Leo XIV holds up Newman as a model: faith and reason are not separated

On Friday, September 4, 2026, Pope Leo XIV received at the Vatican a delegation from Oriel College, Oxford, come on pilgrimage to Rome for the 700th anniversary of the 1326 royal charter that founded the college. Before these scholars, the pope held up St. John Henry Newman, a fellow of Oriel from 1822 to 1845 before his conversion, as the model of a learning in which faith and reason are never separated.

Newman, he said, remains "a shining example of a scholar who not only showed the inseparability of faith and reason in his works but even more admirably in his life." The pope recalled that last autumn he had proclaimed Newman a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education, and he invited the delegation to "seek the truth courageously" and to entrust the future of the college to God, a college he said had "remained firm in its Christian identity" through the centuries.

What the Church has always held

That faith and reason cannot contradict each other is not a discovery of the nineteenth century: it is a dogma. The Vatican Council, in 1870, teaches that these two orders of knowledge proceed from one and the same God, and that there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, "since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind." God cannot deny Himself, nor can the true contradict the true.

From this unity flows the whole doctrine of Christian education. Leo XIII, restoring the philosophy of St. Thomas, recalled that reason rightly used prepares and defends the faith, while faith frees reason from error and raises it up. To separate them is to mutilate both man and study at once.

The measure

On this point, the word spoken at Oxford only restates the tradition, and we say it plainly: here the praise meets the dogma. To make Newman the witness of a formation that "embraces the entire person" and is measured by "human dignity, justice and the capacity to serve the common good" is to refuse the modern divorce between knowledge and salvation, between intelligence and holiness. A school that instructs without ordering the soul to God does not form the whole man: it divides him.

The faithful should hold to this: seeking the truth is never a neutral exercise. All truth comes from God, and study that refuses to order itself to Him is not a purer science but an amputated one. Where it is recalled that faith and reason stand together or fall together, one holds the thread the Church has never let go.

Sources. The Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Dei Filius (1870), ch. 4, On Faith and Reason. Leo XIII, encyclical Æterni Patris (1879), on the restoration of Christian philosophy according to St. Thomas Aquinas.