways humanistic, yet seems to belong to the era of the Church Fathers with his austerity, his sense of the fear of the Lord, and conviction about sin.

I am sad to say that by contrast, even most of the best of today’s orthodox preaching still feels in a sense like it comes from a different religion (not in the literal or doctrinal sense, but in the sense of mindset) than that shared by the Fathers all the way through St. John Henry Newman. It is therapeutic and fails to convict. I think this is to a large extent due to the insistence on relentlessly “focusing on the positive” in preaching.

You can attribute this partly to St. John Henry Newman belonging to a different era, partly to his study of the Fathers—but in that case it is noteworthy that the 20th-century “Ressourcement”, to my knowledge, did not produce this kind of preaching. Why is a question worth asking...

Others will be better qualified than I to explain Newman’s doctrinal importance, and how his influence may be amplified by this new honor. In my opinion, the title Doctor is best used, and has typically been used, to recognize someone who has already influenced the whole Church, rather than to make a relatively marginal figure influential. In that respect, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis made some eccentric choices of Doctors. Though those figures are surely worth knowing about, I think St John Henry Newman is a solid, straight-down-the-line choice in recognition of great influence that has already occurred. St. John Henry Newman, (soon to be) Doctor of the Church, pray for us!