Diakonia of culture
- timmuldoon
- Nov 5
- 16 min read
John Henry Newman, Pope Leo, and the new apostolic letter
on education “Designing New Maps of Hope”
On the occasion of St. John Henry Newman being declared a Doctor of the Church
Lecture to the St. Thomas More Society[1]
Boston College
November 3, 2025
“Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short, if I may so speak, of unravelling the web of University Teaching.” (Newman, The Idea of a University, 1.3.10)
“children and young people have a right to be motivated to appraise moral values with a right conscience….” (Gravissimum Educationis, 1)
Last week, Pope Leo released the apostolic letter “Designing New Maps of Hope” (Disegnare Nuove Mappe di Speranza), recalling the 60th anniversary of the Vatican II document Gravissimum Educationis, the Declaration on Christian Education (October 28, 1965). The release of this document also coincides with Leo’s declaration of Saint John Henry Newman as co-patron of education (along with Saint Thomas Aquinas), and his proclamation of Newman as the 38th Doctor of the Church.
The document reaffirms the Church’s commitment to education as “the concrete way in which the Gospel becomes an educational gesture, a relationship, a culture” (1.1). Education represents a vision of the world: a “cosmology” (1.2) that guides the unfolding of culture. It is, according to Leo, one of the highest expressions of Christian charity.[2] The long history of the Church shows many examples of adaptations in education: from parables and apophthegms of the classical world, to the disciplines of the mind and heart in the monastic period, to the formalized programs of study such as the 16th century Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, to the many institutions of learning pioneered by women and men such as Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Maria Monstessori, Francesca Cabrini, and Katharine Drexel. (Note that several of these figures named by Leo have connections to the United States.)
Christian education, he writes, is a community effort, founded on the person, the image of God. It is to this foundation that I will dedicate sustained reflection. Leo invokes Newman’s thesis in The Idea of a University that there is a necessary relationship between faith and reason. He quotes Newman in section 3.1: “Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” I add here the subsequent sentence in Newman’s work: “To blot it out is nothing short, if I may so speak, of unravelling the web of University Teaching.” I propose to answer two questions: first, why does Newman make this claim? Second, what might Leo’s invocation of Newman here suggest for his (and our) understanding of education’s service to the building of culture?
1. Newman on the Integrating Mission of the Modern Catholic University
John Henry Newman’s life and work unfolded amidst a period of great change in Western culture and, in particular, the university. The latter institution was emerging as a much more complex kind of institution than he himself had been part of at Oxford in the early nineteenth century, and his ruminations of decades of university life amidst this change is what formed the germ of his well-known Idea of a University. That series of lectures, published initially as “Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education” in 1852, was a critical reflection on what a university ought to be. Later, he published many papers and sermons on the mission and real-life administration of a Catholic university.[3] Writing as he was during a period in English history when Catholics could not be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge, he was mindful of the Church as alma mater to provide for her children, but also to be leaven in a society still hostile to Catholics even after the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829. For Newman, what lay Catholics needed was the ability to cultivate their intellects in order to challenge the dominant intellectual culture.
I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. ... I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism....[4]
The Church’s interest in universities in modernity, Newman suggests, is for the training of an educated laity who can “view things as they are,” prejudiced neither by common opinion nor false doctrine. Here we can see the seeds of what became his later work Grammar of Assent, dedicated to the question of the relationship between belief and knowledge. Newman was chiefly interested in answering the epistemology of British empiricists like Locke and Hume, who held that knowledge is possible only through the data of the senses. Such a view, Newman held, excluded all forms of knowledge that emerged from belief. Over some twenty years he developed the Grammar, and in particular he formulated a theory of the illative sense as a foundational element in his theological epistemology. A person comes to knowledge of God not through propositions, but through a grasp of prior inferences. True knowledge is not speculative but illative, progressing like a mountain climber toward a peak.[5] As such, real knowledge is not something that can be deposited in the receptacle of a person’s mind. It is rather the fruit of great effort, great exercise. For him, a university is the place where that exercise happens; it trains people to use their minds not solely in instrumental ways for practical ends, nor in servile ways in thrall to the purposes of others. Rather, it is the place where one comes to see the world in its integrity. The person who has scaled the mountain of university education is less likely to fall prey to what he calls “viewiness,” “that spurious philosophism,” which leads people to fall prey to the latest intellectual fad.[6]
Newman develops this emphasis on integration of knowledge in a sermon preached at the opening of the Catholic University of Dublin in 1856. The very reason why the Church sets up universities, he writes, is “to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man.”[7] Thus for Newman, a Catholic university is about the task of rebuilding culture marred by sin and bias. Yet Newman’s vision was far from parochial, and by no means was his vision of a Catholic university that of a seminary for lay people. He emphasized—often to the chagrin of the Catholic bishops in Ireland— the academic and personal freedom of his students. In answer to those who were suspicious that a Catholic university could not practice academic freedom as it was developing in Europe, especially at the University of Berlin, he wrote:
Some persons will say that I am thinking of confining, distorting, and stunting the growth of the intellect by ecclesiastical supervision. I have no such thought. ... I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons. ... I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.[8]
On this question of personal and academic freedom, Newman wrangled with the bishops, especially Bishop Cullen of Dublin, who had hired him as rector of the Catholic University. Cullen was at times scandalized by the reports of student behavior, and differed significantly from Newman in his desire that the university look more like a major seminary.[9] Newman, though, stood firm on the belief that the education of lay people was predicated on free inquiry and a certain latitude in personal life.
