44 Responses to “Is there such a thing as a Catholic college?”

1. 1 Doctor Asinorum Feb 18th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

   Clara will surely weigh in here, but I think it worth making a distinction between places that are completely gone (e.g. Georgetown) and places, like Notre Dame (and the University of St. Thomas) where certain bastions of orthodox Catholicism still remain. The hope, of course, is that these bastions might become the basis for a re-evangelization of the university.

2. 2 Clara Feb 19th, 2008 at 3:05 am

   It would be ridiculous to claim that Notre Dame is a completely, unproblematically, 100% orthodox Catholic university. But it would be equally silly to take it as nothing more than a cautionary tale. It should properly be seen as a “battleground school” — one where the battle between Catholicism and modernism is vigorously being fought. As the Doctor indicates, I think distinctions need to be drawn between “Catholic” schools whose religious identity is all but dead, and schools like Notre Dame that, despite some real deficiencies, are meaningfully Catholic, because a significant group of people continue to labor there in defense of the Church.

   Choosing a college is a complicated business, and it’s hard to make blanket statements, but generally speaking, I would much rather see my child educated at Notre Dame than at a public university.

   The existence of the 21 “joyfully Catholic” schools from Groeschel’s list is a wonderful thing. I have nothing but admiration and respect for these institutions that work so diligently to be fully faithful to the teachings of the Church, and I commend both the students who choose to go to them, and the parents that help pay the bills. Doubtless the Church will reap many rewards.

   At the same time, it should be admitted that schools like that tend to be quite marginalized in the academic world as a whole. That doesn’t mean, obviously, that they can’t do a tremendous amount of good, particularly for the students who attend them. Those graduates will hopefully go on to do many wonderful things — some as priests or religious, some as laypeople in various professions, and as parents raising good Catholic families. Nonetheless, the schools themselves are too marginalized to have much success in inserting Catholic views into the larger intellectual discourse of our times. And since their student bodies are overwhelmingly made up of already-very-committed Catholics, they don’t do much to help the vast majority of undergraduates (whose parents didn’t send them to very Catholic colleges) withstand the ravages of modernism in their universities.

   All of which is just to say that schools like Notre Dame can’t just be given up for lost. They’re too important. Like it or not, Notre Dame is the flagship of Catholic higher education in America, and it has the power to do many things that schools like Dallas or the Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy could not possibly do.

   Obviously I am by no means an impartial judge of this matter, because I have a real love for my alma mater, and it’s instinctive for me to want to defend her. Still, my personal experience might not be totally irrelevant in this matter. I came to Notre Dame knowing almost nothing about the Church, and while I didn’t actually convert until three years after my graduation, I think it’s clear that Notre Dame did much to help draw me towards the faith. What chance would there be of a Mormon girl having any dealings at all with Ave Maria, or Thomas Aquinas, or Christendom? A city set upon a hill cannot be hid… and Notre Dame is on much higher ground than these newer, smaller Catholic institutions. Our Lady’s most prominent university deserves to be defended.

3. 3 Raindear Feb 19th, 2008 at 10:31 am

   Clara,

   It is not entirely true that Christendom graduates are marginalized in the academic world. Some of my classmates and friends obtained significant fellowships because of their superior performance on the GRE. One fellow received a handsome fellowship to Harvard after he achieved outstanding scores on national Latin and Greek exams. Another student went on to do graduate philosophy studies at Notre Dame is now in Oxford for a year after receiving a Richard Weaver Fellowship.

   On the other hand, there have definitely been some cases where a Christendom degree made an academic career more difficult. One of my friends, an exceptionally talented history student at Christendom(nearly perfect scores on the SAT and GRE; valedictorian with a 4.0 and a double major in history and classics), was rejected by Notre Dame’s history department because he received his undergraduate degree from such a conservative school. However, another Christendom history student was accepted to ND for his doctoral studies after completing a masters elsewhere.

   So Christendom may present certain obstacles, but is not necessarily an academic dead end. Classics majors probably fare the best, because ideological issues are less intrinsic to their field.

4. 4 Clara Feb 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am

   Raindear,

   That kind of thing is certainly great to hear, and I didn’t mean to suggest that it is absolutely impossible to go from a school like Christendom into the larger academic world. But it does, as you say, present obstacles; I haven’t researched this but I suspect they would be much greater for those whose involvement with such a school came later in their academic career. Christendom, of course, doesn’t have a graduate school, but for schools that do there are probably limits to where a person can go immediately after completing a PhD. (I know there are cases of people who get PhDs from, say, Dallas, and work their way up to fairly prestigious academic positions, but I’m sure they do suffer from a lot of prejudice when they first go on the market. And believe me, going on the market is hard enough in any case!) I suspect the faculty at Christendom would be “branded for life”, and unless they managed to publish something really spectacular, would probably have a tough time getting jobs anywhere outside the circle of orthodox Catholic schools.

   Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A person could certainly have a rewarding career teaching in such places. But it would be optimal if not every orthodox Catholic took that route — the rest of the world needs some, too.

   Anyway, I’m sure you understand that what I say is by no means intended to diminish the value of orthodox Catholic schools. I’m just saying that places like Notre Dame have a part to play, too.

5. 5 Franciscus Feb 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am

   Clara, before we can discuss the merits of this guide further, it deserves mentioning that the parents’ responsibility of raising a well-formed child and evaluating what is best for the child in terms of college education trumps any guide, as good as it may be. Any guide is only meant to provide another source of information to make a good judgment about what to about college, not replace the parents’ responsibility or be a final word. It should only supplant an already critical evaluation of potential universities to attend.

   Keeping this in mind, the Cardinal Newman Society specifically wanted to debunk the notion that any college advertised as Catholic will be like a college run by the parish, closely monitoring all aspects of student life. Their job would be done once a child moves into the dorm, because obviously, they will wake-up, say vespers with all the other members in the dorm, and make it to 7 AM Mass. Then things precipitously go south when their child comes home and says “In Dogma 101, I learned that (insert heretical, modernist, Jesuitical teaching here).”

   There, no doubt, are a lot of treasures at Notre Dame, but you need to aware of them in the overall picture of the battlefield. I gather, that when you, Clara, would send one of your kids to Notre Dame, you would not want them to aimlessly walk in and assume everything from academics to student life is Catholic, but to know how to evaluate decisions based on the resources present. There is a huge difference between a philosophy class taught by Fr. McBrien and Prof. McIntyre.

   It would seem that the goal of the guide is to get parents to more critically evaluate how Catholicism is treated in college. The low percentage is a shock.

   Is academic prestige incompatible with Catholic teaching? Well, no. You would not call a Jesuit a gimpy academic up until the 19th century. That why I am very disappointed in the sad state of Jesuit universities. It would be ideal if Notre Dame with its academic riches and prestige continues to imbue them with Catholic philosophy and for newer schools to not be afraid to become a major player in academia. It all starts with educating formidable, Catholic students.

   What the review of Notre Dame was getting at was that Catholic teaching must be put aside for Notre Dame to become an academic player, which is not true. There must be a discourse that shows how Catholic ideals make one better in academia or how a great academic, Catholic or non-, embodies Catholic ideals.

   You bring up a very important point about non-Catholics in a Catholic college. Other than a single question in a Q&A, this guide seems to be written for Catholics by Catholics. This issue should not be forgotten in defining a Catholic college’s identity. Is their a conduit to the Faith that a non-Catholic can take advantage of in the University setting? As a cradle Catholic, I have to admit that this is difficult for me to think about.

