When the Catholic Church proclaimed St. John Henry Newman its 38th Doctor of the Church on All Saints Day 2025, few people were better positioned to explain why it mattered than Dr. Bud Marr.
A Newman Scholar at Mercy College of Health Sciences in Des Moines, former director of the National Institute for Newman Studies at Duquesne University, and one of the scholars who submitted materials supporting the declaration, Marr was in Rome for the historic moment.
Sharing St. Newman with Newman University community
This month Marr brought that experience — and a career’s worth of insight — to Newman University as part of 2026 Heritage Month celebrations.
Marr delivered two talks on campus. On February 11, he addressed a public audience at the Sister Tarcisia Roths ASC Alumni Center in a talk titled “Forming Hearts and Minds: St. John Henry Newman’s Message for Today’s Church.”
The following day, he returned for a luncheon presentation at the Dugan Gorges Conference Center titled “Faith, Reason, and the Modern World: St. Newman’s Enduring Witness” — free lunch included. Together, the talks offered a portrait of a saint whose thought, Marr argued, has never been more urgently needed.
St. John Henry Newman would be proud that this institution bears his name.
Dr. Bud Marr
At the heart of his February 12 address, Marr organized Newman’s intellectual legacy around three pillars: his philosophy of doctrinal development, his defense of the reasonableness of faith, and his vision for university education.
On the first, he drew on Newman’s landmark 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which argued that doctrine grows organically — like an acorn into an oak — while remaining continuous with its origins. “To live is to change,” Marr quoted Newman, “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
On the second, Marr highlighted Newman’s challenge to Enlightenment demands for strict logical proof in matters of faith, arguing instead that belief is built like a wire — many strands of converging evidence, any one of which may fray without the whole giving way.
It was Newman’s vision of education, though, that resonated most directly with the audience. Newman insisted that a university, by its very name, must teach universal knowledge — and that expelling theology from the curriculum doesn’t make an institution more scientific, it makes it incoherent.
“When theology is removed,” Marr observed, “a vacuum forms, and other disciplines rush in to fill it — but do so poorly.”
He closed by invoking Pope Leo XIV’s words at the declaration ceremony, calling educators to “form persons so that they may shine like stars in their full dignity” — a charge Marr said Newman University was already living out.
“St. John Henry Newman,” he told the audience, “would be proud that this institution bears his name.”
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