As in many things, Newman’s understanding of lay intellectual and moral formation anticipates a central theme of the Second Vatican Council, and indeed in Gravissimum Educationis. While it may be narrow to identify the most central feature of the Council’s sixteen documents, it can certainly be said that pervading many of them is a concern with the role that Catholic laity have in shaping the modern world.[10] What Newman understood was that the role of the Church was evolving: No longer was it “the first estate” whose universities were charged with the education of clerics for the Church and nobles for civil society. Rather, the Church, consisting mostly of lay people (without whom, he once wryly opined, the Church would look rather foolish),[11] had the task of being leaven in the world, to transform culture from within.
Theology as architectonic
Universities, in Newman’s estimation, thus had the purpose of forming integrated persons fit for service in an increasingly complex world. Integration—which had intellectual, affective, and spiritual dimensions—was thus not merely a felicitous by-product of a university curriculum: it was its explicit aim. Therefore theology—as distinct from the kind of training one finds in a seminary—was crucial. Theology, according to Newman, has a role of completing and correcting other sciences. Whereas each science is limited in its methodology and therefore incapable of making claims beyond its disciplinary bounds, theology is oriented toward the infinite and is, in Ian Ker’s reading of Newman, the highest of the sciences, a “first among equals.”[12]
In contrast to British rationalists such as Bacon, Hume, and Locke, Newman saw a necessarily theological dimension to university life:
The Rationalist makes himself his own center, not his Maker; he does not go to God, but he implies that God must come to him. . . . Instead of looking out of ourselves and trying to catch glimpses of God’s workings, from any quarter . . . we sit at home bringing everything to ourselves, enthroning ourselves in our own views and refusing to believe anything that does not force itself upon us as true.[13]
To Newman, the rationalist was little more than what we today might describe as a computer: an instrument whose operations are wholly dependent on input. Eschewing belief or emotion as potential sources of knowledge, the rationalist assumes a relatively passive position—a tabula rasa in Locke’s language—until sense allows the entry of data upon which the rational mind can operate. This epistemology, according to Newman, is insufficient to capture the depth and complexity of human understanding. To use his metaphor about the illative nature of knowing, if knowledge proceeds like a mountain climber, theology is the science that encompasses questions about the peak, the mountain itself, and the very nature of the climb and the climber.
Commenting on the importance of this theological dimension of Newman’s model, John Haughey suggests that there are unfortunate consequences when universities ignore it or show indifference toward it. “If an academic shuts out the transcendent dimension of his or her life and discipline, there is likely to grow a spiritual ignorance about what one knows in one’s own area of specialization, because it is not located in a fuller horizon of reality, or seen as part of a larger whole.”[14] He goes on to describe Newman’s insight about these consequences: namely, that the academic ignoring the theological implications of his or her work would compensate by trying to make a fragment into a whole. This kind of universalizing of a discrete discipline in isolation from communities, legacies, and traditions, writes Haughey, “makes a mockery of the very idea of a university.” Without a theology, academics “sit at home bringing everything to ourselves,” because there is no way to imagine a larger whole which one’s disciplinary knowledge serves.
Haughey suggests that Newman’s project was driven not by an attempt to proselytize, but rather by an understanding about the nature of knowledge and the way that human beings attain knowledge. The problem with rationalism was thus not simply that it excluded God; it was that rationalism was a truncated epistemology incapable of capturing the illative nature of understanding. An appreciation of this fuller model of human understanding led Newman to embrace what today might be described as a “pastoral” approach to education. Education for Newman is not fundamentally about discrete subjects taught by specialists isolated from one another; it is about the growth of the integrated human person in his or her intellectual, social, and spiritual dimensions, and the flourishing of the human family to whom God has given the capacity of understanding. To reduce university education to the rational is ultimately a disservice to the complexity of human experience, and a diminution of human potential.
