Newman was Catholic, and he has some uses. One is in his defence of the university. He saw the attainment of a rounded education, and the ideal is that one had a balanced sense of holiness. I am quoting Esolen, who describes our fall. I agree with him.

Including the comment about a commitment to truth. The divisions in the church came because of this, and the postmodern does not understand them because he has no idea of what truth, instead relying on autistic rage.

Each of the five qualities of mind that Newman describes is almost something that God may grant to the most blessed of the saints in their lives on earth: the foresight of Isaiah, the insight of John Vianney into a sinner’s heart, the boundlessly patient charity of Mother Teresa, the solid equanimity of Thomas Aquinas, and the rapt gaze of Bernard of Clairvaux. Perhaps we may say that just as reason arrives at truths that are preambles to faith, so does the university dwell in the precincts of the Church. Newman had to distinguish a liberal and Catholic education from training in a skill, defending it from the utilitarian and secular impulses of industrial England. Still, he could take for granted that his readers would acknowledge the goodness of the ideal he was drawing, though they might not feel drawn to attain it in their own persons. We do, after all, need engineers, architects, and inventors.
One thing united the philological and theological dons of Oxford with the chemists of Manchester: a matter-of-course commitment to truth, insofar as they could discover it, cherish it, or deepen their gaze into its beauty. In that quest, no man’s feelings were of any consequence. Opponents may have delivered body blows to one another in the halls of debate or in the pubs afterward, but everyone would have scorned the idea that the possibility of hurt feelings might dictate what a man might say or how he might express it. What Newman calls “littleness and prejudice” would be scouted not by accusation but by intellectual dismantling. Truth loomed above them like a clear night sky powdered with stars. To that sky they might turn and forge those precious intellectual friendships that do not fail, because the ground of the union does not alter with the passage of years, much less with the rise and fall of the stock market or of a political party.
Well, we are far from the Mount of Contemplation. Modern man, afflicted with a variety of itches, sees no use in poetry and the rest of the liberal arts, unless they can teach him marketable skills such as writing a half-sensible memorandum. Hence the study of literature, with its rich content steeped in history, has given way to “communications,” a subject unmoored from both history and culture. Defenders of the liberal arts themselves, having forgotten the divine origin and end of the pursuit of wisdom, appeal not to freedom but to compulsion: at first the compulsions of the workplace, and now the compulsions of partisan advocacy, or of the self-fashioning and self-presentation of identity politics.

The problem here is that without a radical commitment to the truth, we lose our way. The post moderns do not believe in truth. They believe in power. They test this by breaking taboos. We are seeing this in the USA as the democrats politicize the deaths of Gen Kelly’s son: we see it in the instinct to épater le bourgeois. It will corrode society: unfortunately, for our elite, this is a feature not a bug.

Christianity is full of well-made taboos. It doesn’t stop at ‘thou shalt not kill’; though that is particularly appropriate in respect of abortions on demand. You’re obliged to honour your mother and father; to honour your wife. You’re obliged not to sleep around. You’re obliged to treat other people as you would be treated. To wit, decently.
If I were a typical climate scientist observing the contemporaneous collapse of Christianity and common decency, I would draw a settled conclusion that the two are causally related. However, most of us are not so simple-minded. I can’t say for sure that the decline of Christianity in the West is responsible for the rise of indecency. But, based on current trends, it’s worth asking what a society built on Christian taboos would eventually look like if its foundational inspiration were to go on crumbling. Nothing pretty is my guess.

Without Christianity, the West is lost, for Christianity made the West, via the work of the Church Fathers, primarily Augustine. The West is ancient texts plus salvation plus the warrior spirit of the Vikings. All these are resistant to convergence, if truth exists. Which is why truth is now crimethink, and our society is allowed to corrode.

For the State is indeed a jealous God, worshipped by the elite. Be not them. Be not like them.