6. 6 Tobias Petrus Feb 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

   There’s also the fact that not all college students go to school in order to join in some great intellectual crusade or struggle. Many are going in order to get a degree in journalism, business, nursing, engineering, public relations, etc. In such a situation, it is probably better to go with a school that is already Catholic (and qualified to provide the requisite degree, of course) than to hope that your kid, in the process of getting his MBA, will also take part in the liberation of a hostage university from Modernism. Some students will be agents of change for the better, some naturally will be molded by their current surroundings rather than attempt to re-mold their surroundings in a Catholic image. It depends on the type of student. I opted for a Jesuit school (over Notre Dame) after having read a book by Fr. Malachi Martin about the Jesuits. I went with low expectations, which were sometimes disproven, sometimes proven painfully correct. But I got a better education than if I had gone to a secular school.

7. 7 Tobias Petrus Feb 19th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

   “Is their a conduit to the Faith that a non-Catholic can take advantage of in the University setting?”

   Having a high number of non-Catholic students has often led to immense confusion over what the Catholic school is supposed to be. Marquette University is on the edge of, or rather surrounded by, the ghetto in Milwaukee. They aggressively seek inner-city students, in order to “give back to the community.” But that community, with the exception of the Latinos at the south end of the 16th Street Viaduct, consists of non-Catholics. So the current mantra is “Catholic and catholic,” i.e. specifically Roman Catholic and generally universal in scope. Jedi, er, Jesuit mind-tricks.

8. 8 Tobias Petrus Feb 19th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

   “Many are going in order to get a degree in journalism, business, nursing, engineering, public relations, etc.”

   Of course, students with these majors can and do join in the great crusade to re-Catholicize Catholic universities. But they will probably live most of their lives in the “real world,” and their theology and philosophy term papers will not be the first steps toward effecting some sea-change in academia.

   Regardless of their particular situation, the more general point holds: some students will be molded by their environments to a greater extent than others will, some will be molded more than they mold in return. Professional questions aside, for some students it would be better to go with a school where orthodoxy is non-controversial. I, having gone to a public school and not being very spiritual myself, opted for the intellectual ferment only Jesuits know how to concoct.

9. 9 Franciscus Feb 19th, 2008 at 8:29 pm

   Tobias, it is interesting that the Jesuits at Marquette had to make the distinction of “Catholic and catholic” in terms of educating its students. Be a Catholic by getting an education like other Catholics so in order that we can all be catholic? Very mind-tricky.

   Does an institution necessarily need to make a partition where one bin is for philosophy, theology, etc. and another bin for the trades of this world, business, journalism, etc.

   In the Forward, Cubanski quotes Cardinal Newman:

   a college or a univeristy is “a place that teaches universal knowledge. …Since knowledge is limited only by truth, if the Catholic faith is true, a univeristy cannot exist externally ot the Catholic place, for it cannot teach universal knowledge, if it does not teach Catholic theology. Hence a direct and active jurisdiction of the Church over it and in it is necessary, lest it should become a rival of the Church.”

   So according to the patron of universities, there is no partition. What is more ironic is that the people who live this are (were) the Jesuits!

   Was something lost?

   Can a university be an academic powerhouse without losing its Catholic identity?

10. 10 Tobias Petrus Feb 20th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    “Be a Catholic by getting an education like other Catholics so in order that we can all be catholic? Very mind-tricky.”

    That wasn’t their point. They wanted to be both specifically Catholic and open to all truth wherever found. Still “very mind-tricky,” but there was no real subordination of one to other, “Catholic to be catholic.” Just both. You can read the gobbledy-gook mission statement; I’m sure it’s online.

11. 11 Aric Feb 20th, 2008 at 7:27 pm

    Given the title, I would have thought the post was going in another introduction. In fact, many of the problems in Catholic higher education in this country stem from one particular professor (canon lawyer?) who convinced his fellow Catholics that, in fact, there was no such a thing as a Catholic college. (The premise was that only a baptised human being could be Catholic.) The account was laid out in detail in the chapter dedicated to Catholic colleges in James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light.

    I do not know whether the “colleges can’t be Catholic” thesis triumphed because it was unopposed or because it defeated its opposition. If the former, it is a lesson that a small amount of reason (not to mention intellectual honesty) can prevent a lot of evil. If the latter, it is an example that reason does not always defeat ir-reason.

12. 12 JSP Feb 21st, 2008 at 10:56 am

    I was pleasantly surprised to work for three years at Benedictine College as a Military Science Department Assistant Professor, training and commissioning many cadets, and finding a very pro-American, even pro-military sentiment running throughout the staff, faculty and student body.

    Not many colleges can say that.

    Also, I remember fondly my protestant cadets from Benedictine who could talk about the details of Catholic doctrine (especially on issues of morality) better than most Catholics today. Again, a credit to BC.

    Go Ravens!

13. 13 Franciscus Feb 21st, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    JSP, that is an excellent account from Benedictine College .

    Are you referring to the same Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, that is one of the “Catholic colleges” listed in this Newman Guide?

14. 14 Franciscus Feb 21st, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Aric, you raise a very intriguing account in “The Dying of the Light”. Is there a time-line that corroborates this “dying” with the rise of modernism?

    Looking into the un-Catholicising of the Univeristy is like opening Pandora’s box. Lack of reason or logic are not the only culprits of administrative decisions subversive to the Catholic Church. Pride and Avarice can very effectively cloud reason. The effects from infiltrating one, can be precipitated among many, especially in an academic setting.

    Catholicism in the collegiate setting must be continually defended and strengthened.

15. 15 JSP Feb 21st, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    Franciscus, yes.

16. 16 Giangaleazzo Feb 27th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    I don’t know much about the other schools, but here at DeSales university (one of the “fighting the tide” schools) the battle is almost over. A few Catholics in the Philo/Theo department is not enough, especially as most are not vigorous about their Faith. The rest of the teachers in other departments are blatantly heterodox, indifferent, sometimes deeply anti-Catholic, craftily hiding their agenda, which is hard to pick up by most, even moderate, Catholics. Further, Theology courses are increasingly modernist, explaining supernatural events with natural, psychological causes. The greatest danger is that it seems as if the school has made a secret pact with the state, disallowing it evangelization proper. No one is passionate about Christianity here, but for one “Catholic” biology teacher, evolution is God, dwarfing his Catholicism. There is mass confusion, and teaching all the positives about Islam does not help. Students will only doubt further and further, and without joyful Catholicism, they will only slide away from it.
    Of course, it’s not terribly lost, but looking objectively, it seems few believe in Catholicism here.
    I have been at the SSPX’s college in Kansas, and can frankly say that is the only solution: absolutely no compromise with the state. Once the state creeps in, it’s only a matter of time. But the state gives money, and something has to be given in return…
    Only good Catholic students are admitted to the small, single SSPX college, but it makes sense: we need to form strong Catholics first so they can give a good example, rather than train moderates who go with the wind.
    However, intellectualism is another problem: we also need intellectually strong students, able to discern the countless silent attacks upon the Faith. And this requries experience. Perhaps some locations, such as Notre Dame’s Catholics, are able to support this. But on a large scale, this is not happening.
    Education truly is formation in the Faith and living it out: so what is more important?

17. 17 Franciscus Feb 28th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    Giangaleazzo, those are some distressing accounts at DeSales, but I guess that explains the less-than- enthusiastic recommendation by the Newman Society. I haven’t read the section on DeSales. Is their accounts accurate with yours?

    Yes, well-formed and intellectually sound Catholics are required in Catholic as well as non-Catholic colleges. Only a well-formed Catholic can really take advantage of a college education at a Catholic college and, at the same time, only a well-formed Catholic can weather the attacks of modernism and heterodoxy when they arise.

    Of course, an ideal goal would be to have Catholic colleges as a place of evangelization. What better microcosm of the Faith is there than the student life at an orthodox institution. In reality, students are instead fighting for their Faith in student life at “phony” Catholic colleges.

    Schools that are willing do develop an intellectually strong foundation of the Faith are not founded very easily. We’ll have to hope and trust in God’s Providence to see if more and more schools are willing to adopt this philosophy.

