• The Idea of a Catholic University
  • Two Important Documents
  • Views from Boston College
  • Other Catholic Voices
• Pluralism and Identity in Catholic Universities
• The Historical Background of the Debate over Catholic Identity
• Catholic Social Teaching
• The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic Studies, and the Formation of Catholic Scholars
  

---

The Idea of a Catholic University
a. Two Important Documents

One way of framing the whole debate about the nature of a Catholic university is to cite two influential documents.

One had a deep impact on the thinking of an important generation of Catholic educators. It was a paper given in 1955 by one of the leading Catholic scholars of the day, the historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life." (in Thought 30, Autumn, 1955, 351-388). In it he pointed out that few Catholic scholars were listed in standard indices of achievement, that Catholic colleges were more interested in the moral development of their students than in their intellectual growth, that they sent relatively few students on to graduate studies, that the proliferation of graduate programs in Catholic universities amounted to a perpetuation of mediocrity, and that generally American Catholics seemed to have little sense of dedication to an intellectual apostolate.

If Ellis seemed to challenge Catholic universities to meet the same standards as the leading universities of the day, the second document put a quite different question to Catholic higher education. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in their 1968 book, The Academic Revolution, included a chapter on "Catholics and Their Colleges," an analysis that repays reading more than thirty years later. The closing pages of the chapter were devoted to "The Future of the Catholic Colleges." In the final paragraph, the authors wrote:

The important question…is not whether a few Catholic universities prove capable of competing with Harvard and Berkeley on the latter's terms, but whether Catholicism can provide an ideology or personnel for developing alternatives to the Harvard--Berkeley model of excellence. Our guess is that the ablest Catholic educators will feel obliged to put most of their energies into proving that Catholics can beat non-Catholics at the latter's game. But having proved this, a few may be able to do something more. There is as yet no American Catholic university that manages to fuse academic professionalism with concern for questions of ultimate social and moral importance…(405)

The best known official church document on the idea of a Catholic university, Pope John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), makes no reference, of course, to either of these historical challenges, but it could be said to be implicitly a commentary on the issues they raised. Ex Corde sets out, in a style of discourse familiar from Roman documents, a description of the identity and mission of the Catholic university and then a number of norms that apply the Code of Canon Law to Catholic universities. The debate over the latter has obscured a number of virtues in the document's presentation of the former and though aspects of its concept of a Catholic university have aroused legitimate debate the document offers a rich vision of what a Catholic university could be.

Joseph O'Hare, S.J., president of Fordham University, has written a helpful short history of the genesis of this document and of the controversy surrounding its reception in the U.S. A convenient one-volume edition that contains both commentaries on Ex corde Ecclesiae and the Apostolic Constitution itself is Catholic Universities in Church and Society, edited by John P. Langan, S.J. with a Foreword by Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J.(Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1993). This volume has a number of fine essays by first-rate scholars: Philip Gleason, Joseph Komonchak, Michael Buckley, James Provost, and Jaroslav Pelikan, covering the historical, ecclesiastical, theological, and canonical issues occasioned by the Vatican's document.  The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) maintains a helpful page on Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

b. Views from Boston College

A broader, equally thought-provoking, and perhaps more accessible approach to identifying the distinctive qualities of a Catholic university (because rooted in more familiar language and experiences) would be to look at some statements that have come from members of the Boston College community or have emerged from Boston College occasions.

• Michael J. Buckley, S.J., director of the Jesuit Institute at BC, has been one of the most thoughtful writers on the Catholic university. In a series of essays and finally in a recent book he has advanced the thesis that it is the distinctive service of the Catholic university to sustain a dialogue between religious faith and the experience of God's self-disclosure in revelation on the one hand and the various forms of academic reflection on contemporary culture on the other.
  
