A happy Canadian coincidence for All Saints Day

National Post, 2 October 2025

The Toronto Oratory — a national jewel of Catholic piety — will mark its 50th anniversary on the same day a rare honour is bestowed upon St. John Henry Newman

On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV announced that St. John Henry Newman would be given the rare honour of being declared a “Doctor of the Church” on Nov. 1, All Saints Day. A happy Canadian connection lies therein. The spiritual progeny of Cardinal Newman, the Toronto Oratorians, will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of their foundation that same day.

Newman, whom many consider the most learned Englishman of the 19th century, was a scholar devoted to university life. There are hundreds of Catholic chaplaincies named after him; I was chaplain at the one at Queen’s University for nearly 20 years. Indeed, “Newman Centre” is like Kleenex or Xerox — it means the Catholic centre on campus no matter who its patron is.

A national jewel of Catholic piety and intellectual life — for Newman, the two ought never be separated — the Toronto Oratory will hold its celebratory dinner this Thursday evening. In attendance will be Toronto’s archbishop, of course, Cardinal Francis Leo, but more important, some of the hundreds of priest alumni that the Oratorians have taught over the years.

I studied philosophy with the Toronto Oratorians in the late 1990s, and those scholarly priests shaped a great deal of how I think. The Oratorians ought not be blamed for what I think, but they do bear some responsibility for how I see the world, through the prism of the Catholic faith, a prism that refracts into many-coloured splendour the light of reason, God’s first gift to man for knowing the truth of things. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, demanded “thinking with the Church” from his companions. Thinking with the Church, or thinking rightly about God, or thinking properly about economics, politics, culture or anything really, begins with good thinking. There is not as much of that around as needed.

The title “Doctor” has been bestowed on only 38 figures in two thousand years, and comes from the Latin for “teacher,” meaning that Doctors of the Church are known for their significant contributions to theology and doctrine. Newman will thus take his place in a collegium that includes Ambrose and Augustine, Chrysostom and Athanasius. “Doctors of the Church” are a Catholic reminder that faith is an act of the intellect, and so intellectual excellence is to be admired and imitated in those exemplary saints granted the title.

We need their inspiration, because bad thinking abounds on any subject, and even no thinking at all, common enough in an age dominated by the will and emotion: I want and I feel are the appeals heard, not I think. Descartes would weep.

The late Fr. Jonathan Robinson, who founded the Toronto Oratory in 1975 in Montreal (before it moved to Toronto a few years later) taught me Descartes and Kant and modern philosophy nearly 30 years ago. As a priest-scholar, he had been chairman of the philosophy department at McGill University. He had the endearing view that one should know what great thinkers thought before offering an assessment of their value.

He was a convert to Catholicism, like Cardinal Newman a century before him. When Newman left the Anglican Communion for the Catholic Church in 1845, he had to leave his beloved Oxford, Catholics not being welcome there. Newman settled eventually in Birmingham, living with other priests in a fraternal association known as the Congregation of the Oratory, founded by St. Philip Neri in the 16th century, a less martial and more convivial counter-reformation response than established by his contemporary, St. Ignatius.

Birmingham is not the loveliest part of England, and so there was certain parallel when Fr. Robinson and his growing band decamped from Pine Avenue in Montreal to Parkdale in Toronto, a somewhat gritty neighbourhood near the Exhibition Grounds. Planted in that improbable ground, the Oratorians have flourished, becoming a centre of worship and scholarship, striving to imitate Philip Neri himself, whom Newman styled as the “saint of gentleness and kindness.” In a combative age, the Church and the world need more of both.

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