The Church today is not interested in the universities
because they have openness
and academic freedom but because they lack it.

A “Catholic” university:
A contradiction
or a competition?

By James V. Schall

One sometimes wonders about the souls of bishops. No doubt it is a more comforting wonderment if one is not himself a bishop. If they are diligent, concerned with their flock, most bishops have more than they can handle. Still, consider a St. Augustine. He produces most of his vast writings and preaching while he is an engaged bishop with a couple of mini-wars going on. We watch a very busy Pope. In spite of his manifold duties, he systematically visits all the many parishes of Rome, his diocese. We cannot help but thinking that, in any harried bishop’s life, some room can be found for reflecting on “what is to be done,” to cite a phrase from Lenin. Where do his most serious problems lie? Bishops, I think, from now on, have to give a considerably greater attention to the spiritual and intellectual well-being of the academies—students, professors, and structures—than they have been hitherto accustomed to grant them. This, at least, is the most obvious meaning both of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the pope’s instruction on particularly Catholic universities, and of Fides et Ratio, his encyclical on reason and revelation.

A widespread impression exists that some fundamental connection exists between the condition of universities and the condition of the culture, granted that there are those who can see nothing wrong in either the culture or the university. No doubt, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was, for the most part, as pertinent to Catholic as it was to secular institutions. Peter Redpath amusingly described the general situation in this way:

Many Catholics do not know what it means to be Catholic any more. Protestant sects are becoming harder to distinguish one from another. At times, philosophers sound strangely like theologians, fiction mongers, or sceptics. Often, theologians sound curiously like philosophers or atheists. Politicians sound like preachers. Preachers sound like politicians. At times, educators are illiterate. Psychologists, who associate their study with an investigation of the human soul, often do not believe in the existence of a soul. . . .1

Many lofty academic and cultural matters, no doubt, may seem to be none of the bishop’s business even if he has himself a higher degree in some mainline or esoteric discipline.

Yet, any perceptive bishop must realize that the greatest slippage from the faith, the one that causes the most ultimate damage, somehow is connected with the condition of the universities, with the philosophers, theologians, academics, and educational administrators. No doubt, a distinction exists between concern about the souls of university students as individual believers and concern about the university’s structure, atmosphere, and curricula as such. But someone would have to be a Manichean to hold that these two areas of personal and institutional life have nothing to do with each other. Aristotle had already indicated the close connection between the moral life and the philosophic life. Aberrations of mind and aberrations of living do not exist in isolation.

A good percentage of dioceses in the country have colleges and universities within their geographical jurisdiction, even if they be large junior colleges or small colleges with a thousand students. Some such institutions will also call themselves “Catholic,” administered under some Order or Congregation, or even, as in the two colleges in Iowa, under the bishop’s own general responsibility. It has been a long-standing joke that there are often more Catholic students at USC or UCLA than in all the local Los Angeles Catholic schools put together. In fact, many students at Catholic colleges are not themselves Catholic. Not a few Catholic students, alas, even cease to be Catholics in Catholic colleges, just as a not-negligible number of converts and even vocations today come from secular colleges and universities. The local bishop thus must wonder about what the many Catholic students at, say, Michigan State, or the two Miamis, or UConn, or the University of Tennessee know about their faith, whether it corresponds, in any meaningful sense, to the level of the students’ secular knowledge. Likewise, certain Newman Clubs —I think of those at Dartmouth, at the University of Nebraska, at the University of Illinois—have, over the years, been outstanding.

Probably, if an Ordinary is diligent, he wonders likewise about Catholic students at one of the Loyolas, or Notre Dame, or St. John’s, or St. Catherine’s, or even at the University of Dallas. What in fact do they know? Is it really anything substantial, amid all else they think they must know? Are the usual two “required” courses in theology or “religious studies” or philosophy anything more than token, if not positively harmful? If a large (or small) state or private university or college is in his diocese, a bishop will have Catholic students from other dioceses or countries for whom he must have some concern. Is there any way he can talk to them? Could he say Mass for them? How is he to exercise his religious responsibility towards them, which, in this case, would include some concern about the intellectual component of Catholicism? Is the Catholic chaplaincy anything more than a skeleton? Is the liturgy and teaching there orthodox, dignified or is it, in truth, watered down, thinly disguised modernity? Do college “liturgies” subsequently alienate students from their future parishes and their support?

The Holy Father and Cardinal Lustiger of Paris have proved again and again that university students can be their most ardent followers. The Pope in his travels never fails to give a careful address at a major university in the country or city he is visiting. “The origin and purpose of this university [of Havana], its history and its heritage,” John Paul said in Cuba (L’Osservatore Romano, 4 February 1998), “reveal its vocation to be a fountain of wisdom and freedom, an inspiration to faith and justice, a crucible where knowledge and conscience are fused, the teacher of a culture which is at once universal and Cuban.”

