What makes a college Catholic?

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 28, 2005 by William C. Graham

I regard Wheaton College and North Park University in Illinois as fine places for students to pursue any number of tracks in the arts and sciences. Well, the arts anyway. They have strong reputations, time campuses, good faculties and happy student bodies. Personally, I do not share many of their evangelical approaches, and knowing that I would not flourish in a place where evolution is not taught and scripture studies are taught from a perspective that predates Pius XII's 1943 Divino Afflante Spiritu, I would not apply to work there. But why would one seek employment as a faculty member at either place and then attempt to reform the institution into something that was not within its mission? Perhaps a better question is, could such a one even be hired at either place? If not, is that anti-diversity?

Would a scholar seek employment as a faculty member at Brandeis and, once there, suggest angrily that the place is just too Jewish and should lighten up? Have Catholics invited assassins into the family's colleges and universities in what James Tunstead Burtchaell calls "the flush of self-hatred" in his book The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches? Have theology and philosophy, which once had pride of place in the Catholic curriculum, been benched for the long haul?

Must an embrace of diversity exclude having an identity of one's own? Burtchaell quotes a Christian Brother, a trustee of St. Mary's University of California: "If all colleges and universities--Catholic, Mormon, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, any faith--are required to be pluralistic in deed as well as thought, then our society has actually lost its pluralism."

Burtchaell finds the story of the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches to be melancholy in a way he had not anticipated. They are melancholy because the colleges and universities could have helped their churches intellectually had they cultivated denominational affiliation. Also, the estrangement between colleges and churches was effected by men and women who had claimed to want to be partners in both the life of the spirit and the life of the mind.

Perhaps Catholic institutions have been slower than some others in adopting the language of mission. This is not because they previously did not know mission, but when institutions of higher learning were staffed principally by members of the sponsoring religious communities, there was no need for talk of mission in hiring. But when the numbers of religious on staff dwindled and lay professors were hired, too often not enough attention was paid to the distinctive Catholic character of the institution. Among the aims of Ex Corde Ecclesiae is to see that those who govern Catholic colleges and universities will make the Catholic faith tradition a living reality at the institutions they oversee, thus reclaiming both character and mission.

It is not clear to me that Ave Maria University in Ann Arbor, Mich., or Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, provide a better, more Catholic alternative. From my observations, they may offer a nostalgic reconstruction of a worldview frozen in time at about 1960, unable effectively to address the issues of the last 45 years. Many other universities that see themselves as "in the Catholic tradition" appear caught somewhere between the 1970s and the 1980s, where process is more highly valued than product, where diversity is celebrated except where it might seek to include traditional Catholic ideas. Ex Corde Ecclesiae, however, succinctly states our mission: