Fr. Z's Blog

Here is the COLLECT for the Feast of  St. John Henry Newman Memorial, anniversary of the day, 9 October 1845, when he was brought into greater light and received into Holy Catholic Church at Littlemore.

Leo XIV proclaim St. John Henry to be the 38th Doctor of the Church on 1 November 2025.

LATIN:
Deus, qui beátum Ioánnem Henrícum, presbýterum,
lumen benígnum tuum sequéntem
pacem in Ecclésia tua inveníre contulísti,
concéde propítius,
ut, eius intercessióne et exémplo,
ex umbris et imagínibus
in plenitúdinem veritátis tuae perducámur.

The use of confero might raise an eyebrow.  Buried in the entry for confero in our Lewis & Short Dictionary we find “With the access. idea of application or communication, to devote or apply something to a certain purpose, to employ, direct, confer, bestow upon, give, lend, grant, to transfer to (a favorite word with Cicero.).”  The problem is that contulisti here has the sense of “grant”, but then we also have to deal with concede down the line, which also normally comes off as “grant”.  So, I will stick with “grant” for confero and then use something else for concede.

An imago is certainly an “image” or “copy”, it is also a “ghost, likeness, echo, semblance, appearance” or “shade”.

WDTPRS LITERAL VERSION:
O God, who granted blessed John Henry,
a priest following Your kindly light,
to find peace in Your Church,
graciously vouchsafe,
by his intercession and example,
that we may be drawn from shadows and shades
into the fullness of Your truth.

You will notice right away the reference to the a poem written by John Henry in 1833 later rendered as a popular hymn, Lead Kindly Light.

You might know the story of its writing.  When the young Newman was traveling in Italy he fell ill. He experienced a time of great emotional and spiritual discouragement. When a nurse asked him what troubled him, he responded, “I have work to do in England.”  Eventually he got passage on a boat home, but they were constrained to heave to, slowed by a thick fog and nearby cliffs.  Trapped in the fog, on June 16 Newman wrote The Pillar of the Cloud:

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

A version of the hymn, just to help you ponder.

OFFICIAL VERSION:
O God, who bestowed on the Priest blessed John Henry Newman
the grace to follow your kindly light
and find peace in your Church;
graciously grant that,
through his intercession and example,
we may be led out of shadows and images
into the fulness of your truth.

In this world we walk by faith, not by sight.

We peer towards mystery through the dark glass,…

…through the crack in the rock,…

…through chink in the garden wall.

The hope of Christians draws us to the One who will draw us forth from this shadowy place into His marvelous light.

Holy Church is our surest path to that which is good and true and beautiful.

Of interest is that  “ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” was John Henry’s epitaph.

However we put this, “from shadows and shades into truth”, “from out of shadows and reflections into truth”, “from shadows and phantasms into truth”, “from illusions and approximations into reality”… this has a rather Platonic ring to it.

For Newman this certainly also meant something like “from the Church of England and from Anglo-Catholic to the Roman Catholic Church”.

You might imagine yourself, if you have your Platonic hat on, moving away from the back of the cave, turning around, and heading out of the cave to your source.

At the heart of the Platonic and Augustinian paradigm is conversion – μετάνοια – the turning point at which we, who are moving out and away, begin to return.

St. John Henry captures this “turning point” in Lead, Kindly Light, during a period of illness and uncertainty:

“I loved to choose and see my path; but now Lead Thou me on.”

Here is metanoia. The man who once insisted on choosing his own road now asks to be led. His celebrated “one step enough for me” expresses surrender.

This is a paradigm found in many of the Latin Church’s more ancient prayers.  It is also found in the experience of the penitent and of the worshiper at Holy Mass.

Today, 9 October is the feast of St. Abraham, Patriarch of the Old Testament.

