What are you talking about? I said the freethinker movement of the 19th century ridiculed and dimissed Christianity as merely another superstitious pagan corn god myth -- it has the dying-and-rising again god, the passage about "unless the seed fall into the ground and die," and the identification of Christ's body with bread -- open and shut case for the freethinkers. They also maintained that the world as we know it had always existed and always would, without any superfluous Creator.
Newman had nothing to do with them. He was part of the Oxford Movement. Maybe you confused them, though it's hard to see how.
The pagan practices may have been brought into the Catholic Church but the Christianity of the Scriptures was a God given revelation
Nobody claimed otherwise -- well, except for the freethinker movement!
And at the same time saying it didn’t matter as bringing such pagan teaching and practice into the Catholic Church some how “sanctified” it.
What pagan "teaching"? AFAIK, there never was anything in any form of paganism that amounted to "teaching" in any meaningful sense of the word. They had practices and customs and the inborn impulse to worship they knew not what, made up some stories to fill the gap.
And, yes, Newman is in line with the Catholic Encyclopedia. So don't celebrate Christmas (the New England Puritans forbade any celebration of it) or have a Christmas tree or wear a wedding ring or sing at church services (without a church building, because that's pagan in origin) if you feel so strongly about it. It's still a free country, sort of.
“What pagan “teaching”? AFAIK, there never was anything in any form of paganism that amounted to “teaching” in any meaningful sense of the word. They had practices and customs and the inborn impulse to worship they knew not what, made up some stories to fill the gap.”
Here is what Newman said in his Essay,
“The phenomenon, admitted on all hands, is this: That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connexion of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it ‘These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian’. We, on the contrary, prefer to say, ‘these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen! ... so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine.”
You DID ask if I had any quotes from Newman.