Cardinal Ratzinger provides a powerful intellectual presence in the academic world. What kind of a job, it is increasingly asked of bishops, are the old Orders and the new institutes doing in academia? Is it enough just to take their word? On these affairs, a bishop, knowing that he himself is not primarily an academic, still must have his own judgment. This spiritual concern is what he is held to by his authority, by the Church itself. We ought not to begrudge him this solicitude or think him “interfering” when he wonders about his responsibility. It has theological origins of profound import.

Most people would agree that an institution should call itself what it is, no fudging. We are all against “deception” in advertising, not excluding academic advertising. Looked at from this angle, the present controversy about the relation of universities “historically founded and sponsored by Catholic Church sources” looks like a simple question of justice. Call things by their proper names. Don’t say one thing but do another. Don’t take monies under false pretenses. Don’t give monies in endowments or gifts or loans intended for a proper Catholic institution if that institution does not measure up, does not intend to measure up, to a basic and abiding criterion whereby it might accurately be identified in name with what it is in reality. If a school has in practice given up its historic Catholic identity, it seems best to say so. Indeed, a bishop should request that it does so. Agreements even with the dead who founded such institutions, however, ought to be kept. Pacta sunt servanda. “By their fruits, you shall know them.”

The reverse side of this equation would probably be true also: don’t take monies from governments or foundations if the taking of the money, however lavish or attractive, demands or implies consent to or omission of ideas or practices in opposition to one’s held and announced intelligence. The non-monetary side of this principle would be: don’t allow yourselves to be accredited by organizations that directly or indirectly require minimizing or suppressing the religiously intellectual side of the institution. The Holy Father calls this downplaying “reductionism,” the exclusion of genuine intellectual and spiritual topics because certain methodologies cannot account for the presence of transcendent forces in reality. Faith, as such, is never found by sociological methods, the most widely used methods today to investigate “religion.” Sometimes religion’s absence can be recorded or at least hinted at. This is why those who have faith as well as proper degrees should compose the main body of a Christian university. This provision is not set down “against” those who do not have the faith, good folks all, but in order to have a place, an institution, in which questions otherwise “reduced” out of consideration can be properly considered on a permanent and coherent basis.

Universities that exclude the active consideration of issues from the classic Christian tradition exist and are in the vast majority. In this regard, however open they might consider themselves, they are in fact closed societies. The question is whether their quasi-monopoly ought to be so determinative that other sorts of universities, equally competent, cannot exist. It is both unjust and biased if this monopoly denies university status to institutions with religious intellectual interests, in addition to all else. Many governments in the world use political power actively to prevent the possibility of universities founded in the religious traditions. It may even be necessary, as Kenneth Whitehead has argued, to establish independent accrediting associations, independent lists of journals and publishers that provide for the presentation of this alternative view.

Why can we not insist, then, without bias, on universities being both Catholic and university? If we must assume that the term “Catholic” adds something to the term “university,” does it not imply that something fundamental is already excluded from that whole that the word “university” is intended to cover? As a matter of fact, as Gerald Bradley has recently noted, no reason exists in American law why American Catholics cannot set forth criteria that define the nature of their own institutions (National Catholic Register, 11 April 1999). One can even argue that the so-called crisis in Catholic universities supposedly caused by the Holy See’s concern about their relation to the faith was initially the result not of government encroachment but of these universities’ own free decision not to develop institutions more clearly based on their own tradition.

Free people, in any case, ought to be able to found and carry out in space and time institutions of higher learning without the fear that such institutions can be, even ought to be, subverted to purposes at odds with the intention of their establishment. A university ought not to be a cover for not considering and adequately presenting some fundamental aspect of reality worth knowing. If it excludes the intellectual and moral side of religion, it is narrowing its institutional scope and its obligation to the whole range of things to which human life is open. Catholic universities originally existed in order that this wholeness could have a proper setting for its intellectual understanding and development.

The essence of a university, however, is not “academic freedom.” The essence of a university is truth. Freedom is a means to this purpose, not its end. Without truth, there is no freedom, only unresolvable opinions that can be reconciled only by demoting the notion of truth to opinion or by power. Freedom as a sole academic principle that holds that all is free, all is permitted, cannot really produce a university. Paradoxically, freedom as it is understood in universities can and, with some irony, often does produce widespread conformity and rigidly controlled agenda.

“To achieve tenure, graduate students have to first spend years doing whatever their dissertation advisors command,” Martin Morse Wooster wrote in a recent review.

