By Stephen P. White
Fifteen years ago this month, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to make a state visit to Britain. (John Paul II made a pastoral visit in 1982.) It was an historic event, both for the Catholic Church in the UK and for the United Kingdom. Nearly five centuries after Henry VIII broke with the Church, here was the Bishop of Rome being received by the Queen at Holyroodhouse, welcomed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth, and invited to address British leaders and dignitaries in Westminster Hall - the very place where St. Thomas More had been tried and condemned 475 years before.
The central event of the pope's visit was the beatification of John Henry Newman in Birmingham. Naturally, Newman loomed large in the pope's various speeches and homilies during his entire visit. It's worth revisiting some of Benedict's speeches and homilies, not only because the recent decision of Pope Leo XIV to declare Newman a doctor of the Church makes them timely, but because Benedict's remarks, which draw heavily on Newman, have only grown in relevance in the subsequent decade and a half.
In his homily for the Mass at Westminster Cathedral, Pope Benedict highlighted Newman's enthusiasm for a robust, well-formed laity and the responsibility which all the baptized share for the Church's mission. He quoted Newman to this effect:
I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.
In this view, the lay faithful are indispensable, not only to the Church and her mission, but to society itself. They are the primary means by which the Church is leaven in every part of society and civic life. Newman's view, Benedict observed, found an echo in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in Lumen Gentium.
And Newman's vision for the laity was complemented by what Benedict called his "profoundly human vision of priestly ministry."
In his address to leaders and dignitaries at Westminster Hall, Benedict made the connection between the apostolic work of the laity and a healthy and thriving clergy. In fact, he insists that the essence of the priestly vocation becomes clearer when the lay vocation is lived with fidelity and zeal.
Let us pray, then, that the Catholics of this land will become ever more conscious of their dignity as a priestly people, called to consecrate the world to God through lives of faith and holiness. And may this increase of apostolic zeal be accompanied by an outpouring of prayer for vocations to the ordained priesthood. For the more the lay apostolate grows, the more urgently the need for priests is felt; and the more the laity's own sense of vocation is deepened, the more what is proper to the priest stands out.
This mutuality between the lay and clerical vocations is a far cry from the zero-sum calculus, so common in some parts of the Church today, which seems unable to imagine the relationship between laity and clergy except through the categories of power.
A similar mindset threatens public and civic life, too. As both Newman and Benedict understood, to treat the relationship between faith and reason as a zero-sum affair is to impoverish both.
And here we come to the heart of Pope Benedict's address at Westminster Hall: "The central question at issue is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found?"
How can any society - particularly a pluralistic society, as exists in the UK -possibly hope to answer fundamental political questions while excluding the light of faith from our deliberations about how we ought to live together? "If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus," Benedict warned, "then the fragility of the proc...
