Pope Leo XIV will name Saint John Henry Newman "co-patron of the Church's educational mission," alongside Saint Thomas Aquinas, announced Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, at a press conference on October 22, 2025.
So, let us see what 'educational mission' this new doctor of the Catholic Church taught, supposedly alongside Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Let us first introduce John Henry Newman (1801-1890), often referred to as ‘a pioneer and prophet of Vatican Council II,’ a title few could disagree with. His contribution to the Galileo saga was first given by Andrew White quoting from Newman’s 1843 The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine, written two years before he converted to Catholicism from the Protestant Church of England. Andrew White wrote:
‘In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the embarrassment of militant theology in the nine¬teenth century. The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the days when he was hovering between the Anglican and Roman Churches. In one of his sermons before the Univer¬sity of Oxford he spoke as follows: “Scripture says that the sun moves and the Earth is sta¬tionary, and science that the Earth moves and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth till we know what motion is? If our idea of motion is but an accidental result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and both are true: neither true philosophically; both true for certain practical purposes in the system in which they are respectively found.” In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more hopelessly sceptical. And for what were the youth of Oxford led into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real existence of truth or real foundation for it?’--- A. White: A History, p.166.
John Henry Newman’s ‘relative motion’ in space however, didn’t last long. If one senior churchman and renowned intellectual was to be singled out as a leading and influential Galilean apologist in the post 1820 U-turn era it was this man. Henry Newman, we are told in numerous books and articles on him, had a keen interest in science and the contemporary debates on the relation between faith and reason. At Oxford he read for honours in both classics and mathematics. For his final examination he studied geology, geometry, astronomy, mineralogy and Sir Isaac Newton’s incomprehensible Principia. Newman, we see, must have been very familiar with the ‘science’ they claim falsified the geocentric doctrine of the Church of tradition and the seventeenth century, yet with all his education, even he couldn’t see through the ‘proof’ for the heliocentrism scam. Henry Newman was not unlike Galileo, who also boasted of his superior intellect. When he stood for the Oriel Fellowship, he confided to his father that;
‘Few have ever attained the facility and comprehension which I arrived at from the regularity and constancy of my reading and the laborious and nerve-bracing and fancy-repressing study of mathematics, which has been my principal subject.’ ‘Galileo was the one stock argument against the Church.’-Johnson quoting Newman.
Henry Newman converted to the Catholic faith in 1845 and was ordained a priest in 1847. After that he was made rector of the proposed new Catholic University in Ireland where he gave a series of discourses on faith and science that resulted in his book The Idea of a University (1852). In a composition of May 24 1861, the now Fr Newman, adduced the case of Galileo as one of the critical points towards maturing on the part of Catholic Scripture-scholars, that Biblical U-turn of 1820 that changed Biblical meanings when Churchmen abandoned the geocentric revelation of all the Fathers based on their delusion heliocentrism was proven by science. In his lectures in Dublin University, and in subsequent writings, Fr Newman explored the relationship between theology and the natural sciences, as he saw it. In another book written by Phyllis Hodgson, Towards a Grammar of Assent (1870), it states; ‘Henry Newman explored the ways we’ve come to believe, and found instructive similarities between theology and science, and indeed everyday beliefs as well. We rarely believe because of a logical demonstration, but much more frequently by the convergence of probabilities. This is the case in our everyday affairs, and also in science and religion.’ Arising from all these ‘probabilities,’ Newman felt he was competent to resolve the Galileo question. In trying to do so he raised the retreat from Biblical geocentrism to a new level of sophistry.
‘As the Copernican system first made progress... it was generally received... as a truth of Revelation, that the Earth was stationary, and that the sun, fixed in a solid firmament, whirled round the Earth. After a little time, however, and on full consideration, it was found that the Church had decided next to nothing on questions such as these... it surely is a very remarkable feat, considering how widely and how long one certain interpretation of these physical statements in Scripture had been received by Catholics, that the Church should not have formally acknowledged it... Nor was this escape a mere accident, but rather the result of providential superintendence.’--- Fr Henry Newman: The Idea of a University, 1852, p.468.
