During this past academic year, I was honored to hold the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was held initially by TCT’s own Robert Royal and then by Joseph Pearce.) Soon after accepting this appointment, the Church announced that she was going to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor or Teacher of the Church, which she did last November. For me, this was a happy coincidence or a “God-incidence,” as a priest once suggested I call such a happening. I was being asked, I thought, to ponder the significance of Newman as a Doctor.
The “of” in “Doctor of the Church” (the genitive case of Ecclesia) certainly expresses a relationship of possession: a Doctor belongs to the Church; he or she worked and still works on behalf of the Church’s evangelistic mission. The “of” also suggests, it seems to me, the object of a Doctor’s teaching (in Latin, Ecclesiae can be read as an “objective genitive”). Thus a Doctor not only represents the Church, but also teaches the Church herself, bringing her to a greater realization of revealed truth.
The Church learns something new from Newman. Newman mined the depths of the Church’s Scriptures and Tradition in illuminating ways, and in turn he articulated novel insights that have now become part of the Church’s intellectual treasury. Newman taught the Church a whole host of things, ranging from the development of doctrine to the primacy of truth to the nature of conscience.
But I want to consider here something that the newest Doctor teaches the Church by reflecting on a captivating phrase that he uses, a phrase altogether pertinent to those who desire to be sanctified in truth. The phrase comes from a meditation written by Newman called “Hope in God – Creator,” one of the most powerful of his numerous Meditations on Christian Doctrine.
God the Creator, Newman says, “knows what He’s about.” God knows what He’s about! Perhaps more than any Doctor, Newman teaches us how to take this phrase as a touchstone for our lives. Do we know what we are about? Do we trust that God knows what He’s about? What does it even mean to know what one is about, especially since we encounter so many shadows and images on our way toward and into truth? (Newman had the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem cut on to his tomb).
Humanly speaking, to know what one is about is an achievement, perhaps of a lifetime. Great minds have long recognized it as such, though not as pithily as Newman. Consider, for example, Socrates, undoubtedly a man who knew what he was about. The Delphic oracle revealed that none is wiser than Socrates. Thus provoked, Socrates probes this assertion, eventually seeing that its truth lay in Socrates’ knowing-that-he-does-not-know.
As Plato recounts it, moreover, Socrates’ knowing-that-he-does-not-know stood at the heart of his apologia, his defense against those fellow Athenians who accused him of spreading harmful teachings.
Newman, of course, also delivered an Apologia in response to similar accusations from his fellow countrymen. Like Socrates, Newman narrates just how far he probed his own knowing-that-he-does-not-know in pursuit of the fullness of truth. It was a relentlessly honest probing that led him into the arms of Mother Church and the intellectual sanctuary of her infallibility.
We know, of course, that there exists an even greater model of one who knows what He’s about, whose four apologiai were written by men whose lives were transformed by faith in Him. It’s instructive to read the Gospels as the story of a man — a God-man, to be sure — who knows what He’s about. We can’t help but be struck by Jesus’s self-presence, His self-possession, His ability to bring about conscientiously the ends toward which He is striving. Jesus Christ, above all others, knows what he’s about.
The crowds notice. Unlike what they see in the Scribes and Pharisees, they hear in Jesus a man who has authority: “When Jesus had finished saying these things,” we are told, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7:28-29)
Jesus has “authority,” exousia, a fascinating Greek word combining ex (“from” or “out of”) with ousia (which refers to a thing’s very “reality” or “substance”). Jesus spoke from His very reality, from His very substance – dare I say, from His very heart. Wasn’t it His ability to speak cor ad cor, as Newman put things, that amazed the crowds and continues to amaze us?
No doubt it was owing to Jesus Himself that Newman believed that God knows what He’s about. Jesus lived a life of striking self-awareness and self-governance, which manifested itself in the greatest self-gift the world will ever see. The Paschal Mystery, and the union with His Church consummated therein, verifies absolutely that Jesus knows what He’s about. In its light, shouldn’t we, simply and wholeheartedly, trust Him?
Our newest Doctor of the Church did, and in an exceptional way. He trusted the Creator who knows what He’s about. In what he wrote, but even more by how he lived, Newman teaches us what it means to live, like Christ, as one who knows what one is about. Family, friends, countrymen, customs: Newman was willing to forsake all of them for the sake of truth – the full truth of Jesus Christ and His Church, and the full truth about himself.
Like Christ, Newman seems to have been born and to have come into the world in order to witness to truth. As his Apologia Pro Vita Sua recounts, he did so in his own frail and creaturely way, imaging as best he could the Creator who knows what He’s about. Fittingly has the Church invested him with the authority that such truthfulness merits; fittingly has he been named a Doctor Ecclesiae.
![Hegseth Demands Fitness Requirements, Says 'Fat Troops' 'Not Who We Are' [WATCH]](https://teamredvictory.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Hegseth-Demands-Fitness-Requirements-Says-Fat-Troops-Not-Who-We-350x250.jpg)
