In 1990 there was a Symposium in Rome to mark the centenary of John Henry Newman’s death. On the third day Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now of course Pope Benedict XVI, but then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,  addressed the gathering. He began by speaking quite personally.

He explained that, when he had started to study theology in January 1946, soon after the Second World War, an older student, Alfred Lapple, was appointed to act as prefect for those who were new. Lapple had already begun to study Newman seriously, and he and Ratzinger became good friends. The Cardinal told the Symposium, ‘Newman was always present to us.’ And he went on to declare that it was Newman’s teaching on conscience that was so important for them.

When Newman was 15 he had a conversion that convinced him of two realities his own existence and the existence of his Maker.Newman spoke about conscience often. Many scholars have studied his teaching in detail. For our purposes, however, we can turn to 1816. Newman, who was 15, had become sick and had to stay at school for the summer. During that time he had an experience of conversion that convinced him that, were he to doubt everything else, he could not doubt two realities, his own existence and the existence of his Maker.

Recognizing the significance of this conversion is indispensable for understanding Newman. He was, so to speak, overwhelmed by a sense of reality as the union of the visible and the invisible. He was ever afterwards one of those who, in the words of Pope Paul VI, lived as though he ‘could see the invisible’.

And this early conversion experience is significant here because Newman understood conscience as the place where the seen and the unseen meet in the depths of a person’s being. Conscience is an authoritative voice. What it says might not always be clear, or always seem consistent, and it certainly may not always be welcome, but it is there. It is not something we make up for ourselves. ‘It is more than a man’s own self,’ Newman was to observe. We may silence it, disobey it, and refuse to use it, but it remains. Conscience is the voice of God within us, alerting us to God’s presence with us. And as such, of course, it is in stark contrast to the current popular view that invokes conscience to safeguard an individual’s subjectivity. Attention to conscience, as Newman understood it, helps us to be objective, it helps us to know what is true.

We may silence it, disobey it, and refuse to use it, but it remains. Conscience is the voice of God within us, alerting us to God’s presence with us.In the circumstances it is easy to see why this teaching is so important for Pope Benedict. In the homily that he preached during the Mass before the Conclave which would in fact elect him as Pope, he reviewed the situation facing the Church. He spoke of the small boat of Christian thought being tossed about on the waves of the various ideological currents which have become known more recently, ‘from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth’. ‘We are building a dictatorship of relativism’, he declared, ‘that does not recognize anything as definite and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.’

At the time there were those who thought these remarks too pessimistic, but Ratzinger knew what he was speaking about. In that address to the Newman Symposium in 1990 he spoke about what Germans had had to endure under the Nazis. ‘We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party,’ he said, ‘which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual.’ One of its leaders [Hermann Goering] had said: ‘I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.’ Relativism and a subjective conscience do not bring freedom; private preferences cannot stand their ground; they put people at the mercy of those in  power. We need to be able to appeal to objective truth. For Newman, conscience guides us to the truth that sets us free.

It is no wonder that, contrary to his usual custom, Pope Benedict himself wants to beatify Newman.Indeed Ratzinger’s concerns seem in a way to echo a sermon Newman preached in 1873. He called it, ‘The Infidelity of the Future’. ‘Christianity’, he said, ‘has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious.’ He foresaw a time when the faith of other Christian traditions would have grown weaker and so the general culture of faith would be undermined. He could see a future when Catholics were no longer a negligible minority, as they were then.

He observed that, as their influence increased, prejudice against them would become more evident. And then he referred to scandal: ‘No large body can be free from scandals from the misconduct of its members.’ As newspapers become more available, he remarked, ‘we are at the mercy of even one unworthy member or false brother’. He anticipated a time of ‘darkness different in kind from any that has been before it’, a time when people generally in Great Britain would no longer believe. What he foresaw, we can recognize. It anticipates Cardinal Ratzinger’s analysis.

‘one of the great teachers of the Church’. Why? ‘because at the same time he touches our hearts and enlightens our thinking.’Newman’s antidote for this future was first to encourage those listening to him to cultivate their sense of being in the presence of God. He quoted the text, ‘Thou God seest me’, which he had used years earlier as an Anglican, when preaching on providence. It points again to that union of the seen and unseen. We have to live that reality. And then he highlighted the importance of ‘a sound, accurate, complete knowledge of Catholic theology’, in order to respond wisely to a world filled with doubts and uncertainty. As always with Newman, there is that bond between life and teaching, who we are and what we say.

And in 1990 Cardinal Ratzinger concluded his address to the Symposium by describing Newman as ‘one of the great teachers of the Church’. Why? ‘Because at the same time he touches our hearts and enlightens our thinking.’

It is no wonder that, contrary to his usual custom, Pope Benedict himself wants to beatify Newman.