That’s the primary reason why there are so many Ph.D.’s producing theses on race, class and gender. Once they get their doctorates, the newly minted assistant professors then have to spend years doing scholarship that will not shock their peers. Writing articles for The Nation or The National Review doesn’t count as scholarship, and in fact ensures that the budding academic is condemned by his tenure review committee as a “popularizer.” Thus, by the time a professor receives tenure (usually at the age of 45), he’s content to write articles for scholarly journals instead of comment on the issues of the day. (Washington Times, May 2, 1999).

One might question whether tenure is the real culprit here, but the conformity of race, gender, and class is a fact. Freedom, of itself, is not able to keep those who oppose freedom from gaining control of the university’s soul. By itself, without judgment, all freedom can produce is a further multiplicity of opinions, which is what we already have without a university. What we lack is not opinions but truth. Academic freedom, to be sure, has a central place in the university. We have to be free enough to show that “this is true,” and truthful enough to say “this is not free.” We are not free if we say “nothing is true” or “everything is free” without contradicting ourselves.

Yet, we want our assent to truth to be free, based on evidence, argument, and insight. A place for error must always exist in any pursuit of truth. Indeed, no truth is fully known until the arguments against it are known and freely acknowledged. It is quite unfortunate, however, that prior censorship has come to be a mode to protect the truth of religion in particular. Probably nothing has given religion a more dubious name. Not only does its threat or presence undermine the witness of those who freely do hold to Catholic positions, but it also fails to encourage looking for an alternative way to provide for the problem at hand: namely, how to assure that what is said to be Catholic is in fact so, even when it comes from a professor or cleric.
If an academic publishes something in the name of Catholicism that is in fact “heretical,” a distinct possibility, no doubt, the university, the student body, and the public in general have a right to know the fact and the nature of this deviation. In the days of few books perhaps this was a useful way to approach the problem, though I have my doubts. Today, with Internet and e-mail, it is senseless to concentrate on books. The only real solution, I think, is for bishops to briefly point out, after they appear, issues, publications, or ideas that in fact are problematic. Many books and articles today that cause most confusion in the Church in fact have some sort of ecclesiastical approval.

Even though the first universities in the West were founded in and by the Church, it is often assumed that the Church’s interest in the university is somehow narrowing. But the Church, no less than the academy, is interested in the truth. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The end of freedom is not freedom. With widespread “political correctness” conditions in higher education, conditions that restrict, rather than expand, the study of all that is, the Church has recently become more attentive to universities precisely because of their narrowness and confining ideologies. Paradoxically, the Church today is not interested in the universities because they have openness and academic freedom but because they lack it. The Church thinks that universities with a Catholic orientation are not only universities, but more complete ones than those with a more narrow agenda. Catholic universities ought to compete precisely because they are not just like everyone else, because things are studied there that are forbidden (another real form of censorship) or ignored by political or ideological reasons in secular institutions. What can possibly be wrong with broadening the scope of freedom to include, what has always been of central interest to mankind, his religious origins and understandings as they present themselves and affect everything else?

We thus hear it said or implied that the term “Catholic university” is a contradiction in terms. In fact, it is the same term. Both words mean more or less the same thing—what is common, what is universal, what is open to all things. Nothing is excluded from consideration, particularly that which most people in most eras and countries have considered most important to them, that is, religion itself. Considerations of falsity and error have their place in the university, a central place, in fact. We are “to know of what is, that it is, of what is not, that it is not,” as Plato put it. We do not, to repeat, really know something unless we know the arguments against it. This universal scope certainly includes religious claims—and the arguments against them. The Catholic Church has certainly never maintained, as its enemies too frequently do, that its own grounding was in mere whim or unprovable fables. It has always been “realist” in this sense. It has never held that faith has no “grounding” in reason. This is what is most disconcerting about it, even in academia.

The fact is today that there are vast numbers of graduate degrees being awarded each year, more than ever before in history. Only about half of these newly degreed students will find jobs in academia. Very few new institutions are being built, even though it would be easy to staff a great number of new institutions each year if there were students to man them. The decline in the birthrate, moreover, and the increase in immigration have changed the composition of new students in universities. American universities have become in part training grounds for students from all over the world. Ironically, students with grants from foreign governments can study in Catholic schools, grants that our own government would not give to native Catholic students in Catholic universities. International trade has its advantages, even in academia.

If we look at present Catholic universities, it is clear that the religious Orders and Congregations that have founded and continued them are, for the most part, in rapid decline, something they generally acknowledge. They do not foresee any change or propose any innovation that might reverse the situation. It is said, in fact, that religious orders in the Church have at most a two or three hundred year life span and do not survive without radical reformation of their own structures. The newer and more flourishing groups like Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ are not yet into colleges or universities on anything but a very small scale. There is, to be sure, some effort to “re-Catholicize” the traditional universities from other sources. I even saw an announcement of a conference on “How to keep Jesuit Universities Jesuit when there are no Jesuits,” or something like that. One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.

