Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

Thomistic Institute.org.

Given the spirit of the Tomistic Institute, I think is especially fitting to talk about

St. John Henry Newman, who as we know was not only recently canonized in 2019, but has just

been raised to the status of Doctor of the Church.

He's our newest doctor of the church, and so it's a double privilege to get to talk about him

tonight.

So to talk about Newman and his idea of the saint is not only an academic privilege, but also

a very personal one.

He's a saint who I consider

to be a great friend. And in fact, it's thanks to reading Newman that I have come to a far

greater appreciation for the understanding of saints as friends. We see this idea of the saints

as friends across Newman's writing, but especially in his reflections on the doctrine of the communion of saints.

The saints, Newman tells us, are those believers who are knit together from the day of Pentecost to the present time.

Those believers who are grafted onto Christ, who is the beautiful form of God, who is God's final self-revelation.

The saints are those believers who, whether on earth or in heaven, are bound together through the sacramental system,

or as Pope Francis called it recently, the real social network.

And these saints aid and support each other through acts of friendship, through agopic love, that is self-sacrificing love, through deeds of definite service and acts of hidden, humble prayer, both on earth and in heaven.

For Newman, politicians, dictators, celebrities, philosophers are not the true agents of history. Rather, the saints are the

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