Can Catholic colleges make the grade while keeping the faith?

We were sitting among the football faithful at Notre Dame stadium on a rainy fall afternoon, waiting to see the Fighting Irish take on Purdue, when the Notre Dame fan sitting next to me noticed my maroon-and-gold Boston College cap peering out from under the hood of my poncho. He frowned. Just months before, B.C. had ruined the season for the Irish with a stunning victory (and a few weeks later would do it again, saints be praised). The Notre Dame man looked away, muttered something to his companion, then looked back at me.

"Well," he said, "if someone had to beat us, at least it was a Catholic school."

Catholics have good reason to be proud of their colleges and universities. What began as vocational schools for the sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants has evolved into a system of more than 200 colleges and universities, many with international reputations for excellence. The President of the United States is a Georgetown man. Catholic-college graduates sit on the boards of the nation's great corporations, govern states and cities, serve in Congress, practice medicine and law, teach in the greatest centers of learning. Catholic university teams excel in athletics and debate. Experts from Catholic campuses are consulted and quoted by the nation's top government officials and journalists.

But some question whether success has come at too high a price. Church control has dwindled. More and more, today's Catholic schools are run by laypeople. Priests and religious are an increasingly rare sight on campus and especially in the classrooms. Course requirements in religion have been drastically cut, and many courses are taught by lay professors, not all of them Catholic. Professors openly question Catholic teachings and challenge bedrock beliefs. Student health centers offer advice on birth control. Prochoice politicians speak on campus. Students live in co-ed dorms and come and go almost as they please. Compulsory Mass and in loco parentis are out.

Are these places Catholic anymore? And are they necessary when Catholic students can get a fine education at State U. for a fraction of the cost?

Yes, say Catholic educators, on both counts. But what makes a Catholic college Catholic has changed since my dad, may he rest in the Lord, walked the heights of Boston College in the 1930s. (And I followed in his footsteps 30 years later.)

Mixed missions

"The world has changed, the church has changed, and young people have changed," says Father Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J., president of Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

In the early 1950s, one of Kelley's predecessors sent a letter to parents, reassuring them that their sons (no daughters were allowed yet) would be taught no "alien and subversive ideas" that would clash with what they'd heard at home. Once a serious statement of mission, by the time Fairfield marked its 50th anniversary in 1992 it was on display as a museum piece.

"In those days, everybody who came here was not only a Catholic but also a graduate of a Catholic institution," says Kelley. "Students came from homes where Catholic tradition was taken for granted. Their professors took it for granted. It was all around you. Nobody asked questions."

But even in the '50s, the parochial underpinnings of Catholic higher education were beginning to crumble. Catholic colleges and universities, built and sustained through the generosity and sacrifices of an immigrant population that had known little schooling itself, were a magnificent achievement. But they were more like seminaries than colleges, designed less to educate than to defend the faith against a hostile Protestant society. They had strict codes of dress and conduct, and moral formation was prized over academic excellence. By the mid 1950s, the indifference and even hostility to scholarship on many Catholic campuses was so notorious that it drew harsh criticism, both inside and outside the church.

What's more, it was bad for business. The best students from Catholic high schools were choosing superior secular schools. With small endowments and few wealthy alumni, Catholic schools were hard-pressed to compete for tuition dollars, and to take advantage of the GI bill.

The '60s brought turmoil and change. Though Catholic campuses were largely free of the raucous demonstrations for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, a revolt against traditional notions of authority was sweeping the academic world, and Catholic schools could not escape. Parietal hours - regulations governing the visiting privileges of members of the opposite sex - vanished. Male bastions opened their doors to women. Course choices were broadened. Dress codes were dropped. And the days of Father Dean of Discipline roaming the campus to confiscate IDs from rule breakers passed into history. From now on, students would be treated as grown-ups.

Vatican II, with its emphasis on the dignity of the individual, accelerated the trend. And the religious orders that ran most Catholic schools, faced with declining vocations and stiff new rules for obtaining needed federal funds, began turning over control of their campuses to boards of trustees made up of laypeople. This was good for economic survival, and it expanded academic horizons. But it made it tougher to keep the religious traditions alive. Now, decades later, schools are still grappling to define what makes a Catholic college or university Catholic.

