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 A Second Opinion

CWR cannot pretend to maintain a dispassionate posture regarding the transfer of Father Fessio or the founding of Campion College. Father Fessio is our publisher, and Campion College has been organized under the aegis of Ignatius Press, which also owns and operates this magazine. So for an outsider’s perspective, we offer these excerpts from a column by a non-Catholic writer, Stanley Kurtz, which appeared in a secular outlet, National Review Online:

A long-running battle over the fate of the St. Ignatius Institute, a small but influential great-books program at the University of San Francisco, is rapidly turning into a test of the survivability of traditional Catholicism in America—and of the admissibility of traditional religious belief to the academy.

President Privett apparently cannot tolerate the existence of an enclave of traditional Catholic teaching, either inside or outside of his university.

Legalities aside, what’s striking here is the near-tyrannical determination of an allegedly tolerant liberal Jesuit like President Privett to wipe out any traditional Catholic program, however small, and whether inside or outside of his university.

Calling the Jesuits “liberal” serves as a rough sort of shorthand for their ideological sympathies, but in truth, there is nothing liberal at all about what the Jesuits have done to Father Fessio.

The fight for Campion College is now the fight for the soul of higher education in America.