Nurturing Faith and Young Minds on Campus

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 21, 2000 | by Michael Rust

The Rev. David O'Connell, the president of Catholic University of America, provides a bulwark of leadership at the nation's flagship Roman Catholic institution of higher learning.

When the Rev. David O'Connell became president of the Catholic University of America in September 1998, he attracted attention as the second-youngest president of that institution in a line of 14 priests since 1887. One-and-a-half years into his tenure, O'Connell has performed the difficult task of guiding the country's flagship Catholic university through both the financial and organizational shoals that affect all institutions of higher learning and navigating the special tides and currents that affect religious colleges and universities.

A Vincentian priest, O'Connell earned his doctorate in canon law at Catholic University during the years when the Rev. Charles Curran, a moral theologian who dissented vociferously from orthodox church teaching, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university in the wake of Vatican discipline. O'Connell has been a firm supporter of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the papal document which calls for the maintenance of solidly Catholic identities at church colleges and universities.

When O'Connell was in the second grade, a priest visited his ill grandmother, and he remembers that as the beginning of his vocation. "There was such a mystery around the priest," he recalls. "I always found that intriguing. My mother said that I could never have anything when I was a child because I was always toying to pull it apart to see how it worked. The mystery of the priest was something that drew me in. I wanted to see what this mystery meant, what it was all about."

The media spotlight of Washington may seem a distraction from that mystery, but O'Connell wears the burden lightly. He says that proximity to the halls of secular power has not left him envious of the politicians down the road. "I certainly am not lacking for politics as president of a university," he laughs. "I have the best of both words."

Insight: Is the secularization of Catholic higher education inevitable?

The Rev. David O'Connell: My own take on it is that while it's a straggle for [educational] institutions to maintain their responsibility as a very strong and very visible unit of the church, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that their Catholic identity has been sold down the river.

Insight: Can the carrot, as well as the stick, be used to maintain the religious identity?

DO: Let's make an analogy. Let's take the institution and give it a personality. Let's compare it to a Catholic individual. In the course of that Catholic individual's life, there are going to be struggles -- struggles to be faithful, struggles to understand certain teachings, struggles to apply them. There are going to be moments of great success and also moments of weakness and failure. But at no point along the way should the individual be condemned for struggling, as long as that individual's perspective is trying to remain as faithful as one can to the Gospel message and as faithful as one can to the message of the church. I think that is the experience of a lot of us within the Catholic academic world.

Are we perfect? By no means. But are we serious in our effort? I think that certainly can be asserted on the pan of many institutions.

Insight: Does our secular society drown out the Gospel message?

DO: I think the Holy Father said it well when he referred to our age as the age of the New Evangelization. As technology and developments within society and human culture open up and present ways of thinking and ways of being that never were imagined before, this is precisely the moment when the Gospel can be preached in new and different ways. It's the same Gospel, but there are different applications and different ways it can be proclaimed and understood within our time and within our particular social and historical context.

Insight: How adventurous should theologians be at a Catholic university?

DO: I would say theologians should be faithful to the church and faithful to the discipline and its methodology. The freedom of inquiry the theologian enjoys is no more absolute than the freedom experienced by anyone in society. There are limits, there are parameters. There are constraints on everyone's freedom, whether they be theologians or not, so the theologian has to operate within those boundaries. And those boundaries are the good of the community, the good of the individual and truth as it is understood and taught by the church.

So as to your question about how adventurous a theologian should be, I think that theologians can push the envelope on questions that are of serious concern to our world and to the church within that world, but I don't think one pushes that envelope to the extreme, to the detriment of the church and its teaching, and that's very important.

Insight: Seventy percent of all marriage annulments granted in the Catholic Church are in the United States. Is there an annulment crisis?