Keeping colleges Catholic - Cover Story

Commonweal, April 9, 1999

Introduction

The Catholic church in the United States shares in one of the nation's most distinctive characteristics: the New World's sense of exceptionalism. Neither history nor experience dictate the future. In the American context, energy and enterprise can reshape human lives in ways that astonished the Old World, and perhaps still do. The American Catholic church, as much as our political, economic, and cultural systems, took advantage of the expansionist and independent spirit of a frontier society. Pioneering bishops, priests, sisters, and lay people helped build a vast system of Catholic institutions, of which the most remarkable is the more than two hundred colleges and universities rooted in the most far-flung rural landscapes and in the most densely populated cities. Catholic schools have sustained in the most disparate regions the presence of a Catholic intelligence. They have handed on the practice of a Catholic intellectual life, at first mostly to Catholics, and more recently to all corners, especially those who are among the least well-off in our society. Indeed, their record in educating first-generation Americans must be unparalleled. These schools have been a gift both to the Catholic church and to American society.

Today the future of these colleges and univerSities is gravely threatened. We do not use those words lightly. Nor did we gather the unprecedented number of articles that follow in this special section without the deepest hope that they will cause not only our readers but the whole Catholic community to consider the consequences of what is about to happen.

Next November when the bishops of the United States gather for their annual meeting, they are very likely to approve a set of canonical requirements that would irredeemably alter the character and mission of U.S. Catholic higher education, both for those schools who accept the canonical requirements and for those who demur. The details of those requirements, how and why they have come so perilously close to enactment, and their potential consequences are explored in the six articles that follow. Not light reading we admit, but these essays are required reading for all who are beneficiaries of these schools and for all who care that the Catholic church in the United States remain an intellectually engaged religious community.

The first consequence of an affirmative vote by the bishops next fall will be dissension. Presidents, boards of trustees, and faculties will have to choose - Catholic or Not Catholic, by the Vatican's definition. That in itself will bring division. Those who adopt the canonical requirements will forsake several distinctive features of higher education in this country - autonomy, academic freedom, and pluralism. Those that refuse the requirements may face the anathema of a local bishop, a religious order, and the Vatican: they will be declared Not Catholic. All of this, mind you, in the name of maintaining the Catholic identity and character of Catholic higher education in the United States.

That the achievement of two centuries and a twenty-year conversation about Catholic character and identity should falter or even fail at this point is not only heart-breaking, it is intolerable.

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other observers uncertain whether the response by Catholic educators has yet been at all commensurate to the challenge.

For the bishops' part, they are currently moving toward a confrontation that is needless and, if not outrightly destructive [see Paul C. Saunders, page 24], wasteful of an opportunity that may not soon return. They are doing this against their own better judgement, pressured by Rome and by a minority within their own ranks. How did we work ourselves into this counterproductive state?

The current discussion actually encompasses three distinguishable concerns:

* maintaining a Catholic character and mission in American Catholic institutions of higher education;

* complying with the apostolic constitution Ex corde ecclesiae;

* devising local "ordinances" that apply the general norms of Ex corde ecclesiae concretely to the United States.

These concerns are obviously related but not al all identical. What has happened is that, step by step, the discussion has lid from the first to the third, and in that process the subject has been radically changed. The original question of how Catholic higher education's religious identity might be defended or renewed has given way to a largely different topic, how Catholic higher education can be subordinated to canon law. The latter question is what is now being pursued regardless of its significance for the former. The point is no longer to reach the destination; it is to pay homage to the road map.

The challenge of retaining this country's exceptional network of Catholic colleges and universities as a key resource of scholarship and critical intelligence for the Catholic community did not arise because of Ex corde ecclesiae. Suppose that no Ex corde ecclesiae existed. Catholic leaders would have been no less obliged to analyze and counter the many pressures driving Catholic institutions, like many other institutions before them, toward secularization. Those pressures are multiple and complex. They are financial, legal, and cultural. They include market competition for students and faculty, the prevailing academic ethos, including its commitments to academic freedom and evaluation by peers, and finally an appreciation for diversity and individual conscience that runs as deep in the Catholic population as outside it. The dynamics of secularization, furthermore, operate differently on small institutions than on large ones, on research universities than on liberal arts colleges, on urban commuter schools than or residential campuses. Anyone who thinks that these pressures can be dealt with by a simple act of will on the part of Catholic educators is blithely ignorant of the realities. Not that a show of will isn't called for (and been sadly lacking) in some cases. But it will prove fruitless without a thoughtful, long-range strategy tailored to the individual institution and its setting. No one stroke is the answer; nurturing a Catholic identity demands a whole repertoire of initiatives that stretch from student life to recruitment of key faculty and administrators, from campus ministry to new course development, from research incentives to interdisciplinary conversations. This is not an effort to be achieved by fiat, from the top down. It requires explanation, persuasion, consensus building. And money helps.