18. 18 Clara Feb 28th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

    Not to be a broken record, but perhaps we need to think in terms a little less absolute. Universities cannot be neatly separated into the orthodox and the “phony”, and although it is obviously desirable, no matter what their intended path in life, for a young person to be a well-formed Catholic, it is difficult to say how people will react under different sorts of pressures. Some may, even in relatively hostile environments, mature into good Catholics, if they have a few teachers and exemplars who can help and inspire them. Others will quickly conform to the prevailing attitudes of their teachers classmates, and be lost. There is no hard and fast rule.

    As I’ve already pointed out, very Catholic colleges are unlikely to be effective tools for evangelization — at least not directly. Few who are not already committed to the Faith are likely to select such institutions for their higher education. Of course, their graduates might be engaged in various sorts of evangelization in their post-college years, and a Catholic university education would no doubt be good preparation for service of this kind. (Although, there are some other respects in which a more typical university education might be better preparation.) In any case, though, the institutions themselves aren’t likely to win many converts.

19. 19 Franciscus Feb 29th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

    Clara, I think you should look at the rankings in this guide more closely. You WILL find gradations in the status of orthodoxy of these Catholic colleges. However, all of these colleges have a commitment to uphold Catholic teaching. There are colleges that are “Fighting the Tide”, namely, reversing trends in the institution that contradict church teaching. The particular institution has a spotted past, but considerable steps have been taken for it to become an institution that more readily fosters orthodoxy.

    There are only SIX colleges that are considered to have all administrative facets in place which are consistent with the orthodox philosophy of Holy Mother Church. There are other colleges that are just starting up and do not have the same resources as these six schools have but are just as committed to the church. Finally, there are those schools that are under the “Fighting the Tide” category.

    According to research and interviews with the Notre Dame administration, Notre Dame is perfectly willing to maintain a “battleground” in the name of academic freedom rather than commit to being a full-fledged bastion of the Faith and uphold the rich and formidable intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church.

    Now, this guide is only a first edition, and other schools can be added or dropped. Hopefully, there will be more adds (including ND) than drops. We’ll just have to see.

    It is deeply troubling that you suggest that one’s temperament determines the optimal environment for deepening the Faith. Catholicism is not conformed to the person, we conform to the ideals of Catholicism.

    Now, our temperaments play a large role in how we achieve Catholic ideals, but they don’t affect the end, only the means. As a “hard and fast rule”, the ideals of Catholicism should permeate all facets of students’ life in a Catholic college. Of course, I agree it is up to the student to take advantage of properly presented Catholic teaching. It is also an extraordinary example of a prodigy to weather affronts in a hostile environment. But even in your example, orthodox teaching must be present.

    The orthodoxy of a Catholic college is not seen in a marginalized cookie-cutter image of its student body but in how it handles an array of issues. There *will* be issues. Promiscuity can be properly handled at an orthodox institution or it can be left untouched or even promoted in many secular schools. Are the right people in place to handle problems that are bound to arise?

    Clara, why is it so hard to accept that Catholicism and the pursuit of academics can be compatible, and why shouldn’t schools pursue this? One only needs to look at the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman and the rich, intellectual history of the Jesuits, before their fall into modernism.

    As an aside to evangilization, how can living among a student body faithful to Catholic teaching be non-productive in converting non-Catholics to Catholicism? Even if a non-Catholic does not convert while at a Catholic college, an appreciation or an understanding can come later at a more appropriate time. Many of these things are out of our control anyway, the best we can do is live the Faith the best we can.

20. 20 Clara Mar 1st, 2008 at 2:41 am

    Francisce, I fear we are not understanding each other. You are talking about ideals, and I about practicalities. This may lead to some serious areas of confusion.

    Of course orthodoxy is not, in principle, inimical to good scholarship — quite the contrary! The scholar should aim to discover the truth. How could access to a reliable source of truth possibly frustrate that end? I think Newman was perfectly right that a university ought to be built on the firm foundation of Catholic metaphysics and guided by the light of Catholic truth.

    You will note, however, that Newman’s signature work on this topic is about the idea of the university. And you seem to be intending, in this post, to address those who are making practical decisions (about where they should study, where they should teach, where their children should study, etc etc.) So we need to consider both the needs and the opportunities of the modernist society in which we actually live.

    Let’s clear up the easiest one first. You argue that orthodox Catholic universities are a good tool for converting non-Catholics, because they would be an ideal environment for bringing people to the faith. I’ve only posed one objection to this, but it’s a pretty strong one: the non-Catholics will not come. How many non-Catholics would even consider going to the Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy or the Wyoming Catholic College? If you interviewed seniors at an ordinary public high school, I’ll bet many or most of them would not have heard of a single college on the Newman Society’s recommended list. These schools won’t be effective tools for evangelization unless non-Catholics choose to come to them, and they won’t.

    Again, that obviously doesn’t mean that the graduates of such institutions might not, with the help of an excellent Catholic higher education, go out and evangelize in various ways. I’m sure they do. But that leads me into my next topic, relating to temperament.

    Catholicism is not conformed to the person. But talent and temperament can render people fit for different sorts of tasks, and different sorts of education might help prepare them for those tasks in different ways. In the military, different people are given different sorts of training, depending on what job they’ll be expected to do. Likewise with us in the army of Christ. A person who intends to be a doctor, or a computer programmer, or a kindergarten teacher in a Catholic school, doesn’t need a deep and intricate understanding of the follies of modern philosophy. Particularly if they are of a somewhat pliable or non-combative temperament, it’s probably best for them to be educated in a place where all their instruction, and everything about their environment, is supportive to their Catholic identity. They should still learn something about modernism; given how deeply it has penetrated our society as a whole, they could hardly avoid it entirely. But a fairly big-picture explanation from a trustworthy Catholic source should be just fine. No reason to risk exposing them to clever, rhetorically gifted modernists who might undermine their faith.

    On the other hand, we still need some front-line soldiers who are able and willing to engage heretics and modernists more directly. And since the modernists aren’t likely to come to us begging for instruction, we’ll have to send some of our people to them. Now the question becomes: at what point in their lives should such people be exposed to this hostile world? I don’t have a definite answer to that, but there are reasons for not putting it off too long. In the first place, there’s just a question of credentials. You do need some in order to be taken seriously in many arenas, and the truth of the matter is that schools like Dallas or Ave Maria just aren’t nearly as respected in the academy or the world at large as schools like Notre Dame. (I don’t really think that’s likely to change anytime soon, but I’ll get to thatnext.) But further, there is this: it becomes harder to fight against the grain the further up the ladder one goes. Generally speaking, professors are reasonably indulgent of dissenting views among their undergraduates. They have so many that they can’t expect to win them all over, and anyway, dissenters make for better class discussion. For graduate students, the atmosphere is considerably less tolerant. Grad students are part of the family now; they are being prepared to be lifelong representatives of the programs that trained them. Resistance to outlying views becomes much stiffer. Beyond the grad level, lots of modernist views have basically moved to the level of unquestioned assumption. They are encapsulated in the very language, and in the whole character of the debates. A person who has not learned to navigate through all this simply will not be able to penetrate these circles. The Angelic Doctor himself, were he to somehow be pulled through time to the present day, would need a good while to familiarize himself with contemporary scholarship before he would be able to get anything published in an academic journal. If you’re going to do effective work in this world, you need to be trained in it for at least part of your education.

    Opposition and struggle do often yield good results, for people of the right temperament. Just look at Dostoevsky. Or Augustine. Or Chesterton. The list goes on and on.

    This is one sort of reason, then, why both students and trained academics might consider secular or less-than-fully-orthodox universities to be promising places for spreading the faith, or preparing to help spread it.