Here is the entry in the newest edition of the Martyrologium Romanum with a translation:

3. Commemoratio sancti Abrahae, patriarchae et omnium credentium patris, qui, Domino vocante, ab urbe Ur Chaldaeorum, patria sua, egressus est et per terram erravit eidem et semini eius a Deo promissam.  Item totam fidem suam in Deo manifestavit, cvm, sperans contra spem, unigenitum Isaac ei iam seni a Domino datum ex uxore sterili in sacrificum offerre non renuit.  …

The commemoration of Saint Abraham, patriarch and father of all believers, who, since the Lord was calling him, went froth from the city of Ur of the Chaldeans, his home land, and wandered through the land promised by God to him and to his seed.  He manifested his complete faith in God when, hoping against hope, he did not refrain from offering in sacrifice his only-begotten son Isaac, given by the Lord to him, an old man, from his sterile wife.

Nothing is impossible with God.

The Martyrologium Romanum commemorates this day the living prototype of the believer who trusts when sight fails.

The Fathers of the Church, meditating on the figure of Abraham, found in him the matrix of the entire spiritual life: obedience, detachment, hope, prayer, and the prophetic anticipation of Christ.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, that earliest heir of apostolic tradition, sees Abraham as the first man who “by faith received the covenant” (Adv. Haer. IV.21.3). For Irenaeus, the patriarch’s life is a pre-gospel. The promise that “in thy seed shall all nations be blessed” already contains the mystery of Christ:

“In the faith of Abraham the Incarnation was prefigured, for his seed is Christ, by whom the blessing comes upon the nations.”

Thus the Old and New Covenants are not opposed but organically one: the faith of the Patriarch flowering in the faith of the Church. The ancient journey from Ur to Canaan prefigures the Church’s pilgrimage from the world to the heavenly Jerusalem.

Ambrose, writing two centuries later, reads that same journey as the itinerary of every Christian soul. In De Abraham (I.5) he comments:

“Voca te Deus ut exeas de terra tua, hoc est de corpore tuo.”

God calls you, he says, to go forth from your own land—that is, from the body and from earthly desires. The geographical exodus becomes an interior migration. For Ambrose, Ur signifies the darkness of ignorance and sensuality, while Canaan, “the land which I will show thee,” is the contemplation of divine things. The Christian must leave behind his “kindred,” that is, worldly attachments, to enter the promised rest of charity. Abraham is thus the archetype of the monk and of every soul who departs from the familiar in search of the invisible.

St. Jerome, his contemporary, adopts the same spiritual reading. Commenting on Genesis 12, he sees in the command egredere an ascetical principle: to “go forth” is to transcend the passions and climb the ladder of virtues. He insists that Abraham obeyed nuda fide—with naked faith—since he did not know where he was going. In that ignorance, Jerome finds a sign of perfect trust:

“He believed, not because he saw, but because he heard.”

The life of faith, for Jerome, begins when one surrenders the map and lets God direct the steps.

Origen, in his Homilies on Genesis, discerns in Abraham’s offering of Isaac a revelation of resurrection faith. The text of Genesis says that Abraham set out “on the third day.” For Origen, this is no accident: the third day announces the Resurrection. “Abraham knew,” he writes,

“that God was able to raise his son from the dead; therefore he offered him, and received him back as a figure.”

The knife raised over Isaac is the shadow of Calvary; the ram caught by its horns in the thicket is the humanity of Christ entangled in the thorns of mortality. Origen’s Abraham is the first believer in Easter. His faith does not end in the renunciation of the beloved but in the hope of restoration beyond death.

Augustine, gathering these strands, makes Abraham the type of both priest and victim. In City of God (XVI.32) he observes that “Isaac, carrying the wood for the sacrifice, was a figure of Christ bearing His Cross.” The two “walked together” (ambulabant pariter), signifying not “synodality” but the unity of will between Father and Son in the mystery of redemption. For Augustine, every detail of the Genesis narrative is prophetic: the mountain signifies the height of divine love, the altar the Cross, the fire the Holy Spirit, the obedient son the incarnate Word. Abraham’s sacrifice thus contains in embryo the whole Triduum. In another place he remarks that Abraham

“offered in figure what God would truly perform,”

since the Father would not spare His own Son but deliver Him up for us all.

