Commissioned to mark St John Henry Newman’s proclamation as a Doctor of the Church, a new icon in Eastbourne gathers together the ideas, images and convictions that shaped his life. Its painter, Fr Neil Chatfield, takes us through an image of the Ordinariate’s patron that is at once familiar and new.

When Pope Leo XIV proclaimed St John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church on 1st November 2025, Newman joined a remarkably small company of saints whose teaching the Church recognises as possessing particular and enduring importance.

For Catholics in the United Kingdom, it was a moment of special significance. Newman is only the second Briton, after St Bede the Venerable (declared Doctor of the Church in 1899), to be numbered among the Doctors of the Church. For the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, however, the honour has an even more particular resonance: Newman is our patron.

His journey towards the Roman Catholic Church from the Anglican Church, his profound concern with the relationship between continuity and development, his insistence upon both faith and reason, and his conviction that truth must be followed wherever it leads all speak deeply to the Ordinariate’s own life and vocation.

To mark his proclamation as a Doctor of the Church, the Eastbourne Ordinariate Mission commissioned a new icon of Newman, now placed in Christ the King Catholic Church, Eastbourne.

Its painter, Fr Neil Chatfield, intended the image to be both immediately recognisable and full of discoveries.

Familiar, and new

Newman’s stance, with his characteristic hand held to his ear, is taken from a well-known photo of the saint. “Cor ad cor loquitur”, heart speaks unto heart, is also familiar to most of us. But the world surrounding him may be new to us: an oak and its acorn, a quill and beehive, a blazing sun, elaborate borders.

Together, they tell the story not simply of Newman’s life, but of his thought.

The oak tree first takes us to Oxford, where Newman taught and developed his ideas about education. Among their most famous expressions is The Idea of a University, developed from the lectures he delivered in Dublin in the 1850s.

For Newman, education could never amount merely to the transfer of facts. It was concerned with cultivating the intellect and forming the whole person. Nor did he believe that such formation happened in isolation. Personal encounter, mentoring and a community in which people lived and learned alongside one another were integral to his vision.

Neither, for Newman, could learning finally be divorced from religious truth. Theology therefore belonged within the university, not outside it. His concern for the proper relationship between faith and reason would remain strikingly influential long after his death.

It was a relationship Pope Benedict XVI returned to powerfully during his 2010 visit to Britain, when he came to beatify Newman. Addressing politicians, diplomats, academics and representatives of civil society in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict XVI argued that faith and reason need one another, each possessing a necessary “corrective” role in relation to the other.

From acorn to oak

The tree carries another meaning. The oak leaf and acorn point towards one of Newman’s most important contributions to Catholic theology: his understanding of the development of doctrine, explored in his 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

For Newman, the Church’s tradition is living. The consequences of God’s self-revelation in Christ unfold and are understood more deeply through time. Theology is therefore not a static collection of formulations but an encounter with revealed truth that continues to speak across different cultures, circumstances and centuries, “purifying all things and bringing them to their finest expressions.” [1]

What is implicit can become explicit. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is present within Sacred Scripture, but its precise theological formulation emerged through the life of the Church and the great Councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381.

That idea can, of course, be misunderstood. Development does not mean that Christian doctrine can simply become something altogether different. Newman proposed a series of “notes” or tests by which genuine development could be distinguished from corruption.

The symbolism of the icon makes the point wonderfully simply: an acorn develops into an oak. It does not develop into an elm or a cherry tree.

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting image for Newman - or, indeed, one with more resonance for the Ordinariate. The Catholic tradition is not preserved by being frozen in time. Nor is it renewed by abandoning what it has received. It lives, develops and bears fruit precisely because it remains rooted in what it is.

Heart speaks to heart

Newman’s red garments recall his creation as a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. Below him appears the motto he chose as cardinal: Cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks unto heart.”

The words echo St Francis de Sales, who wrote of the intimacy of prayer:

“Eyes speak to eyes, and heart to heart, and none understand what passes save the sacred lovers who speak.” [2]

That intimate encounter between God and the human person is the centre of Newman’s spirituality. His was no merely abstract theology. The truths he spent his life thinking through were truths to be encountered, loved and lived.

This shaped his pastoral ministry, his preaching and his work in education. It also found another, particularly beautiful expression in his hymns.

Behind Newman in the icon, the sun points towards perhaps the best loved of them: Lead, Kindly Light.

The hymn is the prayer of someone who cannot yet see the whole road before him, but asks for enough light to take the next step. That image is inseparable from Newman’s own story.

For him, much of that guiding light came through his encounter with the Fathers of the Church. Their writings gradually forced him to confront difficult questions about the nature, authority and continuity of the Church - questions which would ultimately lead him towards reception into full communion with the Catholic Church.

The icon represents them through the quill, signifying their writings, and the beehive, an ancient image of the wisdom and sweetness drawn from them by those seeking the way into the heart of God.

Newman followed that light at considerable personal cost. Yet he followed it because he had become convinced that truth had placed a claim upon him.

An English Catholic inheritance

Even the border of the icon has something to say. Its highly decorative patterning deliberately recalls the long Catholic artistic traditions of these lands. Much British sacred art was destroyed or dispersed during the Reformation, but traces of that visual language remain.

Here, the border becomes more than ornament. It places Newman within a tradition older than the divisions through which he himself had to find a path.

It also carries a note of hope. We are connected, Fr Neil suggests, to a living tradition which is “ever old and ever new”. What was has not been completely lost, even “amid th’ encircling gloom” [3]. It can be encountered again - and can blossom again - as another generation goes searching for God through beauty, truth and goodness.

Newman lived long before the Ordinariate existed. Yet in important respects he stands as its forerunner: an Englishman formed profoundly by the Anglican tradition, led by his pursuit of truth into the full communion of the Catholic Church, without ceasing to recognise what was good, true and beautiful in the inheritance through which God had formed him.

His life resists any easy choice between inheritance and conversion, tradition and development, intellect and devotion. Instead, they belong together.

And that is what makes this icon more than a commemoration of an extraordinary new honour bestowed upon the Ordinariate’s patron.

The acorn and the oak, the Fathers and the quill, the sun and Newman’s listening ear all tell the same story: of truth received, contemplated, followed and allowed to bear fruit.

For the Ordinariate, Newman remains both patron and sign of hope: a witness to the possibility that the Christian inheritance of these lands might not simply be remembered, but rediscovered; and that England might once again find its way home to the faith which once made it the Dowry of Our Lady.

References

(1) Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei (29 June 2013), §48.

(2) St Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God (1616), Book VI, Chapter 1.

(3) St John Henry Newman, “The Pillar of the Cloud” (1833), later known as Lead, Kindly Light.