    Now, to address something I hinted at earlier, when I suggested that orthodox Catholic universities are unlikely to rise to prominence in our society as a whole. Why should this be so? Certainly not, as I’ve already said, because anything about Catholicism is inherently destructive to good scholarship. But, in order to be a prominent university, certain things are needed, among them money and prestige (which, incidentally, tend to mutually reinforce one another.) It’s pretty hard for these little Catholic schools to get those things in much abundance. They often reject Federal funding, and while they may have good reasons for doing this (explained by Giangaleazzo above) this does put some limits on what they can do, for either faculty or students. Since their scope of influence is small, their circle of potential donors is also pretty small. And since they want their education to be as affordable as possible for ordinary Catholic families, they have a strong incentive to keep tuition from going through the roof. Obviously the upshot is that they don’t have that much money. That means that they can’t afford top-notch research facilities, and that they have to give their faculties lower salaries and higher teaching loads. These schools cannot possibly replace Notre Dame as the premiere Catholic university in America — in fact, they’re really not trying. They dedicate themselves for the most part to being good teaching schools that provide a solid undergraduate education for the children of good Catholic families. Which is a great thing to do! But we have to be realistic. Schools like Christendom or Steubenville are not poised to effect widespread reform in higher education or the country at large.

    Even if we could somehow get over the money problem, the truth is that, in a modernist society, a rigorously orthodox Catholic university will always be marginalized. This is inevitable simply because, by their own choice, these schools are not engaging in the conversations that are going on in other parts of the academic world. There is a tension here, and the resolution is not easy. If you want to combat heretics and modernists, you must engage them. If you want to engage them, you must give them a platform. Otherwise they will simply leave you to do your own thing in your own little Catholic world, which is largely what has happened to these “joyfully Catholic” schools. This is the sort of consideration that makes some administrators at places like Notre Dame take pause. They want to use Notre Dame to spread and bolster the faith (at least, some of them do) but they don’t want to destroy all its prestige and influence in the process, which is what would largely happen if they, say, insisted that all faculty members be orthodox Catholics. I’m not by any means saying that they make all the right choices — some of them have made me quite angry, in fact — but I think it must be understood that Notre Dame’s mission is legitimately somewhat different from Christendom’s, and they face some genuinely troubling questions that might not be problematic at all for a school with the more limited goals of an Ave Maria or a Southern Catholic College. And fighting for the side of orthodoxy at Notre Dame is a worthwhile task, because in a sense much more is at stake there than at a small Catholic teaching school. Notre Dame is on the front lines, and victories there will be seen and felt by more than just their own student body.

    It’s true that I tend to get a bit defensive about Notre Dame in particular, but I think I have some reason. There are a lot of really excellent Catholic thinkers there — I know this because I owe a great intellectual debt, not just to one person there, but to many. It’s hard to imagine how I would have turned out but for the instruction I received from them. I tasted the great intellectual tradition of Catholicism, and also began to understand the sort of struggle that was going on against the forces of modernism. Obviously the whole course of my life from there on was dramatically affected. Of course I wasn’t looking for any of that as an undergraduate; I wouldn’t have known what to look for. But that’s what I found. What hope would people like me (that is, the former me) have if there weren’t “battleground” universities like Notre Dame? Where would the debates take place? Where would the soldiers be trained?

    Notre Dame has made some real mistakes in its history, and I’m the first to lament them, but it does not deserve to be dismissed as a “phony” Catholic university. That’s an insult to the many people who have labored intensely to keep Notre Dame a really Catholic university, and who have succeeded to a non-trivial degree. If we care about higher education generally, and not just about a small circle of orthodox Catholic families, Notre Dame is an asset we can ill afford to lose.

21. 21 Tobias Petrus Mar 3rd, 2008 at 8:05 am

    “As I’ve already pointed out, very Catholic colleges are unlikely to be effective tools for evangelization — at least not directly. Few who are not already committed to the Faith are likely to select such institutions for their higher education. Of course, their graduates might be engaged in various sorts of evangelization in their post-college years, and a Catholic university education would no doubt be good preparation for service of this kind. (Although, there are some other respects in which a more typical university education might be better preparation.) In any case, though, the institutions themselves aren’t likely to win many converts.”

    But *is* evangelization the primary goal of a Catholic university? There used to be Jesuit schools where practically all the professors were rigorous, orthodox Catholics and many of the students were not, but there still was none of the “debate” that there is at a place like Notre Dame. Why don’t we consider what things were like before Vatican II — did Notre Dame see itself as a place where dissent was permitted for a supposedly greater good?

22. 22 Tobias Petrus Mar 3rd, 2008 at 8:10 am

    “But *is* evangelization the primary goal of a Catholic university? ”

    Point being: time was, most Catholic schools and colleges were regarded as schools and colleges *for* Catholics. To admit significant numbers of non-Catholics would lead to the senseless pluralism of today. That some non-Catholics have converted via Catholic schools is great, but successes in one respect do not rule out losses in another. Catholic schools should be Catholic. In places like Notre Dame (and Marquette), are the committed Catholics fighting to make their prestigious, moneyed, relevant universities into rigorously Catholic universities (hopefully without losing prestige and money), or just to be a representative voice within a pluralist matrix? If the latter, then those universities should not be called “Catholic” at all, but “pluralist-with-heavy-Catholic-infestation.”

23. 23 Clara Mar 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 am

    I brought up the conversion of non-Catholics mainly because Franciscus did. And no, I don’t think it’s the main goal of schools like Steubenville, Christendom, Ave Maria and so forth.

    With Notre Dame it’s more complicated. Certainly attracting non-Catholics to their student body and converting them isn’t the definite main goal. But they do, at least the good ones do, want to be a light to the world — they want to be a Catholic university that meets and answers many of the challenges of the day, and that wields some influence beyond its own little circle of alums. That’s been the intention for a long time, and while the school was surely more orthodox in many ways before Vatican II (wasn’t everything?), I don’t believe there was ever a time when, for example, the whole faculty were expected to be Catholic. (There was a time, though, when the football coach had to be Catholic.) I don’t think they ever took quite the “bunker” approach that seems to me to guide the schools mentioned above. Those schools are very conscious of trying to build something entirely outside the mainstream, and of deliberately blocking off outside ties (like Federal funding) that might put pressure on them to conform. Notre Dame was never like that.

    Perhaps it’s more dangerous today not to be like that, but you need to make your two categories (”Catholic” and “pluralist with heavy Catholic infestation”) more defined if they’re to be at all helpful. You ask whether the committed Catholics at Notre Dame are trying to make it “rigorously Catholic” or just another voice in the pluralist mix. Well, of course, there’s no one way to answer that because different people would surely say different things; that question is itself one of the things that’s being so intensely debated. But what if I answered you like this: their ultimate goal is to make the university rigorously Catholic… but rather than quarantining the university in order to do it, they’re trying to take the more circuitous route of converting the world! Of course I’m being a little bit silly, but not entirely. The very self-consciously Catholic colleges are not in a position to do much for the world or Academy as a whole, for reasons that I’ve already explained. Notre Dame is, and does. Although things like the Gay Film Fest make me sigh (it’s got a different name now, and is a bit more tightly controlled than it used to be, but basically it’s still going on), it is nonetheless true that Notre Dame puts its weight behind a lot of firmly Catholic initiatives. Observe all the Catholic publications that Notre Dame puts through their university press. And the conferences that are held on very Catholic topics through the Ethics and Culture center (among others.) I could go on, but I think the point stands — Notre Dame does provide assistance, sanctuary, and much-needed prestige for struggling Catholic scholars all over. The Academy needs these kinds of overtures, and who’s going to make them if Notre Dame can’t? But their potential to do things like that would be severely attenuated if they tried to turn themselves into a larger and richer Christendom College, which, as I say, hasn’t ever been their goal.

    I guess the bottom line is that I don’t agree that a Catholic university should necessarily see itself as mainly just existing to serve Catholics. It’s fine if there are some that do. But if we want to wage battle against the follies of the modern age, a university seems like one of the places for doing it. It would be a sore loss for everyone if schools like Notre Dame suddenly became indifferent to that end. On the ground, there are lots of different decisions to be made about how to go about this, and I’ve already agreed that I sometimes wish Notre Dame would make different ones, but I also don’t really want the Newman Society’s report to be seen as a blueprint for what every Catholic university should be.

