Lest I offend, let me explain what I mean. Throughout his life-long search for truth, 'out of shadows and images', Newman struggled to hold together the timeless faithfulness of God and his own experience of change. As a young man he wrote that 'growth is the only evidence of life'. Yet it is a phrase open to a variety of meanings and, I believe, misunderstanding. For some it is used to suggest that as we get older we see the errors of our youthful enthusiasms.
Early commitments have to be reassessed and, perhaps, abandoned.
Now even though Newman underwent remarkable changes in his own life, I doubt if this is quite what he meant. Others use the saying to support the call for change and adaptation in the Church, often in response to changing social and cultural circumstances. I am sure that this too is not what the Cardinal had in mind, even though his vision of the Church was so ahead of his time, much of it coming to the fore only in recent decades. No, Cardinal Newman's understanding of change was much more profound than that. To find it we have to search more deeply.