Those who take public stands open themselves to public abuse. Ask any apologist. If the abuse comes from the unlettered or unmannered, the apologist sloughs it off. But if the abuse comes someone who in other contexts seems the epitome of intelligence and courtesy, the barbs sting. In that case one’s first instinct is defense, to salvage one’s reputation.
After a few moments comes the realization that perhaps even these barbs should go unremarked—better to say nothing, let the matter pass. Further consideration brings nagging questions: What if more than my own reputation is at stake? What if, by keeping silent, I allow the faith to be tarnished and people to be scandalized? On the other hand, is my desire to vindicate the faith masking a deeper desire to vindicate myself? Is my pride overpowering prudence, or is it pride that encourages me to sit out the fray?
These are questions that assail anyone who is attacked in public. Some people are paralyzed by them, unable to find answers. Others perceive their duty at once and act. So it was with John Henry Newman.
When he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1845, Newman lost not just his living, but most of his friends. His conversion was perceived by many not as a change of heart or mind, but as a moral lapse. The press attacked him with vigor. The reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 induced a new outbreak of anti-Catholic sentiment; though not attacked personally, Newman took up his pen in defense of the Church. Once the fever of bigotry cooled, his name was no longer on everyone’s tongue. There followed for him years of relative calm, but that suddenly changed in 1864.
The January issue of Macmillan’s Magazine included a review of the seventh and eighth volumes of J. A. Froude’s History of England. The review was signed only with the initials “C. K.” The identity of the reviewer might have remained unknown to the general public if he had not included several lines that were to ensure his lasting notoriety.
Were it not for thirty words, Charles Kingsley—professor of history at Cambridge, popular novelist, opponent of the Oxford Movement, and anti-Catholic—would be known today only by specialists in Victorian studies. He had the personal misfortune (for us, a felix culpa) of penning words that were to result in the greatest work of its kind since Augustine’s Confessions, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He imprudently wrote, “Truth, for its own sake, has never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be.” He had brought up Newman’s name almost as an aside. It proved to be a major blunder.
There ensued a correspondence between Kingsley (1819–1875) and Newman (1801–1890): Newman writing first to the publisher; Kingsley answering him and identifying himself as the reviewer; Newman telling Kingsley that he “was amazed” that a man of his reputation should write such a line; Kingsley replying that he appreciated the “tone” of Newman’s letter, which “make[s] me feel, to my very deep pleasure, that my opinion of the meaning of your words was a mistaken one,” and backhandedly apologizing in a proposed letter to the editor in which he expressed his “hearty pleasure at finding [Newman] on the side of Truth, in this, or any other, matter.”
So it continued through January, with Kingsley conspicuously failing to substantiate his charge and Newman remaining conspicuously annoyed. Kingsley’s evasions forced Newman to publish the correspondence, which appeared in pamphlet form with this satirical rephrasing of the exchange appended:
Reflections on the Above
I shall attempt a brief analysis of the foregoing correspondence; and I trust that the wording which I shall adopt will not offend against the gravity due both to myself and to the occasion. It is impossible to do justice to the course of thought evolved in it without some familiarity of expression.
Mr. Kingsley begins then by exclaiming,—”O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There’s Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.”
I interpose: “You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when and where.”
Mr. Kingsley replies: “You said it, Reverend Sir, in a Sermon which you preached, when a Protestant, as Vicar of St. Mary’s, and published in 1844; and I could read you a very salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had at the time on my own opinion of you.”
I make answer: “Oh . . . Not, it seems, as a Priest speaking of Priests;—but let us have the passage.”
Mr. Kingsley relaxes: “Do you know, I like your tone. From your tone I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.”
I rejoin: “Mean it! I maintain I never said it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.”
Mr. Kingsley replies: “I waive that point.”
I object: “Is it possible! What? waive the main question! I either said it or I didn’t. You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public. You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly;—or to own you can’t.”
“Well,” says Mr. Kingsley, “if you are quite sure you did not say it, I’ll take your word for it; I really will.”
My word! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my word that happened to be on trial. The word of a Professor of Lying, that he does not lie!
But Mr. Kingsley re-assures me: “We are both gentlemen,” he says: “I have done as much as one English gentleman can expect from another.”
I begin to see: he thought me a gentleman at the very time that he said I taught lying on system. After all, it is not I, but it is Mr. Kingsley who did not mean what he said.
Stung, Kingsley responded with a pamphlet of his own, What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? At forty-eight pages it was more than twice the length of the correspondence and began with a sentence that was to prove more wrong than Kingsley ever could have feared: “Dr. Newman has made a great mistake.” The mistake was to be Kingsley’s: He had chosen the wrong opponent. He thought his pamphlet would end the dispute, but it only induced the Apologia.