  "The university is Catholic in its deliberate determination to render the church and the broader world this unique service: to be an intellectual community where in utter academic freedom the variant lines of Catholic tradition and thought can intersect with all of the traditions and convictions that constitute contemporary culture and move toward a reflective unity between world culture and the self-revelation of God." (America, 29 May 1993, p. 16)
  
  One might begin with Buckley's essay, "The Catholic University and Its Inherent Promise" (America, 29 May 1993)Buckley's position here became the subject of a subsequent debate between him and David O'Brien, professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, in the pages of America magazine ("A Collegiate Conversation," September, 1993). O'Brien thought that Buckley advocated installing a distinctive Catholic intellectual tradition as the integrating principle of the university. He feared this would undo all the positive openings to contemporary culture that have enriched Catholic higher education in the recent past. Buckley replied that he was proposing a mutually illuminating dialectic of the religious and the academic, the Gospel and contemporary culture.
  
  
• On October 17, 1996 Buckley preached a homily, "The Vision of the Catholic University: All Things In Christ," at the Mass on the occasion of the installation of Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., as president of Boston College. In the course of it, he argues that "a Catholic university should be more truly a university precisely because it is Catholic. Its parent culture, the Church--at its best--evokes, encourages, and sustains those questions of ultimacy which have for three thousand years framed the wisdom of any intellectual community."
  
  
• Buckley has also argued that a proper understanding of humanism requires including a concern for justice. See "The University and the Concern for Justice: The Search for a New Humanism" (Thought 57, June 1982) and "Christian Humanism and Human Misery: A Challenge to the Jesuit University," in Francis M. Lazarus, ed., Faith, Discovery, Service: Perspectives on Jesuit Education (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1992), 77-105.
  
  Buckley gathered many of these ideas into an exposition framed by reflection on the history of religiously oriented education and on the Jesuit tradition of education in The Catholic University As Promise and Project: Reflections In A Jesuit Idiom (Georgetown University Press, 1998)
  
  
• David Hollenbach, S.J., Flatley Professor of Catholic Theology at Boston College, has written two useful essays on the Catholic dimension of the university. One is a lecture on "The Catholic University and the Common Good" (Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education 1994), which argues that the Catholic understanding of social solidarity can contribute better solutions to our urgent cultural and social problems than individualist and pluralist viewpoints.
  
  A second lecture, "The Catholic University Under the Sign of the Cross: Christian Humanism in a Broken World" (1994), takes up Michael Buckley's thesis that a concern for justice is not only compatible with but is required by the university's humanistic aims. Hollenbach argues that this enlarged sense of the requirements of humanism will be furthered by a more explicit emphasis on the central symbol of Christianity, the cross. The cross counters an optimistic, often grandiose tradition of scientific humanism by insisting that the ultimate mystery that surrounds our lives embraces human suffering and shares human misery. Its central lesson, compassion for the suffering of others, needs to be part of the university's humanism.
  
  
• Michael Himes, professor of theology at Boston College, describes the hallmarks of education in a Catholic and Jesuit context as: sacramentality, humanization as divinization, introduction into a living conversation that transcends time and space, and an insistence on social action and reflection upon that action. See "Living Conversation: Higher Education in a Catholic Context" (Conversations in Jesuit Higher Education, Fall 1995)
  
  
• A former trustee of Boston College and a noted theologian Brian E. Daley, S.J., who for many years has taught at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, not far from the shadow of Harvard University, reflects on what it means to be a Catholic university in "Christ and the Catholic University" (America, 11 September 1993)
  
  
• In a Commencement Address at Xavier University, Cincinnati (May 19, 2001), the former president and now chancellor of Boston College, Rev. J. Donald Monan, S.J., describes the sense of community, of connections between mind and heart that are the silent message of a university's buildings, its curriculum, the pursuits of its faculty and staff, and the friendships that its students form.
  
• Stephen J. Pope, currently chair of the Theology Department at Boston College, wrote a piece for Commonweal magazine, "A Vocation for Catholic Higher Education?" (28 March 1997), in which he contrasts two claims about the nature of a university. One, Jon Sobrino's, emerging from the experience of the oppressed in El Salvador, argues that a Catholic university must be committed to the poor and participate in movements for their empowerment. The other, in Cardinal John Henry Newman's famous work, The Idea of a University, rests on the view that knowledge is valuable in itself, whether or not it is useful or motivated by compassion. Pope weighs both views, finds them not at odds with one another, and argues that Catholic universities need to graduate students who have learned both "enlargement of heart" and "enlargement of mind."
  
