FINDING 'THE CATHOLIC THING' : In Aquinas, Marx & Billie Holiday - defining 'Catholic Studies' at university level

Commonweal, April 20, 2001 by Paul Crowley

Catholic studies programs seem to be springing up like mushrooms all over the country. Typically, these programs involve the awarding of a certificate or a minor, and in some cases bachelor's and master's degrees. They range from well-funded and highly developed enterprises such as the program at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to modest interdisciplinary programs such as the one at Santa Clara University in California. Not only Catholic universities, but some secular ones as well, are in the process of establishing some kind of Catholic studies program or chair. Some of these programs signal a healthy reinvigoration of Catholicism and interest in the Catholic faith tradition at a time when many people inside and outside the church question some of the directions taken by the Catholic church in the past few years. In many places, these programs are attracting students who are eager to learn more about their faith and to delve into it more deeply, even in places where there already seem to be many excellent existing resources for the study of Catholicism. The existence of these programs is already generating a cottage industry involving conferences, publications, research grants, and academic working groups at national academic meetings of theologians and religious scholars.

Yet, after serving for five years as director of the small interdisciplinary program at Santa Clara University, I am led to ask: Why? To what needs do these various programs respond? What has given rise to them? And if we are to have them, then what should they be doing?

The why question calls for a complex answer, because each of these collegiate programs has a distinct history. I attended my first Catholic studies conference, sponsored by the University of Saint Thomas, four years ago. Scores of schools with various types of programs were in attendance. What struck me was how widely divergent these programs were in their origins, goals, and modes of operation. It was clear that "Catholic studies" did not describe any single model of an academic field, much less any unified view of Catholicism itself. The Santa Clara program, for example, was the result of a discussion among some faculty in the religious studies department more than ten years ago, when a Protestant faculty member proposed a concentration in Catholic studies for students interested in pursuing a high school teaching career. Gradually, faculty from other departments were brought into the conversation. Concurrently, Santa Clara, like other Catholic universities, was engaged in a long-range process of articulating its Catholic character and Jesuit mission. Some faculty involved in the initial conversations about Catholic studies were involved in these discussions as well. A further factor was the existence at Santa Clara of a number of small, interdisciplinary minors (Medieval/Renaissance studies, classical studies, women's and gender studies) created by faculty interested in establishing a focused yet interdepartmental scholarly community around topics of shared interest. Finally, there was a perceived need to offer students a venue within the university where Catholicism could be studied even more richly than within the religious studies department.

The result was an interdepartmental minor, run on a very modest budget, borrowing from much existing course stock, and offering students an intellectual and at times social community within which they could join faculty in the pleasures of delving into various dimensions of Catholicism. While the faculty involved hoped that the program might have a ripple effect throughout the university, encouraging the further development of courses in Catholic heritage, all agreed that this should occur organically and over time in ways congruent with academic life, and not through any administrative fiat. There was no hidden hand guiding the project, no big money coming from outside patrons, and no explicit ecclesiastical ideology shaping the outcome. The project depended almost wholly upon the enthusiasm of a few faculty members and students. Once approved through normal committee channels, it earned the attention and support of the administration. The aim was to grow, but gradually, and not to become too large. Catholic studies would assume a respected role alongside other established interdisciplinary minors at Santa Clara.

Modest programs like this could be a sign that Catholicism, and perhaps more generally, "the Catholic" as an idea, is worth studying in and of itself, at least as a religious phenomenon, but not only that. At least in the Western cultural context, Catholicism as a religion finds itself to be a modern development, that is, a religion whose main lines were established in the sixteenth century after Trent but which now faces a crisis at what could be called the closure of modernity. Especially in the United States, it is a religion of theological and cultural boundaries in an environment where older boundaries of all types--ethnic, racial, gender and sexual, political, religious, even sacrosanct national borders--are dissolving in the search for a new human constellation. Yet, North American Catholics have been living in a cultural mix for the past three hundred years, and have a long experience of pushing beyond a Catholic provincialism toward a Catholic cosmopolitanism in a culture that was not established by the church itself. And as a world religion, Catholicism finds itself cheek by jowl with other world religions, a fact that should not only challenge Catholic theologians to specify the parameters of orthodoxy, but encourage an understanding of Catholicism precisely as a religion among the religions.