Newman believed truth emerged only after debate and disagreement, from a process that involved the whole Church. Yet modern champions of a narrow and prescriptive Catholicism have been claiming Newman as their patron. A leading historian addresses the puzzle

Newman was an angular and uncomfortable presence in the Church of Pope Pius IX, fighting with all his immense intelligence and mastery of words to preserve what he called “elbow room” for questing minds, even where that freedom might take such minds into uncharted theological territory. He was invariably patient and supportive with those who were troubled or doubting, and for all those reasons he was profoundly ill at ease with the overbearing exercise of authority in the Church of his time.

In influential sections of the Church today, probably more in America than here, there is a tendency to claim Newman as an icon of militant orthodoxy, a patron and exemplar of doctrinal clarity and purity. While the young Tractarian Newman might well have had to plead guilty to a charge of ungenerous intolerance of doctrinal error, as a Roman Catholic his letters of counsel to waverers in the faith are invariably gentle and kindly, he believed passionately in the crucial importance of “generous and open discussion”, and was convinced that doctrinal disagreement was a normal route to the discernment of truth.

“In former times,” he wrote in 1872, “it was by the collision of Catholic intellects with Catholic intellects that the meaning and limit of dogmatic decrees were determined.” And one of Newman’s most withering letters was addressed to W.G. Ward in 1867 over their very different attitudes to papal infallibility: “You are doing your best to make a party in the Catholic Church, and … dividing Christ by exalting your opinions into dogmas, and shocking to say, by declaring to me, as you do, that those Catholics who do not accept them are of a different religion from yours. I protest then again, not against your tenets, but against what I must call your schismatical spirit, and I pray God that I may never denounce, as you do, what the Church has not denounced.”