The fact is that the percentage of a faculty that are practicing Catholics is becoming lower and lower. This is probably not necessary in view of the number of new graduate degrees being granted yearly. It is in part ideological. It is generally the result of a well-intentioned effort to “improve” the Catholic university by making it like other universities, a somewhat counter-productive effort, as it turns out. This has meant in practice the hiring of faculty with little regard to the nature of the Catholic university or even with the assurance that it makes no real difference. It has accepted standards of “excellence” and “training,” tenure and promotion, that are implicitly hostile to the kind of university that includes a vision of reality stemming from the Catholic tradition.

The argument for a Catholic university cannot really be made on a large scale except by a university significantly populated by Catholics. The fact is, however, that this sort of Catholic university has been made largely impossible by the hiring and promotion policies of Catholic universities in the last thirty years or so. The criterion of “prestige” defined in secular terms has replaced the criterion of Christian intelligence open to all reality. The result is that Catholics with proper higher degrees are not hired in Catholic universities but are, ironically, found scattered throughout the country. There is probably something good about this result as it has insured that there is usually a good but minority academic presence of thinkers who are Catholic in practically every university and college in the country.

Is there an argument for founding new and struggling Catholic colleges? Ought bishops to decide to cut their losses and acknowledge that the present university structure as it exists will never really do what is needed? Ought they to admit that the present schools are at best schools with a certain “Catholic” heritage but by no means adequate to what is necessary? The newer or reformed colleges and universities that have appeared in the past thirty or forty years have indeed made their mark. They have produced a surprising percentage of graduate students seriously pursuing degrees in the key departments of philosophy, history, and theology. They are very present in Washington and in teaching in Catholic schools. There is something to be said, moreover, for a school that pretty much has to make it on its own and define its new role with only the benign interest of the hierarchy.

To the Bishops of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, John Paul II remarked (May 30, 1998): “The Catholic identity of a university should be evident in its curriculum, in its faculty, in student activities and in the quality of its community life. This is no infringement upon the university’s nature as a true center of learning, where the truth of the created order is fully respected, but also ultimately illuminated by the light of the new creation in Christ” (L’Osservatore Romano, 2 June 1998). He also remarked that students have a right to have what the Church actually holds to be taught to them, not merely the private opinions of the professors. On reflecting on such lines, in light of the concerted opposition to the Pope’s initiatives to address himself to what a Christian university might be like, it does seem tempting to argue that the bishops ought to encourage the founding of new and the re-founding or re-invigorating of Catholic colleges on a more firm basis that would include what is presently generally excluded from the actual programs and spirit of colleges that call themselves Catholic.

It is not altogether impossible that the present universities that call themselves Catholic will reconsider their opposition, but probably not likely. There is at least some discussion today about whether the university in general is not in some fashion both overly expensive and obsolete in terms of new technologies and modes of teaching. On-line teaching is more and more perfected. It might well be that bishops will think that access to the intellectual needs of Catholics is better served through other institutions that need to be formed and developed. It does seem to me that bishops should advise all students in college, Catholic or secular, to commit themselves to a basic core of readings while they are in college, with perhaps some well-developed on-line or taped presentation of major Catholic positions. At a minimum, students should be asked directly and with the seriousness of the Church’s authority to read, while in college, the General Catechism of the Catholic Church, Augustine’s Confessions, Josef Pieper—an Anthology, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Faith and Fides et Ratio.

The term “Catholic” when juxtaposed to that of “university” is not contradictory but complementary, when it does not in fact already mean the same thing, the consideration of the whole, of all things. By any standard, a student and a professor in a university should increase their faith and intelligence, not lose the first and abandon the second. We think of “teachers” being present mainly in the universities or schools. Yet, a bishop is above all a “teacher.” In a culture in which much that is worthy of being known is not presented, the bishop has a wide field to teach little spoken truths. But his “teaching” is already “within” the university’s own scope. He does not speak a truth that is alien to the sort of truth that is said to be pursued in academia. Rather he speaks to its fullness, to its completion. When we read the great bishops, the Augustines, the Alberts the Great, the Bellarmines, the Ratzingers, we are not “outside” the affairs of academia. We are already within the university, looking, yes, with freedom, looking to the truth, and indeed to its completion. It is not “Catholicism” that is “contradictory” in the university. It is its absence, even in secular universities, but especially in Catholic ones. This is the real concern of bishops and the Pope when they look objectively at the present state of universities. In the end, it is a liberal concern. 

1 Peter Redpath, Cartesian Nightmare (Amsterdam: Rodophi, 1997), 2.

Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books and hundreds of articles. A frequent contributor to HPR, Fr. Schall is also a regular contributor to Crisis magazine. His last article in HPR appeared in March 1999.

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