As we see above, Henry Newman needed no abrogation to dismiss the 1616-1633 papal rulings as deciding ‘next to nothing.’ Nor did it occur to him that if providential superintendence was present during the Galileo case, would he as a Catholic convert now not think it more prudent of God to side with His Catholic Church; with the Council of Trent and the interpretation of all the Fathers and prevent His popes from supposedly wrongly defining and declaring a fixed-sun as formal heresy in 1616? Of course, it would. Of all the ploys used by the Earthmovers to try to save Catholicism from its own supposedly ‘erroneous’ decrees, as they saw it, this has to be the most reckless; asserting it was God Himself who made sure the anti-heliocentric judgements were meaningless.
Fr Henry Newman’s Galileo, Revelation, and the Educated Man. (1861)
‘One of the characteristics of the day is the renewal of that collision between men of science and believers in Revelation, and of that uneasiness in the public mind as to its results, which are found in the history of the 17th century. Then, Galileo raised the jealousy of Catholics in Italy; but now in England the religious portion of the community, be they Catholic or not, is startled at the discoveries or speculations of geologists, natural historians and linguists. Of course I am speaking, as regards both dates, of the educated classes, of those whose minds have been sufficiently opened to understand the nature of proof, who have a right to ask questions and to weigh the answers given to them. It was of such, we must reasonably suppose, that Father Commissary was tender in 1637 [1633], and to such he allied in his conversation with Galileo, as he took him in his carriage to the Holy Office. “As we went along,” says Galileo, “he put many questions to me, and showed an earnestness that I should repair the scandal, which I had given to the whole of Italy, by maintaining the opinion of the motion of the Earth; and for all the solid and mathematical reasons which I presented to him, he did but reply to me: “Terra autem in aeternum stabit,’ because ‘Terra autem in aeternum stat,’ as Scripture says.” There could not be a greater shock to religious minds of that day than Galileo’s doctrine, whether they at once rejected it as contrary to the faith, or listened to the arguments by which he enforced it. The feeling was strong enough to effect Galileo’s compulsory recantation, though a pope was then on the throne who was personally friendly to him. Two Sacred Congregations represented the popular voice and passed decrees against the philosopher, which were in force down to the years 1822 and 1837. Such an alarm never can occur again, for the very reason that it has occurred once. At least, for myself, I can say that, had I been brought up in the belief of the immobility of the Earth as though a dogma of Revelation, and had associated it in my mind with the incommunicable dignity of man among created things, with the destinies of the human race, with the locality of Purgatory and Hell, and other Christian doctrines, and then for the first time had heard Galileo’s thesis, and, moreover, the prospect held out to me that perhaps there were myriads of globes like our own all filled with rational creatures as worthy of the Creator’s regard as we are, I should have been at once indignant at its presumption and frightened at its speciousness, as I never can be at any parallel novelties in other human sciences bearing on religion; no, not though I found probable reasons for thinking the first chapters of Genesis were not of an economical character, that there was a pre-Adamite race of rational animals, or that we are now 20,000 years from Noah. For that past controversy and its issue have taught me beyond all mistake, that men of the greatest theological knowledge may firmly believe that scientific conclusions are contrary to the Word of God, when they are not so, and pronounce that to be heresy which is truth. It has taught me, that Scripture is not inspired to convey mere secular knowledge, whether about the heaven or the Earth, or the race of man; and that I need not fear for Revelation whatever truths may be brought to light by means of observation and experience out of the world of phenomena which environs us. And I seem to myself here to be speaking under the protection and sanction of the [1835] Sacred Congregation of the Index itself, which has since the time of Galileo prescribed to itself a line of action, indication of its fearlessness of any results which may happen to religion from physical sciences…’--- Fr John Henry Newman, 1861.
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