  
• A more trenchant statement of the view that education in a Catholic university should involve the kind of encounter with the poor and the marginalized that results in a conversion of heart, a developed sense of solidarity with the suffering of the world and a desire to use one's gifts in the project of understanding and changing unjust social and political structures can be found in an essay by Dean Brackley, S.J. (of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador), "Higher Standards for Higher Education: The Christian University and Solidarity," (in Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 2002).
  
  
• A fascinating way of approaching some of the central issues in Catholic higher education today is to read the papers that formed the symposium, "Remembering A Past--Imagining A Future: Catholic Higher Education," that was held to mark the inauguration of Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., as president of Boston College. The symposium took place on 17 October 1996 in Robsham Theater on the BC campus. Its three addresses were reprinted in Boston College Magazine.
  • In "Marley's Burden: A Ghost Story," Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago Law School develops the idea that Catholic universities are not about business as usual but have "taken as their mission the development of the whole person rather than just the preparation of students for a trade or a livelihood."
  • In "Just Say No: The Power of Negative Reinforcement," Peter Steinfels, religion correspondent for the New York Times, summarizes the religious identity and mission of Catholic colleges and universities in terms of four "nos" (no to the historical pattern of secularization followed by most religiously affiliated universities in the 19th century, no to any surrender of academic freedom, no to any arrangements that would make non-Catholic students or non-Catholic faculty unwelcome, no to the idea of returning to a supposed golden age) and three tentative affirmations (that Catholic identity should be reflected not only in campus ministry, liturgy and service programs but also in the intellectual life of the university; that that Catholic identity is something broader than the place and character of theology and should show up in all the other academic departments too; and that maintaining any kind of distinct identity implies somehow bringing that factor into the hiring process.
  • In "Dedicated Memory: The Virtue of Hindsight," Rev. J. Bryan Hehir of Harvard Divinity School grounds a vision of the Catholic university on three "memories": the "long narrative of faith and reason" that is part of the Catholic experience, Vatican II's fresh vision of the relationship of church and world, and the distinctively American understanding that knowledge is transformed into power,which Hehir sees as related to the Jesuit tradition that both knowledge and power must be framed within the structure of a moral universe and must be given direction in terms of ends and means.

c. Other Catholic Voices

Several other contributions to the discussion of the nature of a Catholic university can be recommended:

• The title of historian David J. O'Brien's From the Heart of the American Church: Catholic Higher Education and American Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994) was suggested by the papal document Ex Corde Ecclesiae. O'Brien explores the historical and ecclesial context for the current debates about what makes a Catholic institution Catholic.
• The distinguished former president of the University of Notre Dame, Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., invited 29 members of the faculty and administration from various fields at that institution to contribute to a volume about the critical issues in contemporary Catholic higher education. The result is The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, ed. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
• George Dennis O'Brien, former president of the University of Rochester and frequent writer on higher education issues, has published a philosophical analysis of the Catholic university, The Idea of a Catholic University (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
• Rev. James H. Provost was chair of the department of canon law at The Catholic University of America. In 1994, during the early stages of the Ex Corde debate, he wrote an interesting article, "The Sides of Catholic Identity" for Current Issues in Catholic Higher Education, 14 (2), 1994. It was reprinted in Enhancing Religious Identity: Best Practices from Catholic Campuses, ed. John Wilcox and Irene King (Georgetown University Press, 2000), 18-26. In the article he makes an interesting distinction, between "outside" Catholic identity--the public label on a college or university, its relationship to hierarchy and official structures--and the more important "inside" identity, the culture or spirit that animates the institutional life, summed up for Provost in two concepts, communion and mission.
• An article by Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., "The Advantages of a Catholic University," America (May 20, 2002), 19-21. In contrast to views that hold that religion belongs to the private sector but has no place in the university, or that all points of view may properly be represented in the university while the university itself must remain neutral, or that a university may properly dedicate itself to the Catholic intellectual tradition while respecting the right of other traditions to maintain their own heritages, Dulles argues that Catholic universities have unique qualifications for the discovery and dissemination of truth.