In order to understand the place of theology in Newman’s model, it is necessary to think of it not as a discrete discipline but rather as a quality of the inquiry, teaching, and learning that unfolds within university life. Knowledge, according to Newman, is “quickened by aspirations after the supernatural”—that is, it grows more and more within a horizon that has divine wisdom as its telos. Knowledge is driven by a passion to find “the solution of a great mystery.”[15] That passion may be moral or intellectual; it may arise from the desire to cure a loved one’s illness, or it may arise out of an intellectual curiosity to understand the Pythagorean theorem. It is driven by a “first principle” that the world is indeed knowable and that it has discernible laws—a first principle which is rooted, Newman might say, in the fact that God has created a knowable world, whether or not a thinker chooses to advert to it as such or not. In either case, knowledge proceeds when one acknowledges a certain intellectual humility, a recognition that one’s knowing unfolds according to laws not governed by the self but rather by the structure of reality. Faith in a God who has created a knowable world spurred monks to establish centers of learning that were the precursors of the university, where teachers and scholars (universitas magistrorum et scholarum) together sought to plumb mysteries both human and divine.
Michael Buckley’s discussion of the architectonic nature of theology helps us to consider Newman’s model of the necessary theological horizon in university life. Like Newman, Buckley acknowledges the “drift and default” ways that scholars often seek answers to great questions, pointing to “economic pressures and the unchallenged attitudes of minds formed by advertisement, social mobility, and television.” The failure to sustain a continual conversation about education, he writes, degenerates into premature specialization and the demise of the liberal arts. There is a need, he suggests, for a common conversation that is untethered to practical questions. That common conversation—if it be rooted in the dynamism of intellectual life itself, a deeply and fully human life unconstrained by economic or social gain—“inevitably bear upon the ultimate questions that engage religion.” Conversely, questions of faith move “inescapably towards the academic.” For Buckley, then, theology is “architectonic” in the sense that it not only provides a kind of keystone to the edifice of university life, but it also represents the very raison d’etre of the edifice in the first place.
It is important to observe that Buckley, like Newman, speaks of an ideal. The ideal model of theology in the university is one in which the discipline is both a specific object of study and an overall dynamic within the institution:
theology is essentially a university discipline; that it draws into itself—as the apex of a cone draws the lines of a cone—all of those studies which are designated as liberal or scientific or philosophic; and that it is theology which specifies the curriculum and its content….
Buckley suggests that the alternative to this kind of architectonic theological dynamism “is not that human beings will have no philosophic assumptions, but that they will be culturally determined and immaturely accepted.” Theology ensures that knowing proceeds in the direction of authentic inquiry, which is always oriented toward greater synthesis. “Theology,” he writes, “must not be seen as one science among others, self-contained in its own integrity and adjacent to other forms of disciplined human knowledge.” It has a necessarily integrating function in all knowledge. He continues: “It is much more like a place, a place within which the critical thought and developed habits of reasoning in the arts and sciences are encouraged and their ineluctable movement toward questions of ultimacy taken seriously.”
One of the people most influenced by Newman, Bernard Lonergan, articulates well the consequence of ignoring Newman’s model:
To make science the criterion of certitude despite its limitations, is wantonly to tempt man…to give up the quest for wisdom, to make it possible for him to be complacently agnostic in the high name of reason, when reason hardly countenances his criterion. He will deny the existence of God because the proofs do not convince him and then accept the first theory at hand to explain away the religions of the world.[16]
The very life of the university, suggests Lonergan, as a “reproductive organ of cultural community” depends on the way that its professors come to acts of understanding and base their teaching on such insights. Without at least the possibility of engaging questions that are properly theological—that is, those questions which transcend the disciplinary methodologies proper to specific disciplines—Lonergan suggests, following Newman, that university life will collapse into fragmented conversations. Questions as simple as “what does all this mean?” already move toward theology, and provide fruitful avenues for common conversation among scholars and teachers.
