Laity, Catholic Laity, Catholic Church 

On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine was first published in July, 1859, as an article in the Rambler. It was the immediate cause of great controversy both in Rome and in England. Newman did not withdraw his views, but the article was not reprinted or published in England since that time, and appeared only once in an American journal, Cross Currents. Scholars without access to Rambler archives have had to resort to a German translation, the the ordinary reader has had to rely on brief quotation only and hearsay.

Yet this is an essay of great importance. Ours has been well called the age of the layman in the Church, and Newman's essay was a distant but distinct preparation for some of the most heartening of present-day developments in the growing concern for and thought about the place of the laity in the Church.

This edition of Newman's essay is the first in any language to contain a collated version of the text published in the Rambler for July, 1859, and the abbreviated and amended version of 1871. The book also contains an extract from The Arians of the Fourth Century, which bears on the same subject and amplifies Newman's views.

John Coulson, the editor, has based his penetrating and enlightening introduction on material, hitherto unpublished, in the archives of the Birmingham Oratory and Downside Abbey. He attempts to account for the neglect of a work of such importance, and to explain how Newman's publication of it was an act of political suicide, from which his career in the Church never fully recovered.

Now that lay initiative has received such unprecedented papal encouragement, the re-publication of this essay marks an important contribution to that growing body of theology which seeks to restore the laity to their proper position within the fullness of the Church.

Taken from the inside flaps.