When St. John Henry Newman was beatified in 2010, and again when he was canonized earlier this month, an old dispute flared up. The question, whether Newman was a liberal or not, and then, depending on one's perspective, whether the label is a compliment or a condemnation.

Some highly traditionalist Catholics remain suspicious that Newman advocated liberal positions,

and they even criticized Benedict 16th support of Newman in 2010. At the same time, some progressive Catholics believed that Benedict didn't sufficiently

acknowledge and advance Newman's liberalism.

And some who accused Benedict of hijacking Newman's beatification for conservative purposes

in 2010 were appeased that Pope Francis, canonizing Newman recently, exuded a different tone.

In his own lifetime, too, Newman was accused of being a liberal by many Catholics.

Newman's writings contained ideas that seemed to imply a Protestant or liberal ethos.

In the idea of a university, among other places,

we find a strong commitment to the power of reason

and the importance of intellectual inquiry

apart from church authority.

In the grammar of assent and elsewhere,

one can find a strikingly modern defense of conscience. And more than anything else,

his essay on the development of Christian doctrine, which defended change in the church's

understanding and articulation of the faith, provoked intense criticism as liberal theology.

At my university, I asked the archivist in 2010 at the beatification to see if we had any

things from the 19th century referencing Newman, and she found a letter from a local

Maryland citizen to a professor at Mount St. Mary's,

complaining about what a liberal Newman was,

not like the staunch conservative,

Orestes Brownson, who was a more authentic Catholic.

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