Academics resist Church communion.

Part One: A showdown for Catholic colleges?

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Catholic commitment of Catholic universities and colleges in both the United States (230 of them) and Canada (a dozen) has been seriously weakened. Many of them continue to call themselves Catholic but their academics resent the idea that the "Church," i.e., the local bishop, should have any say in "their" affairs. They portray him as an "outsider," unqualified to judge "academic" issues, including theology. In short, they no longer see themselves as a necessary and integral part of the Catholic community. The following two articles discuss the recent contention surrounding the 1990 Vatican document Ex Corde ecclesia.

The unsatisfactory dialogue between Catholic colleges and the Roman Curia throughout the seventies and eighties resulted in an Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Out of the Heart of the Church) in 1990. Following its publication, each country was asked to apply Ex Corde to its own situation. In the United States the large colleges, particularly the Jesuit ones and Notre Dame University in Indiana, have fought Ex Corde until the present time. Only the new small colleges, and the few medium-sized reformed ones, have accepted it.

Commonweal magazine

The chief cause of trouble in Catholic colleges is dissent from the teaching of the Church. This is recognized, for example, in the American Catholic publication Commonweal, of April 9, 1999, devoting seven articles to the matter, all of which side with the universities against the Vatican.

The sociologist among them acknowledges, however, what everyone knows: that these universities are nominally, but not really, Catholic. He writes:

"There was a rush in the Catholic colleges to become 'like everyone else.'... The situation was complicated by the attempt, before Vatican II, to move the Catholic colleges into the mainstream of American higher education. How did we enter the mainstream? By hiring faculty who were not Catholic, by eliminating Catholic course requirements, by ending obligations to participate in Catholic services such as retreats, by clergy dressing in sweat suits and nuns in Bermuda shorts."

The editor of Commonweal says that at its annual November meeting in 1999 the American bishops will "very likely" require all Catholic colleges to declare whether they wish to be Catholic according to the criteria of Ex Corde and, if they do, to bring their constitutions, by-laws, and practices into line with the Constitution within a certain time, say five years. The institutions not wishing to be Catholic will be declared not to be Catholic.

Lead article

The Commonweal's lead article presents arguments on behalf of the recalcitrant colleges:

1. It lists many ways in which they might improve their Catholic status other than the ones Ex Corde requires (this after nine years of doing nothing);

2. It says that, if the bishops take the step indicated, they will be simply following the directives of Ex Corde rather than trying to improve the Catholicity of the institutions (as if the purpose of the directives was not to do this very thing);

3. It even defends some of these institutions having the majority of staff non-Catholic (whereas even ten per cent of non-Catholic staff is already too high);

4. It contends that only the colleges have the right to say what type of person they should hire and that the laws of the Church in this matter are irrelevant;

5. It suggests that teachers who were good Catholics would be second-rate under Ex Corde rules, since orthodox Catholic teachers cannot be genuine inquirers;

6. It ridicules a college if it sees, as part of its task, preventing the teaching of questionable Catholic theology, or heresy;

7. It doesn't want any penalty for theologians who publicly dissent from Church teaching.

And I notice that in this very issue of Commonweal can be found the names of dissenters who are advertised by Catholic institutions of higher education as teachers in their summer courses.

The two chief requirements of Ex Corde which the colleges oppose are that those who teach in theological disciplines must have a mandate from an ecclesiastical authority, and that the majority of the trustees and faculty must be faithful Catholics. The former of these requirements is found in a document even more authoritative than Ex Corde, namely, The Code of Canon Law, Canon 812.

Legal view

The Commonweal article by a lawyer argues that there will be legal difficulties in translating the requirements of canon law into civil law. He worries that the institutions will have trouble with accrediting agencies, and might not get federal or state aid, if they are too Catholic. (These two problems have already been shown to be false by K. D. Whitehead's Catholic Colleges and Federal Funding, 1988.)

The author says that the president of a Catholic college must be faithful to the board of trustees (apparently not to what God's Church says). He also wonders whether an institution, in its hiring, could tell whether a candidate was a faithful Catholic. (There are well-known criteria, such as church attendance, prior education, marriage in or out of the Church, letters of reference, personal statements, organizations belonged to, and so on; in fact, it is as easy to make this determination as it is to determine academic competence.) He also thinks that discriminating in hiring on the basis of religion might be unlawful. (Experience shows that there is really no problem if a college is truly Catholic.)

A conversion

One Commonweal article was written by Father John Piderit, S.J., the president of Loyola University, Chicago. Within a month, however, he was converted to the opposite point of view. He now writes: "The universities' unwillingness to cooperate with the bishops and the Holy See over the mandate ... sends the wrong message to Catholics in the United States. Even worse, a refusal to cooperate suggests that the Catholic colleges and universities are not responsive to priorities established by the Holy See" (First Things, June! July, 1999, pp. 22-24).

