Angels in America: At the Catholic University of America

Academe, Nov/Dec 2002 by Williams, Gary Jay

When administrators objected to a student play, faculty discovered that defending academic freedom can be a complex and conflicted ambition.

When George Bernard Shaw visited Washington, D.C., he was told that the Catholic University of America was located in the city. Shaw's quick reply was that a Catholic university was a contradiction in terms.

I spent most of my career inside of what Shaw saw as an oxymoron; I taught daily in a culture of contradictions, where faith and reason are frequently in negotiation, often fruitfully.

But the encounter between Angels in America and Catholic University revealed some of the contradictions in their most agonizing form. On the table were competing interests between religious freedom and free artistic expression and between the interests of administrators of a church-affiliated university and those of its theater faculty and students. There were First Amendment rights and moral imperatives on both sides of the table. There were Catholics on both sides of the table. This article is about the complexities of this crisis, both human and institutional. It is not theoretical or legalistic. It describes how the situation played out at ground level.

I was a member of a theater faculty whose degree programs in the last decade have focused on developing contemporary cutting-edge theater. Doing so has often meant exploring issues of social justice through the art. I was also a member of the faculty of a university sponsored by the bishops of the United States, with a unique relationship with the Vatican. I taught in a climate of Catholic religious conservatism that has steadily intensified over the last two decades. At Catholic University, that climate took hold beginning with the visit of Pope John Paul II to our campus in 1979.

Dissent Discouraged

By the late 1980s, the university had challenged a tenured theologian, Charles Curran, who was on the faculty of our School of Religious Studies. Because Curran was seen as espousing liberal views contrary to church doctrine, the Vatican revoked his license to teach Catholic theology. The university then removed him from his position as a professor of theology. Curran brought a breach-of-contract suit, but the university won a favorable decision in D.C. Superior Court, because Curran's contract to teach theology required that he be licensed by the Vatican. It was a clear case of contract law and of the doctrinal concerns and legal rights of the church's university. But it had a chilling effect on dissent, and I suspect that it emboldened conservative Catholics thereafter.

Then, in 1990, Pope John Paul II issued his "apostolic constitution" on Catholic higher education, entitled Ex Corde Ecclesiae, or "from the heart of the church." In it, the pope stressed the Catholic mission of Catholic colleges and universities. Since then, our campus has continued to worry and talk about whether and how our university is fulfilling its Catholic mandate. Ex Corde was even the focus of a recent self-study prepared for our accreditors.

In 1990 the university set forth its Policy for Presentations and Balanced Programs, in which it declared its intention, as a private, value-based, religious institution, to refuse to "provide a forum for advocates whose values are counter to those of the university or the Roman Catholic Church." It declared its desire to have "balanced programs" in which knowledgeable spokespersons representing opposing viewpoints would deal with both sides of controversial issues (including societal, political, moral, and ecclesiastical matters) in pursuit of greater understanding. Making a distinction between "advocacy" and "objective explanation," it also declared its intention to refuse programs that might "promote action rather than understanding," or that would constitute "incitement" as opposed to the "scholarly and abstract discourses" appropriate to a university setting.

Unacceptable Content

Since the early 1980s, our department's theater seasons have included classical and contemporary works by playwrights from Samuel Beckett to the British Marxist Caryl Churchill. We staged the medieval Christian morality play Everyman and Moliere's Tartuffe, which is about a cleric who is a sexual predator. In my graduate courses, students have been reading not only Plato and Aristotle but twentieth-century poststructural theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. From the vantage point of these theorists, all claims to truth are mediated by language and culture, a view arguably not congenial to ideas of divine revelation. My point is that our administration did not forbid such views from discussion in the classroom.

Enter Angels. In fall 1996, our university president asked our dean, in effect, to control or suppress the forthcoming production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, a production directed by one of our M.F.A. degree candidates, with a cast of graduate students. Summoned to the dean's office, the drama faculty learned that the administration believed that Kushner's play, because of its sympathy with homosexuals, would be seen as endorsing a homosexual lifestyle, which is unacceptable to the church.