St. John Chrysostom, preaching in Antioch, contemplates the same scene with moral fervor. He calls Abraham “the father of faith and the master of obedience.” What moved God, he says, was not the knife but the heart:

“He raised the blade, yet the sacrifice was complete already in his mind.”

Chrysostom insists that such faith is the root of all Christian virtue, since it trusts the divine command even when reason cannot see the purpose. The patriarch becomes, in his words, “the first fruits of the faithful.” Isaac’s silence and consent make him a type of Christ’s meekness; Abraham’s readiness prefigures the priesthood of believers who offer their lives as a living sacrifice.

For the Alexandrian Fathers, the story of Mamre, the hospitality of Abraham to the three mysterious visitors, was no mere moral tale but a theophany. St. Basil the Great, in De Spiritu Sancto (IX.22), writes that Abraham

“adored one and welcomed three,”

discerning dimly the mystery of the Trinity. His table beneath the oak of Mamre foreshadows the Eucharistic table of the Church, where God sits with His friends. In the tent of the patriarch, the invisible God begins to be seen; in his hospitality the image of divine communion is revealed.

Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil, deepens this mystical sense. In his Life of Moses (II.29), he compares Abraham’s faith to the soul’s epektasis, the perpetual stretching forth toward what lies beyond.

“He goes out, not knowing whither he goes because the good which he seeks has no limit.”

Faith for Gregory is not static possession but endless movement toward the Infinite. Abraham’s pilgrimage is the emblem of the soul’s unending ascent into God.

The image of the sinus Abrahae, the “bosom of Abraham,” provided another field of reflection. Tertullian, in De Anima (55), imagined it as a place of rest and refreshment for the righteous dead, a kind of vestibule of paradise awaiting the Redeemer. Ambrose later ennobled the image in De obitu Valent. 72:

“Sinus Abrahae requies aeternae pacis… the bosom of Abraham is the repose of eternal peace.”

Augustine, commenting on the parable of Lazarus, identified it with the hidden life of the Church, where the faithful departed rest in the promise of resurrection. Thus Abraham remains father not only of the living but of those who sleep in hope.

Throughout patristic literature, Abraham’s greatness is never detached from humility. St. Gregory the Great, reflecting in Moralia in Iob 5.3.6 on his intercession for Sodom, marvels that

“he who was a friend of God called himself dust and ashes”

Faith and humility, for Gregory, are inseparable: to believe is to acknowledge one’s nothingness before the Almighty. The same Abraham who converses familiarly with God bows to the earth in reverence. His confidence is born not of presumption but of trust in divine mercy.

Thus, from Irenaeus to Gregory, Abraham stands as the common ancestor of all theology.

He is the first contemplative, the first missionary, the first intercessor, the first pilgrim of faith. His life forms the grammar of revelation: calling, promise, testing, and blessing. In him the Fathers discern the whole outline of salvation history already traced in miniature. He believed, and it was counted to him as righteousness; he obeyed, and the nations were blessed through him.

The Church, reading Genesis in the light of Christ, sees in Abraham the mirror of her own faith, walking through this world as a stranger, building altars on the way, awaiting the city whose builder and maker is God.

In fact, speaking of altars, the Roman liturgy invokes Abraham as both witness and intercessor.

In the Roman Canon the priest prays:

“Supra quae propitio ac sereno vultu respicere digneris, et accepta habere, sicut accepta habere dignatus es munera pueri tui iusti Abel, et sacrificium patriarchae nostri Abrahae, et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchisedech.”

Here Abraham stands between Abel and Melchisedech as the perfect figure of priestly faith: he offers not the fruits of the earth but the beloved son, prefiguring the Eucharistic oblation of Christ Himself.