Proper Catholic teachings on Mary were not fairly or properly represented when attacked
5 min • Digitized on May 9, 2023
From A Defense of the Teachings of Mary, page 102
By St. John Henry Newman
4. Thus we are brought from the consideration of the sentiments themselves, of which you complain, to the persons who wrote, and the places where they wrote them. I wish you had been led, in this part of your work, to that sort of careful labour which you have employed in so masterly a way in your investigation of the circumstances of the definition of the Immaculate Conception.
In the latter case you have catalogued the Bishops who wrote to the Holy See, and analyzed their answers. Had you in like manner discriminated and located the Marian writers, as you call them, and observed the times, places, and circumstances of their works, I think, they would not, when brought together, have had their present startling effect on the reader. As it is, they inflict a vague alarm upon the mind, as when one hears a noise, and does not know whence it comes and what it means.
Some of your authors, I know are Saints; all, I suppose, are spiritual writers and holy men; but the majority are of no great celebrity, even if they have any kind of weight. Suarez has no business among them at all, for, when he says that no one is saved without the Blessed Virgin, he is speaking not of devotion to her, but of her intercession.
The greatest name is St. Alfonso Liguori; but it never surprises: me to read any thing unusual in the devotions of a saint. Such men are on a level very different from our own, and we cannot understand them. I hold this to be an important canon in the Lives of the Saints, according to the words of the Apostle, “The spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is judged of no one.”
But we may refrain from judging, without proceeding to imitate. I hope it is not disrespectful to so great a servant of God to say, that I never have read his Glories of Mary; but here I am speaking generally of all Saints, whether I know them or not;—and I say that they are beyond us, and that we must use them as patterns, not as copies. As to his practical directions, St. Alfonso wrote them for Neapolitans, whom he knew, and we do not know.
Other writers whom you quote, as de Salazar, are too ruthlessly logical to be safe or pleasant guides in the delicate matters of devotion. As to de Montford and Oswald, I never even met with their names, till I saw them in your book; the bulk of our laity, not to say of our clergy, perhaps know them little better than I do.
Nor did I know till I learnt it from your Volume, that there were two Bernardines. St. Bernardine of Sienna, I knew of course, and knew too that he had a burning love for our Lord. But about the other, “Bernardine de Bustis,” I was quite at fault. I find from the Protestant Cave, that he, as well as his namesake, made himself conspicuous also for his zeal for the Holy Name, which is much to the point here. “With such devotion was he carried away,” says Cave, “for the bare name of Jesus, (which, by a new device of Bernardine of Sienna, had lately begun to receive divine honours,) that he was urgent with Innocent VIII. to assign it a day and rite in the Calendar.”
One thing, however, is clear about all these writers; that not one of them is an Englishman. I have gone through your book, and do not find one English name among the various authors to whom you refer, except of course the name of that author whose lines I have been quoting, and who, great as are his merits, cannot, for the reasons I have given in the opening of my Letter, be considered a representative of English Catholic devotion.
Whatever these writers may have said or not said, whatever they may have said harshly, and whatever capable of fair explanation, still they are foreigners; we are not answerable for their particular devotions; and as to themselves, I am glad to be able to quote the beautiful words which you use about them in your letter to the Weekly Register of November 25th last. “I do not presume,” you say, “to prescribe to Italians or Spaniards, what they shall hold, or how they shall express their pious opinions; and least of all did I think of imputing to any of the writers whom I quoted that they took from our Lord any of the love which they gave to His Mother.” In these last words too you have supplied one of the omissions in your Volume which I noticed above.