>top

Pluralism and Identity in Catholic Universities

There are widely varying opinions about the de facto pluralism of student bodies and faculties and administrative staffs in most Catholic colleges and universities. Some see a conflict between institutional identity and diversity of belief and fear that the latter will inevitably erode the former. Others see pluralism as a good because it reproduces the diversity of American society and gives voices to groups on the margins of our culture. Perhaps the most interesting contributions to this discussion are those which develop the view that a Catholic university needs a pluralism of views for its own good health. It achieves its distinctive purpose of promoting the interaction of faith and the varied forms of culture only if the two challenge and transform each other.

Here are several essays which explore various facets of this understanding of pluralism and diversity in the Catholic university community:

• J. Donald Monan, S.J., "Faithful Acts," Boston College Magazine (Spring 1992).
• William M. Shea, "Beyond Tolerance: Pluralism and Catholic Higher Education" (Current Issues in Catholic Higher Educations 8:2)
• Walter J. Ong, S.J., "Yeast: A Parable for Catholic Higher Education" (America, 7 April 1990)

  Ong, emeritus professor of humanities at Saint Louis University and author of numerous ground-breaking studies in the history of culture, reflects on the tension between Catholic identity and the growing pluralism of Catholic universities. He finds the tension a healthy one and suggests that yeast is a useful image of how Catholic identity works. "Yeast acts on dough, but it does not convert all the dough into yeast, nor is it able to do so or meant to do so." Its primary effect is to interact, and this interaction results in ferment and growth for both yeast and dough. A faith that sets out to engage itself with all of the real world of God's diverse creation finds pluralism not a problem but a source of nourishment. "We cannot expect to draw from purely Catholic sources the knowledge we need for this vast enterprise."

• John Langan, S.J., "Reforging Catholic Identity: How Will Non-Catholic Faculty Fit In?" (Commonweal, 21 April 2000)
• William J. Rewak, S.J., "Dissent in Catholic Universities" (Current Issues, Summer 1987)
• Alan Wolfe, "Catholic Universities Can Be the Salvation of Pluralism on American Campuses" (Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 February 1999)
• John McDade, S.J., in a paper written for the 1999 conference on Jesuit higher education at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia "The Jesuit Mission and Dialogue with Culture" (Jesuit Education 21: Conference Proceedings on the Future of Jesuit Higher Education ed. Martin R. Tripole; Saint Joseph's University Press, 2000, 56-66).

  McDade suggests that Christianity is always involved in a double activity, proclaiming to human culture the significance of the unique reality of the divine Word made flesh but also discovering in dialogue with human culture a richer account of what it means to be human. It not only draws on other anthropologies, it needs them to understand itself. "Now, if this is right, Christian truth cannot eliminate what is outside its territory without undermining itself: the non-Christian other to which we related is the other that we need in order to be ourselves." (62)

>top

The Historical Background of the Debate About Catholic Identity

Three books offer authoritative overviews of the changes that Catholic higher education has undergone in recent decades. The President of Boston College, William P. Leahy, S.J. in Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Georgetown, 1991) takes as his subject how Catholics adapted to the United States and how American culture affected Catholicism and especially Catholic higher education during the twentieth century. Philip Gleason, in Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995) focuses especially on the changes from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s. Alice Gallin, O.S.U. in Negotiating Identity: Catholic Higher Education Since 1960 (Notre Dame, 2000) tracks in some detail the last four decades of change in Catholic colleges and universities and in the world of Catholic higher education administration.

The Governance of Jesuit Colleges in the United States, 1920-1970 by Paul Fitzgerald (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984) is an intriguing account of American Jesuit higher education from the perspective of the issues the colleges and universities faced and the decision-making processes they evolved to resolve them.

American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967-1990, ed. Alice Gallin, O.S.U. (Notre Dame, 1992) is a reference volume containing the documents that reveal church official's and university presidents' collaborative efforts to answer the questions: What does it mean to be a university or college? And, specifically, what does it mean for such an institution to be Catholic? Among the interesting documents it contains is the so-called Land O'Lakes statement, "The Nature of the Catholic University," which takes its name from the Notre Dame conference center where a gathering of leaders of Catholic higher education was held in 1967. This was the first post-Vatican II document about the state of autonomy in Catholic higher education. In a Boston College Magazine article ( "The Land O'Lakes Statement,"1995), David J. O'Brien recalled the importance of this document thirty years after it was written.

