DJ: Your mention of Jack Sullivan brings us to the subject of Cardinal Newman, who is one of the great figures of English letters and thought, but we still struggle to see him, particularly non-Catholics, as a great spiritual leader and a living presence. But this year he will be beatified, the first figure of its kind since St Thomas More, not counting the English Catholic Martyrs. It will be an event of truly global significance. What does Newman mean to you and why should people still be interested today?

VN: It's a huge topic, with many layers. At one level, in academia, Newman is much studied and highly regarded, particularly in Germany and America. Every university in the US has a Newman society or centre. There was a very interesting article by [Cardinal] Avery Dulles about the three conversions in Newman's life. The first was at 15, when (like many people today) he embraced a sort of natural religion. This was a sense of right and wrong: a sense of God as an adjudicator of all that goes on. But Newman's first conversion was from that point to a sense of God as a personal God, a person to whom he could relate, to whom he could open up his life and from whom he could gain a strength and grace and sense of purpose. That was when he decided to serve God in the Church in a celibate manner. That was when Newman became in some ways evangelical. Then his second conversion was once he began to grapple with "the non-dogmatic principle" of his age: liberalism. This claimed that truth was individual, was what you made it, that there was no over-arching dogma. That was going to be the struggle. That was perceptive of him to note. It reminded me of a phrase from G. K. Chesterton: "People are divided into two kinds: those who live by dogma and know it and those who live by dogma and don't know it." He had an anxiety about the "don't know its" who were trying to live by the non-dogmatic principle. It was in contrast to this that Newman then developed his whole sense of the continuity of a steady doctrine going right through the history of Christianity. He began to look to the Christian faith for doctrinal positions, for saving truths-that is what a doctrine is-and that's when he started reading through the Fathers and trying to see the importance of these firm statements of truth that were beyond a culture and beyond an age. Third, he came to see a need for "a living and universal authority". That completed his entrance to the Catholic Church.

In doing so, he used dramatic and contemporary language, that of smelting and iron foundry, reflecting its tremendous strength of steel and construction. That's what the papacy is like. It a part of a smelting and clashing of elements whereby our human nature (so powerful, so glorious, so terrible) is fashioned into something that is capable of bearing an eternal truth. That's a fascinating path. Its relevance today is to show how one can go from a natural religion to a personal religion, to a religion that accepts the importance of dogma that needs to be kept in a dynamic tension with reason. 

Newman also fascinates me as a parish priest. When he died, in 1890, the streets were lined with people — maybe 20,000. Although very few of them had probably read Newman (maybe they had sung a hymn), they came out to salute a dead parish priest. They saw him as someone who prepared his sermons well, spent hours in the confessional, to whom they could talk, who visited the sick and brought coal and food to the cold and hungry, someone who would walk in the snow as an 80-year-old to Bournville Village to defend the Catholic workforce from imposed Bible studies, and a man who volunteered to go to Smethwick when an outbreak of plague had decimated the parish. It is also rather remarkable in the context of this year for priests that Pope Benedict has asked us to observe, that in this country we are going to have the beatification of a parish priest. It is a great boost for the priests of this country. With Newman there is the priest and also the poet and man who wrote The Dream of Gerontius, and the hymns, such as "Lead Kindly Light", and the things that we know by heart because they appeal to the heart. 

DJ: To be controversial for a moment-the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a lecture in Rome about the priesthood. He talked about the idea of women being ordained. It lies at the heart of the recent Apostolic Constitution to welcome disaffected Anglicans. In the context of Newman, it seemed to me that Dr Williams was to some extent throwing out a bit of a challenge to the Catholic Church in that lecture. He was effectively saying: "Please tell us why the Catholic Church feels not able to ordain women as priests." He was asking for an explanation for this. Now, Newman's most important theological idea was that doctrine evolves and occasionally goes in surprising directions. The Second Vatican Council brought many new things to light. Is this a fruitful dialogue to be had between the churches or is this an area where the Catholic Church is simply not going to change?