Newman can also help us “read” the post–Vatican II situation in which the Church finds herself because he knew, in the late nineteenth century, that trouble was brewing: “The trials that lie before us,” he preached in 1873, “are such as would appall and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I, or St. Gregory VII.” Why? Because a world tone-deaf to the supernatural—which Newman saw coming—would be a world in which Catholics were seen as “the enemies . . . of civil liberties and of human progress.”

Sound familiar? (From a article in "First Things" entitle NEWMAN AND VATICAN II by George Weigel