>top

Catholic Social Thought and Social Justice

A good collection of documents and source material is Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage, ed. David J. O'Brien and Thomas A. Shannon (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).

Two useful guides to the subject are Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret, by Michael Schulteis, SJ; Edward DeBerri, SJ; and Peter Henriot, SJ (Washington, Center of Concern, 1985) and Doing Faith Justice: An Introduction to Catholic Social Thought, by Fred Kammer, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1991).

On justice in Catholic higher education, a helpful resource is The Just One Justices: The Role of Justice at The Heart of Catholic Higher Education, edited by Mark K. McCullough (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2000). This volume represents the views of a number of higher education personnel committed to the mission of justice. John Coleman's foreword is an attractive, seven--page summary of approaches to the question of the relationship between justice and higher education, worth reading on its own merits.

Another useful work is John R. Donahue, SJ, What Does the Lord Require? A Bibliographical Essay on the Bible and Social Justice (Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, 2000).

For those who wish to explore the resources of the Web on this topic, a very useful starting point is the web site of the Center for Concern, in Washington, DC. The Center's main web site (http://www.coc.org/) directs the user to a number of resources, including their own publications.

A truly comprehensive--and possibly exhausting--list of links to documents having to do with Catholic social teaching, originating from both Roman and U.S. sources, can be found at a privately maintained website: http://www.justpeace.org/docu.htm.

For brief summaries of the important documents of the Church's social teaching, go to a site sponsored by U.S. Catholic magazine, "The Busy Christian's Guide to Catholic Social Teaching."

Other useful web sites include a site maintained by the Archdiocese of St.Paul-Minneapolis and the homepage of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, www.nicwj.org

>top

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic Studies, the Formation of Catholic Scholars

The "Catholic intellectual tradition" is a notion more often invoked (especially in mission statements) than explained. On the one hand, there is a vast repository of theological thought; philosophizing; works of literature, visual art, music, and drama; styles of architecture; legal reasoning; social and political theorizing; and other forms of cultural expression that could be said to have been influenced by two thousand years of Christian religious experience or five hundred years of a specifically Catholic sensibility. On the other hand, there is the challenge of synthesizing the meaning of this vast archive, summing up its principles, and making them relevant to contemporary intellectual life.

Three collections of essays survey the issues and are a good starting point to get an idea of what the term "Catholic intellectual tradition" might mean and how it might function in different academic fields:

• Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, ed. A. Cernera and O. Morgan (Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 2001). Especially helpful is the essay by Gerald A. McCool, S.J., "The Christian Wisdom Tradition and Enlightenment Reason."
• The Challenge and Promise of the Catholic University, ed. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) contains a number of essays that explore the links between a Catholic intellectual tradition and the academic disciplines of the modern university.
• A useful collection of essays that covers more than the Catholic intellectual tradition but also sheds light on this particular topic is: As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life. Ed. Thomas M. Landy (Sheed and Ward, 2001). The essay "The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Achievement and Challenge," 3-16, is especially helpful.

A thorough bibliography on "Understanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition" is maintained online by Villanova University's Office for Mission Effectiveness.

Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, Robert E. Sullivan, ed. (Notre Dame University Press, 2001).

A fairly recent development is the appearance of "Catholic Studies" as a field of academic research and as a rubric for curricular programs on university campuses. A useful overview is an article, "Catholic Studies in Catholic Colleges and Universities," by Thomas M. Landy (America, January 3, 1998)

The most notable academic program in Catholic Studies is at the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul. St. Thomas offers a Master's degree in the field and publishes a journal. See their web site: http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/.

Collegium is a noteworthy program that fosters the development of a religiously oriented view of the intellectual life among faculty from Catholic colleges and universities and among graduate students who are interested in teaching in Catholic institutions of higher education. Each summer Collegium gathers several dozen graduate students, faculty members, and senior mentors for a week of reflection and spiritual growth on a campus of one of the member institutions.

For two useful accounts of Collegium see:

• James Kelley, "Collegium and the Futures of Catholic Higher Education," (America, 11 Sept., 1993).
• Tom Landy, "Collegium and the Intellectual's Vocation to Serve," (Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Fall 1996).

Collegium's website provides a handy list of links to other sites dealing with Catholic intellectual life.

>Top      >Next: "Jesuits"