Few people know that St. John Henry Newman was deeply devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, her Immaculate Heart, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This doctrine was declared an infallible teaching of the Church by Pope Bl. Pius IX in 1854, less than a decade after Newman had become a Roman Catholic.
READ: Pope Leo XIV to proclaim St. John Henry Newman a doctor of the Church on Nov. 1.
By Dr. Robert Stackpole
On July 31, Pope Leo XIV accepted the recommendation of members of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints that St. John Henry Newman (feast day: Oct. 9), the 19th-century English theologian and scholar of early Church history, should be declared the next “Doctor of the Church.” He will be the 38th saint to be given that title by the See of St. Peter.
Newman is renowned for his autobiography (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1864), which tells the story of his long and deeply considered conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, as well as for his famous book An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845), which has had a profound influence on Catholic theology, and especially on the case for the truth of the Catholic faith.
Newman and the Immaculate Conception
What fewer people know, however, is that Newman was also deeply devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, her Immaculate Heart, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This doctrine was declared an infallible teaching of the Church by Pope Bl. Pius IX in 1854, less than a decade after Newman had become a Roman Catholic. Indeed, Newman is arguably the most effective defender of Our Lady’s graced origin ever to have written on the subject in the English language.
In a nutshell, Newman’s case for this doctrine comes down to two main points.
First, Newman did not think that the doctrine could be proven from Scripture alone. Nevertheless, the New Testament, by implication, is not silent on the matter. Newman claimed that the most proper translation of the angel Gabriel’s salutation to Mary in Luke 1:28 should be not “Greetings, O favored one” (ESV), or similar words (as most Protestant translations render that verse), but “Hail, full of grace” (RSVCE).
The Greek word the angel uses here, kecharitomene, actually comes from the Greek root-word charis, almost always translated as “grace” in English versions of the New Testament. It usually refers to an inner, spiritual gift from God, Newman said, not just to an external blessing or favor of some kind. Thus, at some point in the past, before the angel Gabriel appeared to her, Mary was completely filled with divine grace.
That’s great as far as it goes, but it does not tells us when that complete transformation by grace happened. To trace it right back to Mary’s conception, Newman said, we need to see what the earliest Fathers of the Church taught about the Blessed Virgin. This is the second point.
Mary as the New Eve
By unanimous consent, the early Fathers of the Church taught that Mary is the New Eve: What Eve had lost for humanity by believing the bad angel in disguise (the serpent in the Garden of Eden), Mary recovered for the human race by believing and consenting to the call of the good angel (Gabriel): “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38).
Newman then reasons that if Eve was graced from the first moment of her existence to prepare her for her special role as “Mother of all the Living” (Gen 3:20), then how can we deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary must have been at least as specially graced as Eve was to prepare her for her greater role as Mother of the Son of God, the Savior of the world?
Newman wrote:
I ask, was not Mary as fully endowed [with grace] as Eve? Is it any violent inference that she, who was to cooperate in the redemption of the world, at least was not less endowed with power from on high than she who … did in the event but cooperate with him for its ruin? If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had a greater grace? ...
And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny too that Mary had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence?
I do not know how to resist this inference — well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception … and it really does seem to me to be bound up in that doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the Second Eve. (Source: John Henry Newman, The Mystical Rose. Princeton: Scepter, 1996, pp. 10-11)
To which we all reply, "Amen!"
Saint John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church and champion of the Immaculate Conception, pray for us!
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