'Ex corde ecclesiae' and its ordinances: is this any way to run a university? Or a church?

IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN A UNIVERSITY? OR A CHURCH?

No one who cares about the future of the U.S. Catholic church can ignore the question of the religious identity of America's Catholic colleges and universities. The questions will be greatly shaped in the years to come by the fate of a few hundred words of "ordinances on Catholic higher education."

The unparalleled system of Catholic higher education in the Unites States has educated more religiously literate lay Catholics than at any other time in the church's history. Not incidentally, these schools have produced an upwardly mobile Catholic population that has entered the mainstream of American life.

And therein lies the challenge. Having shed their immigrant defensiveness, adopted U.S. standards of academic freedom, and achieved academic excellence, many of these schools must articulate anew the nature of their mission as Catholic institutions. Many Catholic educators, beset by all the familiar problems of institutional survival, may have too-long neglected this difficult task. And if pressure frolm Rome, which began with a 1985 draft of a pontifical document on Catholic higher education and finally issued in John Paul II's 1990 Ex corde ecclesiae, has helped focus these educator' attention and steeled their will for undertaking the challenge, so much the better.

At least in the United States, however, there is considerable questions whether the remedies emerging from the Vatican and the episcopacy will support or undermine the efforts of local educators. In fact, the U.S. bishops may be on the brink of forcing a precipitious resolution.

We are in the closing rounds of a struggle that has run throughout the consultations prior to Ex corde ecclesiae (see Commonweal, January 27, 1989). Catholic educators from around the world warned the Vatican that a single document could not prescribe for dramatically difference local conditions. In particular, a group of presidents from U.S. Catholic universities appear to have convinced Roman officials that direct intervention by local bishops or other church authorities into academic affairs was incompatible with academic freedom and with the educator' own best judgement on how to run these institutions. The result was that Ex corde ecclesiae restricted itself to declaring broad norms and delegated the original bishops' conferences to sculpt more detailed "ordinances" regarding Catholic higher education. But that did not remove the issue, rooted in the Code of Canon Law, of requiring episcopal mandates for the theology faculty and oversight in other areas. Each new round of documents always brough the local bishop back onto the campus in some sort of canonical role.

In the United States, a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (Cardinal James Hickey, Archbisships Oscar Lipscomb, Adam Maida, and Francis Schulte, and Bishops James Malone, James Griffin, and John Leibrecht, the chairman) has drafted the set of ordinances (see p. 15) that will govern the relations between local ordinaries and shcools of higher education in their dioceses.

The drafting committee included eight Catholic college and university presidents as consultors. It is an omen for the future that the bishops voted unanimously in favor of the ordinances; the consultors opposed them (and in any case were not permitted to vote). The proposed ordinances are circulating among the U.S. episcopate as well as college and university presidents; comments and recommenndations are to be returned by December 31, 1993. The bishops as a whole will vote on these ordinances (or revised vewrsions) at their November 1994 meeting and the ordinances will be sent to Rome for approval.