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
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