24. 24 Tobias Petrus Mar 3rd, 2008 at 11:09 am

    “But if we want to wage battle against the follies of the modern age, a university seems like one of the places for doing it.”

    Take your persistent military analogy to heart. If your goal is to train warriors for the battlefield, you need to be assured of the loyalty of the profs at West Point. Having traitors on the faculty of West Point or VMA wouldn’t help those organizations. Purposely tolerating such traitors would merit a revocation of the title “US military academy,” etc. By all means the warriors should be prepared for the battlefield, but the battlefield should not be within the walls of Catholic universities or colleges. The enemy, as you call them, is the enemy, and hiring the enemy or giving him tenure is also known as capitulation. It is worth it to reclaim these (once) Catholic shools. But we need to be clear on what “reclaim” means.

25. 25 Tobias Petrus Mar 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am

    “Well, of course, there’s no one way to answer that because different people would surely say different things; that question is itself one of the things that’s being so intensely debated.”

    It is not intensely debated amongst committed Catholics. Committed Catholics want the Faith to prevail, not merely to be heard.

    ” The very self-consciously Catholic colleges are not in a position to do much for the world or Academy as a whole, for reasons that I’ve already explained.”

    And what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul by voting to give tenure to a heretic on the theology faculty? The Pharisees too would travel earth and sea to gain converts while damning themselves. Aren’t we supposed to “straighten up our own house” first? I want to go back to Marquette and fight the good fight; I think it’s worth it, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t pretend that Marquette is really “Catholic” as an organization. It’s a long road to Tipperary — I’m willing to go, but I realize that it’s a long way off.

26. 26 Clara Mar 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am

    I don’t have much experience with Marquette, but I’m inclined to think it’s in worse shape than Notre Dame. As I’ve said, I think there are some really heartening things going on at Notre Dame, together with some of the bad ones. Be that as it may… though I do like military analogies, the West Point comparison is not precisely right. In this case, universities are the battlefield — they are, after all, the place were academics meet and do battle. If you want to draw the analogy out more precisely, you might think of the earlier phases of education as equivalent to the military academies, and undergraduates might be like soldiers and junior officers in the fight. Because, of course, soldiers and officers do get trained on the job too — after they finish with the academy, they don’t get promoted to high ranks immediately. They start out in more junior positions, so that they can learn.

    Where is the “battleground” if not in the universities? And if you say “the secular universities”, consider what that would mean. Suppose we did actually succeed in reclaiming Marquette and Notre Dame and various other Catholic schools, and putting them into the Newman Center model wherein non-Catholic voices would be systematically denied any platform for speaking. The result would be that these schools would become more reliably orthodox, but would cease to have much relevance in the eyes of the rest of the academy. Now where would the “battleground” be? The secular university, presumably, but we’d probably find that the doors were now sealed pretty tightly. Having clearly sent the message that Catholic scholarship and secular scholarship don’t mix, secular schools would not see much reason to admit Catholics to their institutions. There would be no Notre Dames to bolster struggling young Catholic academics with things like the Catholic-but-still-academically-respectable Ethics and Culture conferences. And as schools like Notre Dame and Marquette lost their standing, all Catholic undergraduates would suffer from the same disadvantages that Raindear describes above with respect to Christendom grads. In short, the isolation cannot go only one way. By shutting heretics out of all Catholic universities, we’d be effectively removing any influence we have over the others. It would be winning a battle to lose the war.

    A good military commander sometimes likes to select the battleground in a place that’s advantageous to his own army. I like to think that’s what’s being done at schools like Notre Dame.

27. 27 Clara Mar 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    I should clarify too… in reality, there are lots of individual decisions that determine just how Catholic a particular university is going to be. Speaking in generalities like this may not be that helpful. But look, I don’t want Catholic universities to open their doors to absolutely everybody. Shutting out the Richard McBrians of the world is just fine. I don’t see any real merit in helping to advance the careers of people whose main academic goal seems to be the undermining of Church teaching. By the same token, refusing to allow, say, pro-abortion speakers on campus is great. If the president of Planned Parenthood were invited to give a talk at Notre Dame, of course that would make me furious. Certainly some degree of censorship is necessary if these institutions are going to stay meaningfully Catholic at all.

    I’m just saying that there are trade-offs, and we don’t necessarily want all institutions to draw the lines at the same places. For example, we might want some schools to exclude all but orthodox Catholic scholars, while others allow serious Protestant or Jewish scholars to work under their auspices, provided that they aren’t overtly and intentionally stirring up scandal against the Church. It seems reasonable to me to be stricter with people who identify themselves as Catholic than with people who never claimed to be, and stricter with philosophers or theologians than with chemists or accountants. But ideally what you want from a school like Notre Dame is to give the overall impression, not that they’re in any way afraid of the modernists, but that they just don’t want to devote too many resources to silly and defunct research programs when there are so many gems from their own tradition just waiting to be further explored.

28. 28 Franciscus Mar 4th, 2008 at 11:39 am

    Clara, I was harping on ideals in order to rationalize the method of evaluating the Catholicity of Catholic colleges. But looking at ideals does not stop there. A clear definition and picture of ideals is needed to make practical decisions. Very rarely does an ideal situation arise. Therefore, in order to make do with the situation at hand, deficiencies in areas need to be addressed to come closer to an ideal situation. Whatever the situation may be for someone thinking about college, the ideals should always be strive towards with what is available.

    To help clear up a simple issue about evangelization, I only mentioned Catholic colleges as a tool for evangelization because I have heard about non-Catholics at U Dallas from a link that was posted on the blog a year and a half(?) ago. You also showed concern for non-Catholics in earlier comments.

    I agree that it would be a rare occasion for a non-Catholic to attend a Catholic college, but in the unlikely (but providential?) event it does occur, a heathy, faithful student life can make a very positive impact towards evangilization.

    I wonder what the statistics are anyway. It would be interesting to know.

    In light of your concerns, Clara, about the impact these new and upcoming Catholic colleges have on academia, I think the overall scope and mission of this guide needs to be clarified. Somewhere it was lost.

    College does not prepare you academia, *graduate* school does. So what is the purpose of college?

    To foster sound fundamental life skills one needs to succeed at a crucial developmental time.

    At a Catholic college, this should be done faithfully to Catholic teaching and includes the development of a rich Spiritual Life, which takes into account one’s temperament. Navigating one’s own temperament is vital to a good Spiritual Life. To stress this point further, the collegiate years are an extremely important developmental time to foster one’s identity.
    Shouldn’t this be done in the line of Catholicism?

    Right now, there are very few places that do this, as the Newman Guide points out because their criteria for evaluating a college centers around this point. Are solid Catholic fundamentals developed and nurtured
    at “X”? Given this question, of course this question is inconsistent with the “greater good of academia”.

    Why be critical of an institution’s place in academia based on their philosophy of undergraduate education? An undergraduate education is focused around teaching fundamentals, while academia is focused around
    pushing beyond what we know, which is what I gather is your “battleground”. Frankly, we enter a “battleground” when we wake up, so any oases to strengthen Faith should be welcomed and taken very seriously.

    Therefore, a graduate education at a “well-known” university would make you a better player in academia compared to your undergraduate education. Notre Dame definitely falls under this category. In addition, a great foundation at an orthodox Catholic college would
    bolster a graduate education with a rich Spiritual Life and a proper perspective. There are also less problems with secular graduate education. The environment is more mature and business-like with graduate education and a lot of the issues with Catholicism that a secular
    university might have are not present. Can you really compare the student life of an undergrad and grad?