"What we offer that is unique is a happy blend of the spiritual and intellectual lives," according to Anita Pampusch, president of St. Catherine's College in St. Paul, Minnesota. "We do that in a way that the secular school simply cannot."

St. Catherine's, says Pampusch, takes a backseat to no one when it comes to academics; it was the first Catholic college to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. And St. Catherine's retains a lively Catholic spirit, though, like other Catholic campuses, it has a lot more religious diversity than in the days before Vatican II.

"You used to be able to assume a common background," says Pampusch. "You always had a few students from different religious traditions, but they stood out." However, now St. Catherine's Minneapolis campus is, at most, 60 percent Catholic, and the student population at St. Paul's campus is mostly Lutheran.

"It makes the spiritual and intellectual mix more difficult," says Pampusch. "But it also makes it more interesting."

Not everybody on campus needs be to Catholic for the school to be Catholic, says Robert F. Sasseen, president of the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. All that's needed, he says, is a "critical mass" of faculty, administrators, students, and alumni who are committed to the ideals of Catholic education.

"The purpose of any university is to pursue the truth," says Sasseen. "But Catholic higher education has its own method, and its own field of inquiry. The difference between Catholic and secular universities is that Catholic schools teach a scholarship informed by faith, which acts as a light to illuminate all aspects of learning."

Catholic schools, says Sasseen, educate not only the mind but also the conscience. In their intellectual marketplace, no one is embarrassed to bring up religion. "One is free and comfortable discussing whether God exists and what the divine plan is for the human race," says Sasseen.

Can you be too Catholic?

Shortly after John E. Murray became the first lay president of Pittsburgh's Duquesne University in 1988, some accused him of trying to make the school "too Catholic." But he maintains that his emphasis on teaching moral values along with academics is what Catholic higher education is all about.

"That doesn't mean that we proselytize," says Murray. "It does mean that we are committed to educating men and women of virtue. We want to turn out people who know what it means to lead a virtuous life. We have produced generations of people who are morally illiterate, and we've got to stop. The need for moral and spiritual education is critical today, and students thirst for it."

Murray asserts that Catholic schools have more academic freedom than secular schools, which he says are afraid to even discuss moral issues, much less take them seriously. "You can take ethics courses at Penn State," Murray says. "But it's a joke because it has no foundation. Morality is all a matter of opinion. Our ethics courses at Duquesne are built on a solid foundation of time-tested moral principles."

But Murray recognizes that Duquesne has to compete academically with the best of the secular universities. "We have to do that with solid faculty and a commitment to excellence," he says. "But we will never stop caring for the students and their moral and spiritual growth."

It is this kind of commitment to moral values that led Eileen Wirth to leave her career in news and public relations and teach journalism at Jesuit-run Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Wirth holds advanced degrees from two renowned state universities, but having experienced Catholic Creighton, she can't envision being happy teaching at a secular school. "I've always been a big believer in values-centered education," says Wirth. "It starts in grade school and in the home, but it comes to fruition in the college classroom.

"Here at Creighton, I can address values and morals in a way I never could attempt at a secular school. I can teach ethics as part of everything I discuss in class."

The emphasis on values at Catholic colleges and universities traditionally has included a commitment to social justice. Students at many schools go into the surrounding community to work with handicapped and poor people. At the University of Dayton, run by the Marist Fathers in Ohio, students volunteer their time tutoring local children, reading to the blind, and comforting the terminally ill. And students at Benedictine-run St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania help disabled people and work in a soup kitchen.

At Fairfield, Kelley has seen his students, mostly from affluent, upper middle-class backgrounds, change before his eyes. "When they come in here, they say that what they want is to get a good job and make money," he says. "But when they leave Fairfield, the percentage who list that as number one has dropped sharply. They say they want to make a contribution, to be of service."

