Depending upon who you ask, you may be informed that there are thirty-seven Doctors in the house known as the Catholic Church, not including Cardinal John Henry Newman who, on a date as yet to be announced, will be formally proclaimed as such by Robert Prevost (now starring on the world stage as Leo XIV in the ecclesiastical blockbuster The Titans of Conciliar Rome).
There’s much more to the story, however.
Up to and including the time of Pope Pius XII, there were twenty-nine Doctors of the Church, with St. Anthony of Padua being the last person so declared on January 16, 1946.
In 1959, as the word held its collective breath in anticipation of the Second Vatican Council, the calling of which had been announced in the previous year, John XXIII proclaimed Lawrence of Brindisi a Doctor of the Church.
Following the conciliar revolution, the list of Doctors was expanded to include eight more persons, including Newman.
In 1970, Paul VI declared Saints Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena Doctors of the Church.
John Paul II so declared St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1997.
In October of 2012, roughly four months prior to fleeing for fear of the wolves (or whatever it is that he did), Benedict XVI so declared Hildegard von Bingen and John of Ávila.
The proclamations made by Benedict were groundbreaking in that both of the newly named “Doctors” were the first to have been canonized by conciliar claimants to the Chair of Peter (aka anti-popes), men who publicly and consistently manifested and promoted something other than the Catholic faith.
Francis saw Benedict’s Doctors and raised him a heretic by naming Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church in 2015. Not only was he never canonized, the man wasn’t even a Catholic!
Seven years later, Francis so named Irenaeus of Lyons, who – although never formally canonized – is universally known and honored as one of the Church Fathers. Naming him a Doctor of the Church was an unusual and perhaps unexpected step simply because he is a martyr.
As Fr. Stephen McKenna wrote in a 1950 article for Homiletic & Pastoral Review specifically about Irenaeus:
The Church does not confer the title of Doctor upon such men, whose life-blood is a more eloquent testimony to their faith in Christ than their writings.
As one looks at the list of persons named Doctor of the Church after St. Anthony in 1946, some are easier to take seriously than others. Setting aside the obvious problem of anti-papal proclamations in general, at least some of them – namely Lawrence of Brindisi, Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux – have the high honor of having been canonized by a true Holy Roman Pontiff, well before that distinction was replaced by the bogus “canonizations” of the counterfeit church (largely best understood as Conciliar Lifetime Achievement Awards for Service to the Revolution).
This brings us to the present day as arrangements are being made for Jorge Bergoglio’s mini-me, Leo, to formally proclaim John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church.
Newman received his own Conciliar Lifetime Achievement Award from Francis in 2019.
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
But Newman died long before the Vatican II revolution!
True, but Newman – deservedly or not – has long been anointed by the Council’s staunchest promoters and defenders as a veritable voice crying out in the desert, a man ahead of his time whose insights on doctrinal development fell on deaf ears until Vatican II exhibited the wisdom to put his brilliant ideas into action.
In a 2009 L’Osservatore Romano article titled, The Father of Vatican II, Fr. Ian Ker, himself an Anglican convert who wrote no less than twenty biographies of Newman, stated:
But if Newman is “the Father of the Second Vatican Council”, he will, in the event of his canonisation, surely be declared a Doctor of the Church. And if so, he will be seen, I am convinced, as the Doctor of the post-conciliar Church.
Fr. Ker’s first prediction (Doctor of the Church) was undeniably prophetic. The second one (Doctor of the post-conciliar Church), however, is even more noteworthy, albeit not in the sense that he intended.
What Ker, who died in 2022, unintentionally admitted is that “the Church” and “the post-conciliar Church” are not one and the same thing. Why else would anyone imagine them having their own particular Doctors?
As for the propaganda value of Newman being declared a Doctor of the Church, I’d say that it exceeds that of the faux canonizations of John XXIII and Paul VI, which many commentators rightly recognize as nothing more than a transparent attempt to create the impression that the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Missae bear the imprimatur of Heaven itself.
What Newman-as-Doctor provides that even John XXIII and Paul VI could not is what the Council’s defenders will treat as an unassailable lifeline that connects the anti-modernist age of Pope St. Pius X, within which Newman lived, to the false religion that was born at Vatican II.
See, see… there is continuity after all!
To be clear, that is not suggest that Newman was a modernist. He was not.
Novus Ordo Watch has an excellent article on this subject, along with links to several others on the website of WM Review, all of them well worth checking out.
Beyond what has been said thus far, I do not believe for a moment that Newman would ever be named a Doctor of the Church by a true pope, not because I question his orthodoxy, but rather because he doesn’t fit the exceedingly high traditional criteria for such an honor.
In the aforementioned article by Fr. McKenna, he described the Doctors of the Church as men whose writing qualified them as “outstanding champions of orthodoxy” who exhibited “preeminence in the sacred sciences.”
It cannot be said that Newman even came close to clearing this high bar. As we find in the Novus Ordo Watch article:
In his 1945 article “John Henry Newman and the Vatican Definition of Papal Infallibility”, for example, Mgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton (1906-69) exposed some grave deficiencies in Newman’s work.
More disqualifying still is what is sometimes called the Rambler affair.
The Rambler was a progressive leaning publication based in England, one that Newman served, for a time, as editor. In an article published in 1859 – fourteen after his conversion to the Catholic faith – Newman wrote concerning the Arian crisis:
… in that time of immense confusion the divine dogma of our Lord’s divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and (humanly speaking) preserved, far more by the “Ecclesia docta” than by the “Ecclesia docens;” that the body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism; that at one time the Pope, at other times the patriarchal, metropolitan, and other great sees, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said…
He went on to say:
On the one hand, then, I say, that there was a temporary suspense of the functions of the “Ecclesia docens.” The body of Bishops failed in the confession of the faith.
For obvious reasons, and perhaps in light of other specific statements in this article, Rome insisted that Newman retract. He was also pressured to step down as editor of the Rambler.
Though it may be the case that Newman was guilty more of sloppiness in his writing than of doubts about the nature of the Church’s infallibility as made manifest in “the body of Bishops,” he humbly obeyed the decision made by Rome in the matter.
This is a point in favor of his sanctity, but such an episode alone would seem to me to preclude any thought of him being declared a Doctor of the Church.
The bottom line is this: The simple fact that sincere men are moved, and rightly so, to question such things as the canonizations of saints and the proclamation of Doctors in the conciliar church is proof positive that it cannot possibly be the Holy Catholic Church.