Canada

What about the Canadian English-speaking scene? A small committee representing the bishops and the universities was appointed a number of years ago to make recommendations concerning Ex Corde but negotiation with the Holy See has taken as long as in the United States. I know that when I attended meetings of the presidents of the Canadian Catholic colleges some twenty years ago, I was the only one defending the position of the Church.

Since that time a study of these institutions was begun but was cancelled because of the pathetic picture they gave of Catholic higher education in the nineteen eighties. And, since 1990 when Ex Corde came out, things have gotten worse.

What is necessary is that Canadian Catholic colleges put their by-laws in agreement with Ex Corde and act in accordance with them. Most problems can be avoided if appointments to boards of trustees and to faculty are made properly.

One wonders how a college can be Catholic if it does not have the assurance that theologians teach the doctrine of the Church. It would have no safeguard against being a scandal to its students, their parents, and the general Catholic public. It would have to be made known to a professor, of course, at the time of appointment, that he would have to have a mandate to teach and that, if he began to publicly and obstinately teach contrary to Church doctrine, he would lose his mandate and thus not be able to teach theology. This would have to be written into the by-laws as well.

The colleges see difficulties with this. They fear that many professors would not apply if a mandate was required and could be withdrawn (yet certain professors would love to teach in an institution which took its Catholicism seriously). They fear that a professor who lost his position with this arrangement might sue the college (but it's hard to see how the suit could be upheld if the action was in accord with the by-laws). They fear that a particular bishop might be too ready to withdraw a mandate (but the protocol for this withdrawal would be a protection here; for example, the decision might be made by a committee of three, the bishop, the college president, and another person, perhaps a neighbouring bishop, chosen jointly by the first two).

Freedom for whom?

Academic freedom is possessed not only by professors but also by colleges and students. A Catholic college has the right to have Catholic theology taught according to the teaching of the Church, and students have the right to be taught Catholic theology (not a denial of it) in a Catholic college.

The fears aroused by the opponents of Ex Corde are, to an extent, smokescreens raised to preserve the status quo. The bishops should not be terrified by them but rather insist on what must be done. They have been asked to apply this document, not to change it.

Part Two: Catholic academics evade scrutiny

When Newman delivered his lectures on the idea of a university in 1852, three of them had the word Theology in their titles. One of his main contentions, in fact, was that religious doctrine is knowledge, and that it is indefensible for a university to omit theology from its circle of studies. If there be religious truth at all, he maintains, we cannot shut our eyes to it without prejudice to every other kind of truth.

In his ninth discourse, he pointed out that the Church has a distinct duty to watch over and protect theology. Yet the possession of chairs in theology would be no guarantee of the Catholicity of a university, unless the Church watches over its teaching and superintends its action. Theologians will be affected by the spirit of the age, and by the tendency of liberal education to view revealed religion from an aspect of its own,

"under the notion, conscious or unconscious, that the human intellect...is more true in its ideas and judgements than that of Prophets and Apostles...."

Left to itself, intellectualism can come into conflict with dogma, and become an element of corruption and debility. The masters of human reason may ignore theological truth altogether, or accept Christianity but alter its spirit, "unless the Church, as in duty bound, protects the sacred treasure which is in jeopardy." Newman wanted the theologians to be given the widest latitude in their investigations, but clearly he expected the bishops to intervene when the theologians were in danger of going off the rails.

After Vatican II

Up until 1960, writes Father Leonard Kennedy in his little book How to Keep Your University Catholic, American Catholic universities transmitted well, but the bishops have continued to be neglectful. Within American higher education today, Christopher Derrick has written, it has become increasingly unreal to apply the adjective "Catholic" to institutions which once claimed it proudly; and Alice von Hildebrand has said that the sight which confronts one today is a pitiful one: the Catholic university, which was flourishing forty years ago, "seems to have been struck by a tornado. Catholic institutions have succumbed to subjectivism, relativism, historicism, or idealism, and in many of them 'God is dead'."

The Land o' Lakes document of August 1, 1967, signed by representatives from Georgetown, Boston College, Catholic University of America, Notre Dame, and other well-known Catholic universities, declared that

"the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself."

This declaration of rebellion against the Church was adopted by the National Educational Association, and thus in effect by 223 Catholic Colleges, in 1976. It stated that a juridical relationship between the Church and Catholic Institutions in the exercise of their proper autonomy "is not desirable or even possible." This flies in the face of the Code of Canon Law, which gives bishops the duty to ensure that the principles of Catholic doctrine are observed in universities--and the right to withdraw the designation "Catholic" if they are not.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae

In contrast, an Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, issued by the Holy Father in 1990, states that every Catholic university has a relationship to the Church which is essential to its institutional identity; that it must adhere to the teaching authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals; and that theologians must respect the authority of the bishops and assent to Catholic doctrine.

