AAUP, Meinrad vie in McEnroy case

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 9, 1996 by Pamela Schaeffer

Administrators at St. Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana have refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by the American Association of University Professors to investigate last year's firing of Mercy Sr. Carmel McEnroy, a tenured theology professor.

A committee will visit St. Meinrad on Feb. 23 and make a report to the AAUP, which could result in the school's formal censure by the association. The AAUP is a watchdog group that seeks to protect academic freedom in U.S. colleges and universities.

In a recent memo to administrators and faculty at the school, dated Jan. 29, Benedictine Fr. Mark O'Keefe, academic dean, said, "I want to make it clear that the administration of the School of Theology does not approve of this visit. We are not cooperating with it nor are we offering any assistance for it. We respect the fact that individual faculty members may do as they see fit if contacted by the AAUP. Members of the administration will not meet with the visitation team."

Barbara Crawford, director of communications at the school, said administrators regard the case as a church matter having nothing to do with academic freedom or with the jurisdiction of the AAUP."

McEnroy had taught for 14 years at St. Meinrad when she was fired in April for signing, along with hundreds of others, an open letter to Pope John Paul II. The letter, published as an advertisement in NCR, criticized the Vatican's efforts to stifle discussion of the church's ban on women priests.

School administrators said McEnroy's action in signing the letter amounted to "public dissent" from church teaching. McEnroy, who remains unemployed, contends she was fired without warning and without due process, although she had signed the ad as "a private person," not as a representative of St. Meinrad.

"I'm very glad they are coming," she said of the committee's upcoming visit. "I hope this will help to throw light on the injustice done to me."

She has just finished correcting proofs of her book, Guests in Their Own House: The Women of Vatican II, scheduled for spring release by Crossroads.

Jonathan Knight, an officer of the AAUP, said the committee will go forward with its inquiry despite the administrator's stance, meeting with McEnroy and others familiar with the case. Although administrators normally cooperate with such investigations, St. Meinrad's refusal is not unprecedented, Knight said.

Members of the ad hoc committee appointed to visit St. Meinrad are Bertram H. Davis, chair of the English department at Florida State University and a former general secretary of the AAUP, and Sr. Marie G. Hungerman, philosophy professor at Nazareth College and Western Michigan University.

In his memo to faculty members, O'Keefe noted that the AAUP, unlike North Central Association or the Association of Theological Schools, "is not an accrediting agency. We do not believe that AAUP is in a position to understand or to appreciate our distinctive academic and ecclesial situation. Our legal counsel concurs with this judgment."

McEnroy noted that St. Meinrad's includes the AAUP's statement on academic freedom in the school's handbook, thereby endorsing it. But Crawford said the statement did not apply to McEnroy's case. "Were this issue considered a matter of academic freedom," AAUP principles would apply, Crawford said.

According to B. Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the AAUP, he received a letter on Dec. 18,. 1995, from Benedictine Fr. Eugene Hensell, St. Meinrad's rector, stating that the association was overstepping its bounds in the McEnroy case. The association is "without authority to interpret church law or to review decisions of the church," Hensell wrote, adding that, in dismissing McEnroy, administrators had "acted at the direction of the religious ordinary of St. Meinrad Archabbey pursuant to the laws of the Roman Catholic church." In this case, the religious ordinary is Archabbott Timothy Sweeney, spiritual leader of St. Meinrad Archabbey, which runs the school.

Sweeney sent a letter to McEnroy on April 26, stating that he had asked Hensell to terminate her contract.

Hensell's remarks in the Dec. 18 letter were in response to a letter from Kreiser, dated Nov. 20, in., which Kreiser said AAUP officials had determined that McEnroy's case "raises significant issues of academic freedom, tenure and due process."

In a Jan. 19 letter to the St. Meinrad rector, Kreiser wrote: "Several years ago, when we investigated and reported on the case of Professor Charles E. Curran at The Catholic University of America -- a case not all that dissimilar to that of Professor McEnroy in the issues of ecclesiastical authority it raised -- the undertaking had the cooperation of the CUA administration, whose position on the key issues was fully represented."

As a result of that investigation, the AAUP censured Catholic University. Such a sanction functions as a red flag to academics involved in decisions about accepting jobs or honorary degrees or holding academic conferences at a given school, Knight said.