Keeping colleges Catholic - Cover Story

Could this approach have muscle? Hasn't there been enough mindlessness or avoidance on the part of Catholic educators to justify the Vatican's demand for a "juridical" approach? Doesn't anything less leave the bishops and the church generally at the mercy of recalcitrant educators' protestations of good intentions? If the Vatican's demand for a "juridical" approach were freed from its canon law specifics and simply translated into a search for some practical leverage, a workable compromise might be within reach. Catholic bishops always retain the prerogative of unilaterally announcing that a college or university no longer meets the minimal conditions for being considered distinctly Catholic. There would be legal consequences but the reverberations would be potentially great, and I think most institutions would strive to avoid such a public rift. And given the danger that such a break could be irreversible, bishops would avoid it too. If a declaration of this nature were issued lightly or eccentrically by a local bishop, it would quickly backfire, generating solidarity from other schools, and alienating scholars and educated Catholics. The bishops might do well to devise procedures for insuring that such a declaration of last resort were used rarely and responsibly, in view of an institution's overall posture rather than some narrowly defined dispute, and only after an appeals process, broad consultation, and institutionalized opportunities for dialogue and resolution. Should an approach based on communication and mutual trust need to be balanced with a little bit of muscle in reserve, this seems like a more flexible and restrained way than applying canon law.

I am convinced that the American bishops can find a way to implement Ex corde ecclesiae that has real bite but does not sabotage Catholic higher education and the current initiatives to affirm its Catholic identity. But they will have to keep several things in mind.

* Back to basics. Return to the papal vision enunciated in the first part of Ex corde ecclesiae and, beyond that, to the concrete reality of the campuses. The goal is preserving the distinctly Catholic character of these institutions. It is not abstract compliance with a code or even a papal text. It is not mounting a weapon for penalizing dissenting theologians. It is not to keep Catholic students or the Catholic public innocent of objectionable ideas. Clarity and realism about the objective are primary.

* There is no single model for being a Catholic college or university in the United States. Different histories, different locales, different constituencies, different opportunities, resources, and aspirations suggest different models. Let there be a strictly doctrinally defined Franciscan University of Steubenville and a cosmopolitan Georgetown and a more religiously homogeneous but academically open Notre Dame, and also liberal arts colleges serving working-class women or minority and often non-Catholic returning students. Let the bishops show that the one university they already collectively control, The Catholic University of America, can finally, after more than a century, become a presence in the first rank of American universities. See which one of these institutions or, more realistically, which ones best live up to the pope's culturally evangelizing vision. Perhaps that vision will be best served by a variety of models emphasizing different aspects of the task.