Kelley believes that Catholic university students care about others because their schools care about them. "Today's Catholic students assume academic competence," he says. "What they want is somebody who cares about their needs."

Faith, values, and service are noble goals. But to some, they are not enough to make a college or university authentically Catholic. These critics suspect that orthodox church teaching gets short shrift from liberal professors in the classroom. They maintain that inviting dissenters to speak on a Catholic campus is a perversion of academic freedom because, as one puts it, "Catholics know that certain truths are not open to debate." They feel that Catholic schools have sold their birthright for a mess of federal grants.

And a few would have Catholic schools model themselves after triumphalist enclaves like the Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio, which requires faculty members to take oaths of loyalty to the Roman magisterium and offers a "minor" in opposing abortion.

More thoughtful critics fear that the religious character at Catholic schools will gradually wear away like a neglected coat of paint. They note that Boston University, Northwestern, and Duke, as well as some of the Ivy League schools, started out as church-run institutions. But as they entered the academic mainstream, they lost their religious identities along the way and now are thoroughly secular.

Are Catholic schools headed down the same road? Not likely, say Catholic educators. Overflow crowds at student Masses and lively campus ministries attest to a Catholic character that they maintain is stronger than ever. Listening respectfully to opposing views and challenging one's own assumptions is not disloyal, they say, but essential to understanding and defending Catholic beliefs. And Catholic schools have their own unique history on their side.

"Catholic schools were never Catholic the way B.U. [Boston University] and Northwestern were Protestant," says Fairfield's Kelley. "Most of them were founded by religious orders - not the church hierarchy. They're independent of the institutional church and have their own separate traditions."

A Protestant expert on church-related higher education understands the concerns of the Catholic critics because he hears them from his own. In his book Uneasy Partners the College and the Church (Abingdon Press, 1994), Professor Merrimon Cuninggim writes that people need to understand that there's been a revolution in the relationship between church and campus.

In the early years of religious higher education, he writes, the founding church or religious order was in firm and undisputed control of its school naming the president, hiring the faculty, and dictating school policy in and out of the classroom. But over the last 25 years, the tables have changed. In most places, it's the college, and not the church, that calls the shots.

Schools choose their own leaders and set their own academic and administrative goals. And they fiercely resist pressure from outside authority, whether it comes from the state legislature or from ministers and bishops.

Church-related colleges and universities are not in the business of saving souls, but of educating. And the best way for a school to be truly Christian or Catholic, Cuninggim argues, is to be the best school that it can be. "A church-related college," he writes, "is, first, a college."

Most Catholic educators agree with Cuninggim. "When you say 'Catholic university,' university is the substantive, and Catholic is the adjective," says former Notre Dame president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., in Fordham, the alumni magazine of Fordham. "Small-minded people tend to put the Catholic first and the university second."

Hesburgh, known as the "dean of Catholic higher education," denies that schools like Notre Dame are losing their Catholic identity. "There's no conditioning of our commitment," he says. "We just have to exercise it in ways appropriate to our pluralistic culture."

The relationship between the institutional church and the campus is at the heart of one of the touchiest issues at Catholic colleges and universities: academic freedom. While most today would not go so far as George Bernard Shaw, who said that "Catholic university" is a contradiction in terms, the commitment to truly free inquiry at Catholic schools has always been suspect.

It's a tragic irony because the church really founded what we know as university education. But all too often when Catholic schools make headlines, it's because a dissident professor has been disciplined or a gay-students group kicked off campus or a prochoice speaker banned. Efforts by church authorities to "rein in" Catholic higher education - often in response to right-wing letter campaigns - touch off fierce battles over independence.

The current battleground is Ex corde ecclesiae, a 1990 papal constitution that attempts to set strict rules for Catholic colleges and universities and includes a requirement that professors of theology and religion get an official "mandate" of approval from the local bishop.

Some Catholic educators defend the papal norms and deny that they threaten academic freedom. They say it's a simple matter of truth in labeling. "It is the right of the church to hold a Catholic university responsible for teaching authentic Catholic doctrine once it hangs out that shingle," says University of Dallas president Sasseen.