    If I am not mistaken, aren’t graduate students more likely to take advantage of the orthodox think-tanks at ND in their work than undergrads? Would you say that there are less problems with the Grad program at ND
    that with the undergrad program? Wouldn’t more responsible grad students gravitate towards orthodoxy more than undergrads?

    To sum up, a college education is not meant to expose someone to the modernist matrix that is academia but to form a solid foundation rooted in the Faith so that if one wants to engage the modernists at their own game, a proper and more focused training in graduate school for an academic career can make one a serious player in defense of Holy Mother Church.

29. 29 Clara Mar 4th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    It feels a little funny to me to say that college is for establishing “fundamentals” — I would tend to think of that happening a little earlier in life. By college, you should really be pushing the boundaries of your knowledge a little further. Some of the basic groundwork for one’s identity should ideally be laid at a younger age; by college, young people are asking themselves, “What sort of adult life should I live?” “For what do my talents and temperament suit me?” I tend to think it would be more difficult to answer those questions without getting a taste for what the life one is choosing might really be like. Also, just practically speaking, it’s a lot harder to get into a good graduate program coming out of a small Catholic college — as Raindear has related earlier in this thread.

    But hey, I’m perfectly prepared to countenance the possibility that an education at an orthodox Catholic college would have given me certain wonderful experiences and resources that I now am not in a position to appreciate. We all have just one life to look back on, and converts especially are always in the position of trying to appreciate the positives of a personal history that we know perfectly well shouldn’t be the norm.

    It occurs to me, though, that our perspectives on this differ a lot in virtue of our different disciplines, Francisce. This is especially revealed when you say this:

    “There are also less problems with secular graduate education. The environment is more mature and business-like with graduate education and a lot of the issues with Catholicism that a secular
    university might have are not present. Can you really compare the student life of an undergrad and grad?”

    Thinking about it, I can see how that probably would be the case for you. Certainly from the perspective of the lifestyle, a graduate program is more just like an adult job; you needn’t plunge yourself so deeply into the general ethos of the campus. And in your field, religious convictions aren’t very directly relevant to the work, so even if there are widespread anti-Catholic prejudices in your department, there’s no reason why this should necessarily complicate your academic life.

    In my field, though, my religious convictions are very centrally relevant to the subject matter, and yes, in my field, I would say that it’s more difficult/dangerous to be a graduate student at a secular university than to be an undergraduate. Considerably so, in fact. I mentioned a few of the reasons above. As an undergrad, you’re basically just one of hundreds of students who are “sampling” the department’s different courses. Most professors are inclined to be pretty tolerant of undergrads who dissent from the majority views, so long as they do it intelligently and respectfully. Although academics probably do hope to disseminate their ideas among their students generally, they know they can’t expect to persuade everybody, and they may actually appreciate some dissent in the classroom just for its value in sparking discussion. After the semester ends they’ll probably never see you again, so they’re not too bothered about converting you personally.

    Graduate students, on the other hand, are being systematically professionalized in their field. Professionalization involves learning the assumptions and methods of discourse within your discipline… and in some fields, those may be in serious tension with the faith. At this level, professors will not be so tolerant of students who resist — after all, if they give you a PhD, you’re going to be out there representing their program among their peers for a long time to come. So yes, the pressure to compromise the faith is much more prolonged, and much more intense, than anything undergraduates are likely to encounter. Even assuming a student managed to get into a school like Cornell after attending a school like Christendom, I suspect it would be a very steep learning curve once they got there.

30. 30 Tobias Petrus Mar 4th, 2008 at 4:20 pm

    Clara, if the academy does not want to hear from a Church that consistently applies its own teaching, then the academy doesn’t *deserve* to hear from the Church. So much for the academy, so much for the world, and so much for their ruler. You can only do so much in order to stay relevant. I am sure that the Church could be much more relevant in the eyes of the world if it suffered more dissent in its parishes and seminaries and chanceries. We wouldn’t want to put our candle under a bushel basket by disciplining dissenters, would we?

    The Catholic school is a battleground insofar as it should a place for Catholics to get together and fight the ideas of people who never could get hired at a Catholic school. You want orthodox schools? Well you can either have them by ignoring the world (to a greater or lesser extent) or you can put them off until the rest of the world gets in line.

    “The result would be that these schools would become more reliably orthodox, but would cease to have much relevance in the eyes of the rest of the academy. Now where would the “battleground” be?”

    If the “eyes of the rest of the academy” are too blind to see, we can’t make them.

    I am not in favor of such isolation that there would be a secular America and a Catholic American and never the twain do meet. I want all America converted. Some forum of debate somewhere would be disirable. But not in hiring heretics to theology and philosophy departments. Not in hiring feminists to literature departments. Not in diminishing the orthodoxy of Catholic schools. Not in ignoring Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which two past presidents of Notre Dame condemned. Jews and Protestants in business and engineering? I guess I can’t see how that would be so obviously bad, provided they gave no scandal.

    Actually, perhaps we should reappraise where the battle actually is. I assume it is to make the world Catholic, right? Maybe the battle isn’t even so much between the grand poobahs of academia, and it’s not in the brain. It is in the heart, and it is between God and the devil. Great intellectual training is wonderful, it has its role, but the battle there actually is not paramount. The primary goal is to convert the world, and for that we need not so much brilliant Catholic academics but priests, ordinary clergy or special religious orders, simply to Catholicize the country en masse. If all the students at the state schools are Catholics anyway, then the intellectual divide between the two educational systems you propose will not be so important. In many ways 1940s-50s America stood poised at “critical mass,” where the scales might have tipped in the Church’s favor. If the clergy and religious, trained in orthodox schools win the real battle in the trenches of the heart, then the academy won’t have to shoulder a burden that properly doesn’t belong to it and which it is institutionally ill-equipped for. St. Augustine did more to defeat paganism as a bishop than he would have if he’d remained a rhetor (a professor/talking head/policy wonk).

    Don’t get me wrong: brilliant scholars are wonderful, great, etc. But they aren’t going to convert the country. Compromising the orthodoxy of Church institutions in order to give skilled academics’ a greater audience seems too great a compromise. Better orthodoxy and letting clergy and religious (not lay academics) make the Church “relevant” by converting the masses. Historically speaking, it is the Boniface’s and Ignatius’ who convert nations, not the Chestertons and von Hildebrands. Convert the world, and the Catholic academy won’t have to compromise itself in order to shoulder a burden that does not belong to it in the first instance.

31. 31 Clara Mar 4th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    There seems to be something of an obvious false dichotomy in this post, perhaps best exemplified in this quote:

    “Historically speaking, it is the Boniface’s and Ignatius’ who convert nations, not the Chestertons and von Hildebrands.”

    But surely the latter two, Chesterton especially, have made scores of converts too. Nobody doubts in the least that good priests and bishops are vital to the health of the Church, but she needs good scholars too, especially today when the former are in shorter supply. And indeed, both pastors and scholars have always, from the beginning of the Church, been critically important. I imagine St. Augustine was a good bishop, but his greatest gifts to the Church were surely through his scholarly work. Each are mutually supportive of the other.

    “I am sure that the Church could be much more relevant in the eyes of the world if it suffered more dissent in its parishes and seminaries and chanceries.”

    But no, not at all! If anything, she has greatly hurt her relevance by suffering too much! Those kinds of compromises, I agree, make her appear relevant for a season (a very brief one), after which she becomes identical to most of the other churches on the market — and hence irrelevant. But the parish council is not the appropriate place for suffering dissent. The university is. Some places should be preserved as sanctuaries in which the faith is not questioned or attacked; in others, good-faith skeptics and dissidents should be patiently engaged and answered. Parish life should go into the former category, but universities are the proper forums for the latter.

    Again, I agree that people who are blatantly offensive and willfully destructive to the faith (i.e. Richard McBrian) should not be permitted to work and teach at a Catholic university. People like that are poisonous in a way that can’t be cured through reasoned debate. Monasteries in Siberia would probably be of more use. (Cases like that are doubly sad, because as faulty as the university administration may be for refusing to check him, his religious superiors are even more to blame.)

