John Henry Cardinal Newman was a 19th century British convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism. In full transparency, I should be clear that today I am not going to assess his controversial views of the inerrancy of Scripture or evolution. Also, the topic of whether Newman be a good candidate for a future valid canonization is better tackled by the WM Review here.
Today, I am only going to assess his teaching on the “Development of Doctrine” and what that means for Catholics in the 21st century.
As a Jesuit-educated 20 year old in the late 1990s, I had been told by many in my life at that point that all the dogmatic and liturgical changes that followed Vatican II were all bona-fide “developments of doctrine.” I wanted to see if that was true, so the first book I could find on that topic was Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. That Essay is over 300 pages long! It was a lot to handle as a kid whose Catholic life was spent learning from bus-nuns in downtown soup-kitchens up to that point. But I understood most of it.
Cardinal Newman’s view of the Development of Doctrine can be summarized in his Section 1. First Note of a Genuine Development—Preservation of Type where he writes: “This is readily suggested by the analogy of physical growth, which is such that the parts and proportions of the developed form, however altered, correspond to those which belong to its rudiments. The adult animal has the same make, as it had on its birth; young birds do not grow into fishes, nor does the child degenerate into the brute, wild or domestic, of which he is by inheritance lord. Vincentius of Lerins adopts this illustration in distinct reference to Christian doctrine. ‘Let the soul’s religion,’ he says, ‘imitate the law of the body, which, as years go on, developes indeed and opens out its due proportions, and yet remains identically what it was. Small are a baby’s limbs, a youth’s are larger, yet they are the same.'”
As someone who was pre-med at Boston College at the time, this analogy made a lot of sense. Although Newman didn’t know what DNA was in the 19th century, he obviously understood that a baby boy was the same person as who he would be as an adult man later in his life. So also for dogma. It can change by addition, but not subtraction. And even then, there are caveats around doctrinal addition. For example, it must be slow, conservative and natural—never a grotesque outgrowth to the original Deposit of the Faith.
Although the word “Trinity” is not in the New Testament explicitly, it is in there implicitly anytime the Divinity of Christ is affirmed. The genetics, so to speak, of Our Faith have everything in seminal form in Scripture and Apostolic Tradition. Thus, the Deposit of the Faith can only grow beautifully, and more strong. Never into a Frankenstein.
True doctrine can only grow in a manner that is slow, conservative, non-violent, non-grotesque and natural. A baby grows into a man or a woman, capable of doing more (never less.) This is why Cardinal Newman just quoted St. Vincent of Lerins with his analogy of doctrine to human biology, where any true development of doctrine “imitate the law of the body, which, as years go on, developes indeed and opens out its due proportions, and yet remains identically what it was.”
Cardinal Newman wrote elsewhere in his same essay: “No doctrine is defined until it is violated.” Thus, he implies all of Catholic dogma is in either explicit form or implicit (seminal) form in what Christ gave the Apostles. The Deposit of the Faith must stay “identically the same” through every century of the Church, even if it be given new weapons to fight novel heresies of each age.
For example, St. John and St. Mary never doubted the Trinity in the first century living together in Ephesus. But once the heretic Arius (a few hundred years after them) sewed seeds of doubt into the minds of millions of Christians, saints like Athanasius had to make more specific statements on the Divinity of Christ and the Trinity in several infallible ecumenical dogmatic Christological Councils and Creeds.
Of course, St. Athanasius believed the same things as St. John the Beloved about the Trinity, even if their vocabulary was slightly different. Hence, the beautiful line from Newman, “No doctrine is defined until it’s violated.”
Clearly, the Protestants would apply this to their own rebellion. The “reformers” of the 16th century might well have said “The Roman papists diverted from Apostolic Christianity with their indulgences and superstitions and we had to correct the errors of the papists by returning Europe to early Christianity.”
But Newman, a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, saw through this argument. The good Cardinal saw that Protestantism was not a development unto life, but one unto death, as he wrote: “Luther started on a double basis, his dogmatic principle being contradicted by his right of private judgment, and his sacramental by his theory of justification. The sacramental element never showed signs of life; but on his death, that which he represented in his own person as a teacher, the dogmatic, gained the ascendancy…”
Cardinal Newman lived in the 19th century. What would he think of the current doctrinal and liturgical wars in the Catholic Church of the 21st century? Would he call these valid “developments of doctrine”?
This summer of 2025, Dr. Ed Mazza was on the new YT channel of Mr. Stephen Kokx here to discuss the papacy. Just after 23:30, Dr. Mazza explains that the once-Bishop-Prevost’s X account promoted the heresies of Amoris Laetita as “an authentic development of Catholic doctrine.”
Boom… there you go. Now you see why Cardinal Newman is being weaponized by the leftists in the Vatican. It’s clearly to claim that Francis’ heresies are “development of doctrine.”
Also, Chicago-born Leo once thanked Illinois governor Pat Quinn for abolishing the death penalty and supported Francis’ heretical statement that the death penalty was always “inadmissable.” This is a distortion of doctrine. Even Pope John Paul II walked the Church right up to the line of questioning the death penalty in practical matters, but never crossed that doctrinal line of claiming it was “inadmissable.” Why? Because he knew a valid Pope could never fully overturn a defined dogma of the Catholic Church, namely, that the State has the right to execute certain criminals (See Rom 13 and over 200 Popes who sided with the death penalty in definitive Magisterial statements.)
It is obvious: Cardinal Newman is now being promoted as a mascot not for the evolution of weapons against heretics, but for a novel devolution of true Catholic dogma under the pretext of “development.”
Is any of this an organic “development of doctrine” of theology? Of course not. No more than a tumor could grow within a perfectly healthy baby. Thus, there is no chance that Cardinal Newman (despite his small doctrinal flaws) could ever support these new tumors growing in the Vatican. They’re not natural or beautiful, or even Catholic for that matter.
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