2. Pope Leo’s invocation of Newman
Pope Leo writes:
Education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good. This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy. Following in the wake of the thought of Saint John Henry Newman, it goes against a strictly mercantilist approach that often forces education today to be measured in terms of functionality and practical utility.[17]
Leo invokes Newman’s criticism of the utilitarian model of education and his expansive vision of education serving the human good. In several places he highlights the way education can be reduced to the logic of the marketplace, and urges educators to keep a discerning eye on the way that the Catholic vision of education ultimately serves the integral human good.[18]
Catholic education becomes leaven in the human community: it generates reciprocity, overcomes reductionism, and opens up to social responsibility. The task today is to dare to pursue an integral humanism that addresses the questions of our time without losing sight of its source. (6.2)
He shows a particular concern for technological progress, which, while part of God’s plan for creation, requires discernment. This point is particularly relevant given Leo’s particular interest in artificial intelligence.[19]
I believe that Leo’s invocation of Newman serves as a reminder that education—and the university in particular—offer a “diakonia of culture.”[20] For Newman, the promise of university education is that it offers a way out of fragmentation, a path toward a wholeness that serves the human good and indeed the good of the entire human family, particularly those members who are poor. Rather than an ivory tower, it is, to use Leo’s phrase, a beacon: “not a nostalgic refuge, but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical invocation and prophetic witness” (11.1). I can imagine no greater mission than exercising this kind of vigilance in service to healing a fragmented nation and world.
[1] Parts of this lecture first appeared in Timothy P. Muldoon, “The Ecclesiology of Catholic University Mission: Learning from John Henry Newman and Vatican II,” Journal of Catholic Higher Education 36:1 (2017), 3-20, and Timothy P. Muldoon, “Newman and the Architecture of Knowledge in the Modern University,” in Brian W. Hughes and Danielle Nussberger, eds., John Henry Newman and the Crisis of Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018),
[2] “Designing New Maps of Hope” (DNMH) 1.3, citing Leo XIV, Dilexi Te (4 October 2025), 68.
[3] Much of this section relies on the scholarship of Paul Shrimpton in The Making of Men: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin (Leominster,UK: Gracewing, 2013).
[4] John Henry Newman, “Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England”
[5] He writes, “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another by probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back upon some received law; next seizing on some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not how himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skillful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason — not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.” From “Implicit and Explicit Reason,” Sermon 13 in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).
[6] The Oxford English Dictionary credits Newman with introducing the term viewiness into the language, in his 1852 publication Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (Dublin: James Duffy), xxii. He writes: “Some one, however, will perhaps object that I am but advocating that spurious philosophism, which shows itself in what, for want of a word, I may call ‘viewiness’, when I speak so much of the formation, and consequent grasp, of the intellect. It may be said that the theory of University Education, which I have been delineating, if acted upon, would teach youths nothing soundly or thoroughly, and would dismiss them with nothing better than brilliant general views about all things whatever.”
[7] Newman, “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, at http://www.newmanreader.org/works/occasions/sermon1.html.
[8] Newman, “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training.”
[9] Cf. Shrimpton, The Making of Men, 460: “Cullen was able to imagine a university along Newman’s lines, at least as regards the content and scope of its teaching; but as regards its administration and discipline, his mind was steeped in the workings of the major seminary — which was true, not only of most Irish bishops but of the episcopate worldwide: they could not envision a university that would not include clerical control of administration and discipline.”
[10] Cf. Tim Muldoon, “Catholic Identity and the Laity,” in Tim Muldoon, ed. Catholic Identity and the Laity (College Theology Society Annual Volume 54, Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 2008), 1–15.
[11] Ian Ker, Newman on Vatican II (Oxford University Press, 2014), 24.
[12] Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford University Press, 1988), 392.
[13] John Henry Newman, “Tract 73,” excerpted in Newman the Theologian, ed. Ian T. Kerr (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 76.
[14] John Haughey, S.J., Where is Knowing Going? The Horizons of the Knowing Subject (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 11.
[15] Newman, Grammar of Assent, 304.
[16] Bernard Lonergan, “True Judgment and Science,” paper read before the Philosophy and Literature Society, Heythrop College, February 3, 1929, cited in Richard Liddy, Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993), 29.
[17] Leo XIV, DNMH 4.2, citing Newman, Writings on the University (2001) [sic]. I believe this source is Rise and Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays (Notre Dame Press, 2001).
[18] See, for example, his invocation in section 6.1 of Gravissimum Educationis and how it “warned against subordinating education to the labour market and to the often harsh and inhuman logic of finance.” Similarly, he writes “Education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good” (4.2).
[19] He cites the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education’s Note Antiqua et Nova (28 January 2025), 117. The Note deals specifically with the advancement of artificial intelligence. Leo has described AI as a “new social question” central to his papacy. See Elise Allen, “Pope Leo says he chose name due to revolution of artificial intelligence,” Crux, May 10, 2025.
[20] That phrase, which Leo includes in his apostolic letter, recall his predecessor Pope Francis’ description of the mission of the Pontifical Gregorian University, founded by Ignatius of Loyola as the Roman College. That mission, he said, was “a diakonia of culture at the service of the continuous restructuring of the fragments of every epochal change.” See Pope Francis, address to the Pontifical Gregorian University, November 5, 2024.