    But admitting a certain number of representatives of other faiths (or of atheism) is another matter. I don’t think of it as a compromise per se, though it may reasonably be called a risk. Allowing dissenters to say their piece, in the appropriate sphere, needn’t be a concession to relativism or what have you. It is just part of the process of assessing their positions, answering them and, through that exchange, helping to convert the world. Such has always been the case, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. And universities are the places where this can happen.

    Are there other fronts on which the battle must be waged? Of course. God wants our hearts AND our might AND our minds… and consequently the devil goes after them all. Catholic academics look primarily to protecting/winning the mind, not because this is the only thing that needs attention (nor necessarily the most important), but because that is their particular province. Think of them as soldiers defending a particular flank in a large battle. They shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that they are the only part of the army that matters, but neither should they think that they can afford to slacken in their efforts. If they do, the impact on all the other units could be considerable.

32. 32 Boots Mar 7th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

    The small lights on the hills are gathering together to form lights much brighter. As a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, I have been amongst some of the movers and shakers of Catholicism at least those of the very near future and a few of today. Father Berg, Superior General of the FSSP is a TAC graduate (1993).

    I have never met more good and pious, and engaged people than amongst the TAC, UDallas, Christendom crowd. BTW I know of a few really good converts from Mormonism that came through TAC.

    I am happy though to be graduating from ND this coming spring. I do think Catholicism sometimes takes a back seat. “oh yeah, and we’re Catholic too” but there are truly good things happening here, but there have been a lot of “social justice” Catholics from the 1960s and 70s entrenched here that I think it will be a while before things are really good, but there are signs of improvement.

33. 33 Br. Andre Mar 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    Tobias Petrus:

    “Not in ignoring Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which two past presidents of Notre Dame condemned.”

    Please cite your sources here. I’m quite familiar with both of the living past presidents at Notre Dame. (Their tenure dates back to 1953) I’m also quite familiar with Ex Corde and the issues surrounding it. I was present for some of the discussions about Ex Corde between ND faculty and administration and Bishop D’Arcy. Never have I heard any one of the three living presidents “condemn” the document. Jenkins, the current president, quotes it with great enthusiasm. Hesburgh and Malloy have both been positive towards it. Malloy was even invited by the Vatican in the late ’80s - early ’90s to be a consultor on the document. He served in that capacity for several years.

    Perhaps you are thinking of the issue of the mandatum for theology professors. If you are, you are mistaking a document of basic principles (Ex Corde) for an instrument of church discipline that was created to ensure that one of those principles would be adequately upheld. These are two VERY different things. Malloy objected to the mandatum being public, not to Ex Corde itself which he helped form.

34. 34 Tobias Petrus Mar 8th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    Yes, Br. Andre, it was the mandatum to which I was referring. http://ewtn.com/library/ACADEMIC/CATHACAD.HTM

    Mazza’s document states the following: “Holy Cross Father Edward Malloy, president of the University of Notre Dame, went so far as to say in February of 1994 that the ‘mandate’ requirement, expressed not only in the Code, but also in (Article 4) and the proposed ordinances (#5 and #6), was ‘offensive to the Catholic theological community’ (, 2/19/94).”

    I took Mazza at his word that the mandate is required by the Code and by Ex Corde Ecclesiae. I also took him at his word when he wrote:

    “If the publication of was meant to effect a change in this situation, it faces what can only be called an uphill battle. Shortly after the proposed schema for the Vatican document on Catholic higher education appeared, Fr. Ted Hesburgh of Notre Dame lamented in magazine that if the Church ‘can dictate who can teach. . . the university is not free and, in fact, is not a true university where the truth is sought and taught. It is, rather, a place of. . . religious indoctrination’ (America, 11/1/86, p. 250). Commenting in a 1991 issue of Fordham’s magazine, Hesburgh noted his resentment with efforts at reforming the Catholic university: ‘It is worth noting that the people who have produced these documents have never created anything in Catholic higher education themselves….American Catholic higher education is a success story. We don’t need to be reformed.’”

    Said article also details the story of the Land o’ Lakes document put out under Fr. Hesburgh’s leadership.

35. 35 Maximilian Hanlon Mar 12th, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    I’m not sure if people are still interested in contributing to this thread, but having spent an hour reading it, I would like to add a word or two of my own.

    As an alumnus Ave Maria University, I find it interesting that Ave is choosing a course for itself that tries to sail between the two different views expressed by Clara and Tobias. Ave is becoming more “mainstream” (and by “mainstream,” I primarily understand “boring”) precisely in order to evangelize, but not just evangelize anyone. One powerful voice in the administration wants the institution to become more “mainstream” in order to attract more “Joe-Shmoe” Nordite Catholics, in hopes that, after experiencing real Catholic culture and the Church’s immense intellectual tradition, these “average” Catholics will become vigorously committed to the life of the Church in every possible facet.

    Clara, no doubt, will have no objection to an institution choosing this path for itself. I must also congratulate her desire (probably her vocation?) to fight the big-bad-evil-monster of modernity right in its own territory of the state-funded university system. I would like, however, to pose a question to her. Is it wise to “fight the good fight” in the way you suggest? Doing battle with the monster on the monster’s home court will certainly take its toll and produce a deleterious effect upon one’s soul. Are our intellectual foes even willing to listen to what we have to say? Do they “have the ears” to “hear” it? As a graduate student myself now in a secular institution, most of the faculty seem to me to end up as faculty in such a place precisely because they are the sorts of people who have rejected the Church’s message, and they have no desire to reconsider their choice.

    All of this comes back to a very basic question that all AMU alumni will have to make sometime in their lives: Live in Ave Maria Town (and other similiar communities) to protect oneself and family in a Catholic “bubble,” or be a light in a very dark place and risk losing one’s own soul.

    Is the culture war so far gone that it’s not worth fighting anymore? How can one discern if he has the call to combat evil in its own territory of the modern University (as I think Clara is in fact doing)? Finally, if one does bring to one’s scholarship the basic premises and dogmas required by Catholic Faith, can one have any hope of being published?

    (In that last question, I intend primarily scholarship in the humanities.)

36. 36 Tobias Petrus Mar 12th, 2008 at 7:26 pm

    Good to hear from you, Maximilian. “Nordite” — now there’s a neologism I like!

37. 37 Maximilian Hanlon Mar 13th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    Tobias,

    If you get a chance, please ask Clara to read and respond to my questions. I’m really interested in what she might have to say.

38. 38 Maximilian Hanlon Mar 13th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    Tobias, one question for you: Do you object to the sort of evangelism desired by AMU’s administration ? If yes, how and why do you object?

39. 39 Tobias Petrus Mar 13th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    No objections here. They may be boring, as you put it, but they are trying to get “Nordite” Catholics, as you call them, to come and then ease them into something more traditional (that’s how I understood your description). As for Notre Dame, et al., they don’t seem to want to evangelize Protestant students. I.e., that does not seem to be their intention in letting in non-Catholics. Plus, Notre Dame et al. consciously hire idiots and heretics, and, I guess the excuse is some combination of academic freedom and the need to fight “the real battle.” Well, they’ve already sold out “the real cause,” so I don’t see why they’d be effective (note: I have not read Clara’s most recent post here, nor do I intend to do so). Ave Maria may be going “mainstream,” but so far you indicate that there has been nothing shockingly bad, as I can say is true of Marquette (e.g. pro-homosexual groups on campus, “rainbow Masses,” priests who pray to “god our father and our mother,” raging heretics on the theology faculty, literature professors who make idle, atheistic-sounding comments apropos of nothing, etc. ad nauseam). Those things shoudn’t be tolerated, even if then you don’t get your professors invited to the best conferences and seminars.