“My object had been throughout to avoid war, because I thought Dr. Newman wished for peace,” Kingsley said, a few paragraphs into his pamphlet: “But whether Dr. Newman lost his temper, or whether he thought that he had gained an advantage over me, or whether he wanted a more complete apology than I chose to give, whatever, I say, may have been his reasons, he suddenly changed his tone of courtesy and dignity for one of which I shall only say that it shows sadly how the atmosphere of the Romish priesthood had degraded his notions of what is due to himself; and when he published (as I am much obliged to him for doing) the whole correspondence, he appended to it certain reflexions, in which he attempted to convict me of not having believed the accusations which I had made.”
Not content with this, Kingsley erred again in saying, “I have declared Dr. Newman to have been an honest man up to the 1st of February, 1864. It was, as I shall show, only Dr. Newman’s fault that I ever thought him to be anything else. It depends entirely on Dr. Newman whether he shall sustain the reputation which he has so recently acquired.”
Kingsley laced his essay with ad hominem remarks. Among them was this, which referred to sermons Newman gave as the Anglican vicar of St. Mary’s parish in Oxford: “I know that men used to suspect Dr. Newman—I have been inclined to do so myself—of writing a whole sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the matter, but for the sake of one single passing hint—one phrase, one epithet, one little barbed arrow which, as he swept magnificently past in the stream of his calm eloquence, seemingly unconscious of all presences, save those unseen, he delivered unheeded, as with his finger-tip, to the very heart of an initiated hearer, never to be withdrawn again.” Newman the religious pied piper.
In the final chapter of the Apologia, Newman was to ask, respecting his Anglican sermons, “Can there be a plainer testimony borne to the practical character of my Sermons at St. Mary’s than this gratuitous insinuation? Many a preacher of Tractarian doctrine has been accused of not letting his parishioners alone, and of teasing them with his private theological notions. You would gather from the general tone of this Writer [this is how he refers to Kingsley in the body of the Apologia] that that was my way. Every one who was in the habit of hearing me, know that it wasn’t. This Writer either knows nothing about it, and then he ought to be silent; or he does know, and then he ought to speak the truth.”
Kingsley had declined to be silent, wrapping up his pamphlet with lines such as “I am henceforth in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write” and “Yes—I am afraid that I must say it once more—Truth is not honoured among these men [Catholic priests] for its own sake.”
Newman was neither the first nor the last Catholic to find himself opposed by someone who “thought” with his marrow, not with his mind. Kingsley was no unlearned fool, of course. A prominent writer in his day, he had a solid command of the language and a wide following, but he was out of his depths when the topics were religious, and he too easily relied on prejudices over knowledge.
However skilled as a writer, Kingsley was outclassed by Newman. When the latter converted, in 1845, the whole of England seemed against him, but his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, completed as he converted, could not be lightly dismissed. Five years later the Catholic hierarchy was re-established in Britain. Protestant opponents termed it the “Papal Aggression,” and popular anti-Catholic bigotry reached new highs (and lows). Defending the Church in a series of lectures (published in 1851 as The Present Position of Catholics in England), Newman used high satire to ridicule popular bigotry. He later would call the book one of only three he deemed “controversial,” the others being his Difficulties of Anglicans and, of all things, one of his two novels, Loss and Gain.
In answer to Kingsley’s charges, Newman wrote the “history of his religious opinions,” as he subtitled the Apologia between April 21 and June 2, 1864. One part appeared each Thursday. “The success of the Apologia was instantaneous,” said Anton Pegis a century later, “and that is a remarkable fact, and also a remarkable tribute to Newman, when we remember the unpopularity of the Catholic cause in England. Long after he had crushed Kingsley, Newman captured the English world by the clear and impassioned honesty of the personal history which he bared to public gaze.” Through that personal defense Newman succeeded in defending the Catholic faith.
In an enlarged preface for the final edition of 1873, Newman briefly recounted the quarrel, without mentioning his opponent by name. On seeing Kingsley’s pamphlet, “I recognized what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes. False ideas may be refuted indeed by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled.”
This passage, read in isolation, might lead one to think Newman, not wanting to be seen as a “gibbering phantom,” was worried only about his own reputation, but the context of his remarks demonstrates a larger concern. Kingsley was attacking not so much Newman as the Catholic priesthood. The Anglican novelist subscribed to the notion that every priest was “jesuitical,” in the worst sense of that term. To slander Newman was to slander the priesthood—and thus the whole Church.
What was the proper response for Newman? Kingsley had not been the first to criticize him, and Newman generally ignored criticisms or commented on them only in private correspondence. This time it was different. A respected and influential man of letters had insulted the priesthood of the Catholic Church by insulting Newman, and a defense of the priesthood, if it were to come from Newman, had to be in terms of a defense of Newman himself.
“To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” our Lord admonished (Luke 5:29). Yet the same Lord cleansed the Temple when his Father’s house suffered the desecration by the moneychangers. It is one thing to permit, in silence, the sullying of one’s own reputation. It is something else to keep silent and out of harm’s way when the reputation of the Church is at stake. In weighing whether to respond to Kingsley, Newman no doubt pondered Ecclesiastes 3:7: There is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” For him, it was time to speak.
