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