But others resisted so vehemently that the Vatican recently pulled the original rule proposals off the table. The fact that they were proposed at all worries Kelley. "It's understandable that the church gets nervous sometimes and feels a need to freeze," he says. "But it's not healthy, and it should be resisted."

Kelley says Rome does not seem to understand the importance U.S. universities place on academic freedom, or the damage that could result from heavy-handed efforts at control. "We cannot make the contribution Catholic colleges and universities are called upon to make without being full-fledged academic institutions," says Kelley. "You cannot lose your right to be called a university."

Christian Brother Patrick Ellis, F.S.C. holds a unique place in the debate. He is president of the Catholic University of America, the only U.S. university chartered and controlled by the Vatican and supported by donations from the U.S. bishops. But he, too, sees Ex corde ecclesiae as the "tail wagging the dog." According to Ellis, "The university is where the church meets the culture. So the culture has to respect the university."

That respect will never be granted, Ellis says, if clerics insist on micromanaging what's taught and discussed on campus. "Real education is a mess," he says. "If it's neat and tidy, it's a fraud. Many in the church fear teaching ideas that might upset the 'simple faithful.' Well, some of the simple faithful need to be upset."

No eggheads need apply

Neglect of religion has not been the biggest failing of Catholic higher education over the last 40 years. Even their staunchest defenders concede that Catholic colleges and universities have often lagged behind the better secular schools when it comes to scholarship and academic excellence.

The roots of the problem are historical. The immigrant founders of the Catholic college never intended it to be a center of intellectual life. They saw it as a place to learn apologetics and useful professional skills to compete in a hostile, Protestant society whose finer schools were closed to Catholics.

When critics such as Msgr. John Tracy Ellis pleaded with the U.S. church in the mid '50s to get serious about the life of the mind, these critics were largely ignored by the bishops - many of whom had never attended college themselves.

A stubborn anti-intellectualism ruled. Catholic alumni prized their schools for success in athletics, not scholarship, and expected these schools to defend without question the attitudes and values of the urban Catholic middle class. (A photo caption in the 1960s identified antiwar protestor Father Phil Berrigan, a 1951 graduate, being led away by the "Real Holy Cross man, Detective Russo.")

It was only in the late '60s and early '70s that a concerted drive began, led mostly by the Jesuits and Hesburgh, to professionalize the Catholic schools. No longer could donning a habit or Roman collar qualify one to teach in a university that required doctorates of everybody else. The days of manning a philosophy department with "five breathing Dominicans," serving up a diet of rigid, exclusive Thomism, had to stop.

Today, the most respected college guides praise the quality of teaching at Catholic colleges and universities. But the scholarly output of Catholic schools remains low. A check of the leading academic journals over several quarters shows barely a handful of contributions from Catholic scholars. "The American Catholic Church has never put people aside to develop as scholars and academics," says Ellis. "We've never had that tradition."

Ironically, part of the problem can be traced to two areas where Catholic schools are traditionally strong: teaching and assisting students. Educators argue that professors who teach their own classes instead of farming them out to graduate students and who spend hours in their offices listening to students' problems don't have much time for writing and research. "We would not want to be thought of as noncontributors to higher scholarship," says Pampusch. "The intellectual life is very important at St. Catherine's. But we have focused more on classroom teaching."

Wirth of Creighton agrees, "I could close my office door when the students come around and try to get something published. But if I'm going to do that, I might as well teach at State U."

Still, it's clear from the journals and college guides that many schools smaller than universities and with less than Ivy League endowments manage to combine excellent teaching and approachable professors with solid scholarship and research. It would seem that more effort is needed if Catholic schools are to compete successfully for the best faculty and students.

Money is a cloud that broods over the future of Catholic higher education. Costs are soaring. Rising tuition is pricing families out of the market. The federal government has virtually abandoned grants in aid, forcing students to shoulder a huge burden in school loans. Fairfield's Kelley is concerned not just for Catholic schools but for all of private education. He says some way must be found to support higher education - with help from the public and private sectors - or the consequences could be tragic. "Catholic and other private schools are a major bonanza for taxpayers, although people rarely think of it that way," says Kelley.