The same dilemma confronts lesser men. Permit me an indulgence here, as I refer to a situation that confronted me two Decembers ago. I learned that a Catholic speaker—I will call him Z—had given a lecture at a prominent parish in Manhattan. The lecture itself did not interest me, but the question-and-answer session that followed it did: Nearly all of the session was a condemnation of me in particular and Catholic Answers in general.
Obtaining a tape of the event, I called other staffers into my office, and we listened. The first question was posed by Z’s friend (he did not identify himself, but we recognized his voice). His question was an example of what used to be known, in Marxist countries, as “planned spontaneity”—in other words, heavy-handed collusion. Was there anything Z wanted to say about those Catholics he perceived as in some way opposed to him? Why, yes, there was, Z said. His “answer” to the “question” lasted half a hour.
We marveled at the alacrity with which he took an event unrelated to himself, such as an employee’s leaving Catholic Answers, and transformed it into an indictment: The employee must have left because he no longer could conscience Catholic Answers’ “campaign” against Z. Did Z find that some of his speaking engagements didn’t pan out? Then there must have been a Catholic Answers “conspiracy” against him. The acme was reached when he discussed our back-cover feature, “Celebrity Quotation Impersonated.”
At the time of Z’s lecture, we had been running the feature for well over two years. Each month we featured a “celebrity” from the past—maybe a Catholic (Mother Cabrini, Hernan Cortes), maybe a Protestant (Martin Luther, William Jennings Bryan), maybe someone less categorizable (Thomas Edison, Boss Tweed). Each “celebrity” gave an encomium for This Rock—all very tongue-in-cheek. Knowing that even the most dastardly man can have a deathbed conversion, we did not identify any celebrity’s current location (except in the case of canonized saints, of course). This did not sit well with Z.
He complained that the monthly spoof implied that “wild West outlaws” (he seemed to have in mind Buffalo Bill Cody) and Christian Scientists (one of the celebrities was Mary Baker Eddy) were in heaven. But that wasn’t the worst part. He said he “sensed” that the staff of Catholic Answers had been running “Celebrity Quotation Impersonated” precisely to “annoy” him. (James Akin’s unguarded response: “Wow! Megalomania!”)
And so the tape recording went, half an hour of non sequiturs and embarrassments. What to do about it? How to respond? Whether to respond at all? The tape was marketed by Keep the Faith, a New Jersey-based organization that distributes some good Catholic material, but also a noticeable percentage of kooky items. Keep the Faith advertises in publications read by Catholic Answers’ supporters. They would see the ad for this tape and might purchase it; we worried what their reaction would be. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. The tape must not have sold widely—the ads ran for only a few issues, then disappeared—and we received only a handful of calls or letters.
But I didn’t know that when I first heard Z’s remarks. Tempted to blast him publicly, I decided to say nothing, except that I wrote to the pastor of the Manhattan parish because he is a prominent cleric, as are two priests in residence there, one a widely-known and articulate speaker (a convert from Anglicanism), the other Z’s host. I told the pastor that I was “disappointed” to learn that Z had spoken at the parish, and, I said, I didn’t want the pastor to think, through my silence, that I put any stock in Z’s malevolent remarks. I sent photocopies of my letter to the two resident priests.
From Z’s host I heard nothing. From the convert/speaker I received a kind and understanding telephone call. From the pastor I received a rude note. He mistakenly thought I blamed him for Z’s remarks. My “Heads up!” had turned to bite me, proving again that, among lesser apologists, no attempt at self-exculpation goes unpunished.
If Newman and I share any trait, it is defensiveness. I think this trait is found in most apologists, whether they engage in apologetics as a vocation or merely as an avocation. Rare is the man who takes no umbrage when being assailed unjustly, who feels no anger when his most-cherished beliefs are attacked and his name besmirched. Defensiveness in such circumstances may not be commendable, but it is understandable among the fallen sons of Adam.
That said, how is one to move beyond this feeling of defensiveness? How does one decide when to “turn the other cheek” and when it is “a time to speak”? This is a matter of prudential judgment, I think, so there can be no hard-and-fast rule, no mathematical formula into which one stuffs data and out of which is spit an infallible answer.
Part of the measure must be the extent of the perceived injury. Is it limited to my own reputation? Then it is ignorable and should be ignored, there being too much danger of escalation: “Did so! Did not! Ka-boom!” A private disappointment could be turned into a public disgrace. Thus I refrained from publicly responding to Z. (I should have gone further and skipped the letter to the pastor—my defensiveness got the better of me.)
But if the injury extends past the individual and to a wider audience—innocents who might be misled, scandal arising from silence, the faith itself called into question—then it ceases to be a matter of self-defense and becomes the defense of third parties. The apologist has a positive duty to respond, as Newman had a duty to respond to Kingsley, even if, in doing so, he necessarily defended himself.
As on the battlefield, the attack defines the defense.