In the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly for Winter 1999, Ralph McInerny, Professor at Notre Dame, describes the ritual dance and toothless compromises between the bishops and the theologians, and their avoidance of #812 of the Code of Canon Law, which figured prominently in a more recent Apostolic Letter, Ad tuendam fidem (see Catholic Insight, October 1998, pp. 8-10). This canon fills people with alarm, because it requires teachers of theology to receive a mandate from competent ecclesiastical authority. What is at issue is not the research and teaching of the majority of faculty members, but the dissenting status of the theologians, who, McInerny points out, "have led Catholic universities down the path to effective apostasy."

The May 1, 1999, issue of the Jesuit weekly America contains two articles expressing the academics' opposition. A former university president, Jesuit Father William J. Rewak, writes on "The 'Gag Rule' and the Church." The title indicates its tone, which is distasteful: the Spirit thrives where there is dialogue, but not apparently in apostolic exhortations from the Holy See. Where Derrick and Alice von Hildebrand see a regrettable decline, he sees excellence: "Catholic colleges and universities, our theological centres and seminaries around the world, have come a long way since the 1950s...and they are doing outstanding work in theological research."

He admits that there are kooks, but he contends that "the kooks and the misinformed and even belligerent, angry adversaries must all have their say, too," which is, at the very least, an anti-intellectual position. He also writes that the study of theology has achieved a rediscovered credibility, an enviable reputation in these several decades--a judgement with which many would not agree. Anyway, he makes the wild contention that capitulation to the Holy See's requirements would reduce the universities to slavery.

In the same issue of America a visiting teacher at Notre Dame University, Paul Wilkes, makes it seem that Ex Corde Ecclesiae is unnecessary because, according to him, Notre Dame is permeated by Catholicism, most students attend Mass on Sunday, they live in a Catholic atmosphere, and the template for their education is a Catholic template. As part of their core curriculum they have to take six hours of theology and six of philosophy. Is this still a Catholic place? His answer is in the affirmative, and it is hard to set his impression aside.

Still, one wonders whether he is right when he says nothing about the string of dissenting faculty at Notre Dame. Father Richard McBrien is only the most vocal one.

Notre Dame University

On the evening of the papal visit to St. Louis in January of this year, Fathers Malloy and Monan--respectively the President of Notre Dame and the Chancellor of Boston College--published a challenge to Ex corde ecclesiae. Canon 812 of the Code of Canon Law requires a teacher of Theology to receive a mandate: he must make a profession of faith and declare his loyalty to Catholic teaching in order to do so.

As McInerny points out in the Scholars Quarterly (see above), it would seem entirely reasonable for the Church to ask that those who teach in her name should actually teach the faith. But the non serviam (I will not serve) of these two Catholic university officials is unequivocal: "Most Catholic professors simply will not request such a mandate, and Catholic universities will take no steps to implement it because of its obvious threat to academic freedom."

McInerny comments, "There could be no more succinct statement of what has gone wrong with our Catholic universities."

In the monthly magazine Culture Wars for March 1999, there is a long article by editor Michael Jones entitled "Notre Dame on the Brink". It takes as its motif a statement by Pope John Paul II when he was in St. Louis last January: "When freedom is separated from truth, individuals lose their moral direction and the very fabric of society begins to unravel." Notre Dame, he writes, has no qualms about accepting the ethical standards of the Big Ten secular universities when it comes to foetal research, hiring, and soon, but it cannot accept the criteria of the Catholic Church when it comes to its own theologians: that it declares to be an unwarranted infringement of "academic freedom."

The notorious Father Richard McBrien, author of a book entitled Catholicism which has twice been censured by the U.S. National Bishops' Committee on Doctrine, was not mollified: "Just the idea of even suggesting any kind of oversight by non-academic people in the academic operations of a university--Catholic or not--is odious to anybody in an academic institution." Bishops should be welcomed on a Catholic university campus, he said patronizingly: "Give them tickets to ball games. Let them say Mass. Bring them to graduation. Let them sit on the stage. But there should be nothing beyond that."

This is an indication of how far American Catholic universities and their theologians have diverged from Newman's understanding of the University as part of the Catholic community. Canon 810 and 812, Jones writes, are not some arbitrary imposition of outside authority on the university. They are a description of the only relationship between an institution which claims to teach Theology and the institution founded by Christ as the guardian of the faith [INCOMPLETE]

David Dooley is professor emeritus of English of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. He is an associate editor of Catholic Insight.

Father Kennedy is a former president of Assumption University, Windsor, and St. Thomas More College, Saskatoon, and a former Dean of Theology, and Director of the Center for Thomistic Studies, at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. His book How to Keep Your University Catholic is out of print but will he reprinted this year by Christendom Press.