While state universities may seem a bargain compared to the cost of a Catholic education, according to Kelley, the taxpayers foot the rest of the bill, providing huge amounts of financial aid to people who don't need it.

Dallas president Sasseen agrees. "You might get a year's education at Texas for $850, but the subsidy per student from the taxpayers is immense," he says. "And you get the same subsidy whether you're the son of Ross Perot or the daughter of an impoverished field hand. The cost of educating a student at a public or private school is the same. The difference is the price. And the danger is that difference will ultimately destroy the private sector."

Duquesne's John Murray feels good about the future. He has seen his school rebound from the brink of disaster to double and redouble its endowment. "Banks that used to refuse us loans are calling us now with offers, and we're telling them no," he says.

Pampusch believes Catholic schools survive "because they have kept a sense of who they are. Catholic hospitals became a huge business to survive," she says. "That's not going to happen to Catholic colleges. They understand their mission, and they operate as small businesses."

In fact, Pampusch worries less about money than about the price of her school's own success. "Our alumni leave here and go on to bigger and better things. Then they send their kids to Eastern schools," she says. "We have to reach out to them and convince them that we can provide their children with the same unique experience that we gave them."

Is it worth the price?

Are Catholic colleges special? Many of the paying customers think so.

Brian and Pam Magrane of Lynn, Massachusetts sent two daughters to Catholic schools. Kate attends Trinity College in Washington, D.C., and Cara graduated from Manhattanville in Purchase, New York - a school that, while no longer formally affiliated with the church, has a strong Catholic tradition. Both women have been active in campus and community-service projects and upon graduating, Cara went straight to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to work among the needy in San Antonio, Texas.

"They turned out with a real dedication to service to others," says Brian Magrane, "And I think that's a defining mark of a Catholic college. It seems the kids who have gone to Catholic schools have more of a sense of commitment to helping."

Both my daughters, Caitlin and Deidre Whelan, attend Catholic schools. Caitlin, a senior at Fairfield, has been active in campus-ministry projects in the troubled neighborhoods of nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut. "I got to experience parts of society I had heard and read about but had never really seen," she says. "It gave me a good perspective on my life, and the lives of others."

Deirdre ran a program for needy children as an undergraduate at Boston College, and this spring she'll receive a law degree from Creighton. "There seems to be a sense of community on a Catholic campus. And the Jesuit tradition of teaching and service is very strong," Deirdre says. "Also, I'm glad I was exposed to religion classes. I didn't feel that I learned much about the Catholic faith in Sunday school and CCD."

Stephanie Streff, a senior at Loyola University in Chicago, will never forget the caring and sympathy of her instructors when her boyfriend died in the spring of her junior year. "They were very sympathetic. They came to the funeral, and gave me cards and flowers," Stephanie says. "It showed that they weren't there just to teach me. They really cared about me as a person. I tell that story to friends at public and secular schools, and they say it would never happen to them."

Stephanie, like Deidre and Caitlin, also appreciates the religion courses, especially those that deal with moral problems. "They have helped me make moral and ethical decisions, and they've given me more of a conscience."

Micaela Kim, a 1993 graduate of Boston College, did not choose B.C. because it's Catholic. In fact, Micaela's parents are Buddhist, and right now, according to Micaela, she's "not really anything."

But the love and Christian example of her Catholic roommates, and of a priest who was the brother of a roommate, left a profound mark on her life. "They all had wonderful Catholic backgrounds, and strong beliefs," says Micaela. "They would talk to me, and I learned a lot about what they believed and why. They were the kind of people I had always wanted to surround myself with.

The strong faith and counsel of the priest helped Micaela through some difficult times. On a Catholic campus, she found people she could trust, and she's convinced it was no accident. "It was not just the things that they believed. It was the strength of their beliefs, and their family values, the fact that they were so committed. They molded me into the person I am today," says Micaela. "And I like that person very much."

John Whelan, producer and writer for WBBM-TV news in Chicago.