40. 40 Tobias Petrus Mar 13th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    Oh, by the way, Maximilian, Reggie will be speaking at Cornell around Labor Day weekend this year. Hopefully you and some of your Latinophone colleagues can make it up here. Michael Fontanus should have a post up on the email list sometime soon.

41. 41 Maximilian Hanlon Mar 13th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    Tobias: As far as I can tell, AMU has not changed its Catholic identity one bit to attract more Nordites; the admissions department is simply advertising in more “mainstream” periodicals (like the National Catholic Register) in addition to its usual ways of making AMU known. In fact, recently Fr. Fessio has started saying the TLM on campus.

    You should be aware that there are two non-Catholics on the faculty: 1. Rabbi Dalin (who is the foremost Jewish scholar in the world famous for defending Pope Pius XII); and, 2. Dr. Daniel Nodes (a Professor of Classical Languages who is Eastern Orthodox). Nonetheless, neither of these two faculty members has ever sought to undermine the religious identity of the institution or the faith of the students. Other than that, as far as can be ascertained, all faculty are Catholics in good standing with the Church and faithful to the authentic Magisterium.

    Thanks for the notice about Foster. I’ll try to show up if I can.

42. 42 Clara Mar 13th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

    Hello, Maximilian. Thanks for your comment… I appreciate how difficult these questions can be for aspiring academics.

    Can engagement with heretics, atheists, etc. be dangerous? Surely. We should pray regularly for wisdom, courage and fidelity. And of course we should avail ourselves of all other protections that the Church provides (the Sacraments, devotions, etc.) But it’s hardly as though this task is the only ‘dangerous’ one we might be called to undertake. Missionary work in pagan (or Islamic?) lands entails grave dangers to the soul. Working with criminals or prostitutes or other troubled people can involve spiritual dangers. Being a priest or a bishop entails grave spiritual dangers (as multiple examples seem to show.) Many of the most worthwhile tasks involve dangers. That doesn’t mean we should shun them, though. Personally, I’m a little chilled when Tobias Petrus declares that the modern university doesn’t “deserve” the light that Catholic academics could bring to it. Of course not, but if Christianity were about getting what we deserve, we’d all be in a bad way. Our task is not to weigh deserts, but to fight the fight for souls.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean signing up for a suicide mission, so to speak. It’s all right to exercise some prudence about where there’s real good to be done and where your words will fall entirely on deaf ears. I’m inclined to think that there are places of both kinds in the modern academic world. In some disciplines, it may be all but impossible to make any headway as a faithful Catholic. You’ll never get published, never get a PhD, never get any kind of job, etc. You’re not cowardly to avoid those fields. Find someplace where there’s more good to be done.

    However, I do think there are fields within the humanities where a good Catholic can make progress. They may fight an uphill battle, but if they learn the right ways to present their claims, they can still be both faithful to the Church and at least somewhat successful in the field. I think it’s possible to do this in philosophy, maybe not in every university, but in some. I can’t speak for all humanities disciplines, but I think there are promising points of entry.

    In my department at Cornell, I don’t encounter much overt anti-Catholic bigotry. Sometimes, of course, my assumptions are so at odds with those of my peers that it’s difficult to be taken seriously. But quite honestly, what I get from many people is a sort of gentle curiosity, at least if I find a way to couch my claims within puzzles that are philosophically interesting to them. There may be a patronizing element to it (how fascinating to see further into the minds of the crazy people!) but at least they’re not averse to understanding the Catholic view a bit better, and that’s a place to start.

43. 43 Clara Mar 13th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    Oh, there was one other part: how do you know what you personally are “called” to do? When presented with a choice between “engaging” the secular world, and settling down within a Catholic ‘bubble’, how to choose?

    No definite answer to this. In the first place, of course, making your way within academia is always difficult, and to some degree your choice may be made by the opportunities that actually present themselves. If you only get offered one job, you take that job and do whatever good you can with it. Likewise if you get offered multiple jobs, but all in the same sort of institution. Available opportunities, personal and family needs, etc etc, will often make a lot of the decisions for you.

    If your options are more varied, you might do your best evaluation of your own temperament and skills. I think there’s something to be said for people who have the credentials to make their way in the secular university doing that, and leaving the jobs at very Catholic schools open to graduates of very Catholic universities who might have trouble getting hired anywhere else. Just a pragmatic consideration. On the other hand, if you have a strong desire to lend your hand to the building of very Catholic schools, that’s certainly a noble task too, and particularly if you’re the sort of person who just feels marginalized and miserable in a secular school, that might be a good sign to look for a position elsewhere. If you feel that your faith is really suffering in a secular school, definitely look for another job!

    That general advice might not be that helpful, I don’t know. I guess in my own case, I’m not absolutely determined that fighting the errors of modernism is my life’s work — of course my work and my husband’s will be bound together one way or another, and our careers aren’t our only concern in life. Still, given where we are now, our background, education, temperaments, etc… I certainly take seriously the notion that this may be one of our tasks. Partly, we just happen to have the educational credentials and academic training that can open the relevant opportunities. But also — and as a convert you may understand this, because it’s a common trait among converts — I think we have the temperament for it. I am certainly sensible that the convert’s way of coming to the faith tends to leave him with certain spiritual deficiencies. But, as numerous historical examples seem to show, it also often develops the irascible part of his nature to a substantial degree. He has a battle-hardened toughness, and a thirst to engage the enemy. If that’s what you’ve got, well, offer it up to God. Let Him give you occasion to use it, if it should be His will. If your gifts lie elsewhere, don’t worry about it. God will find work for us all.

44. 44 Maximilian Hanlon Mar 13th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Thanks, Clara, for that response. Perhaps I can provide a way for you and Tobias to dialogue more on this issue. You seem to be in support of the idea that some well-formed Catholic intellectuals should prudently seek professorships in state-funded universities and so engage the modern world on its own turf. I’m sure Tobias would agree with you there. You also agree that some Catholic institutions of higher education should exist which seek only (or at least primarily) to form Catholics in our own tradition (eg. Christendom, Ave, TAC).

    The disagreement seems to be this: Should historically Catholic institutions invite non-Catholics into their faculties to increase the intellectual diversity present around the clock on their own campuses? Although I am not an alumnus of Notre Dame and have only visited that campus once, it seems to me that what I’ve just described is precisely what Notre Dame did. You seem to dislike the results that this has produced at Notre Dame (eg. lack of Catholic identity in some aspects of the institution, a cultural approval of homogenital acts), but like the idea of dialoguing with modernity by hiring a significant number of non-Catholics as faculty (say one fourth of the total).

    As I noted earlier, having a very few non-Catholics on the faculty has not seemed to hurt AMU thus far, but in the case of my alma mater we’re talking about two faculty members (without anti-Catholic agendas) out of about sixty faculty members total. It goes without saying that only Catholics willing to take the mandatum publicly are allowed to teach theology (and only Catholics teach philosophy as well).

    So, perhaps the question should be phrased this way: What percentage of the total faculty (at an institution dedicated to preserving its Catholic identity) should be non-Catholic, provided that none of the non-Catholics have a bone to pick with the Church? I, of course, also exclude supposed “Catholics” with anti-Catholic agendas (eg. Fr. McBrian, Fr. Curran). I think we can also agree that only Catholics willing to take the mandatum should be allowed to teach theology.

    Secondly, could a university whose facutly is mostly Catholic but includes some non-offensive non-Catholics rise to the sort of secular prominence that Notre Dame has achieved?

    Thirdly, how often would it be permissible for such an institution to allow anti-Catholic intellectuals to speak and promote their views on campus, provided that such speakers were publicly advertised as professing heterodox views? Could such a speaker (eg. one who supports “gay marriage”) be allowed to speak occasionaly on campus about a non-doctrinal issue (eg. on economics), provided that he didn’t discuss his heterodox opinion?

    I imagine that these questions might be worthwhile for our discussion, if we wish to continue this thread.

Leave a Reply