Can universities be Catholic?

Questions about the Catholic identity of a university--or anything else--are questions about its distinctive features as Catholic. A university is said to be Catholic as a way of distinguishing its from something else--something other than Catholic. The available otherness will shape the way identity is understood.

When universities emerged in the Middle Ages, no one would have thought of calling them "Catholic," since no alternative possibilities were really in play. It is only some centuries later, in a situation of religious and cultural pluralism, as in the United States, that an explicitly and distinctively Catholic university becomes a possibility.

At first these were alternative institution mainly or exclusively for Catholic use. Their Catholic chzaracter as institutions was in no way problematic; it was a corollary of the religious affiliation of their faculties, administrators, and student bodies. As this situation has changed, especially over the last few decades, the idea of a Catholic university has become more complex and the appropriate preservation of its distinctive identity more of a challenge.

It is my experience that when faculty and professional staff gather to talk about the Catholic character of their university, the complexity and urgency of the question will often be denied. Some will see no difficulties maintaining the Catholic character of the university, announcing themselves contented with the way things are; others will predictably announce with big smiles, as if they had just thought up the phrase, that "'Catholic university is a contradiction in terms." Many will feel that enough has been said if they can manage to pronounce the words: "I have no problem with the mission statement," though not having-a-problem with the mission of an institution is not usually thought to be the ideal attitude among persons chosen to work within it. Administrators will sometimes worry that overemphasizing the Catholic character of the university will offend some benefactors, board members, faculty members, or government agencies; while underplaying it, of course, might discourage some parents and alumni. Some faculty members cannot hear the word "Catholic" without responding with the words "sectarian," "proselytizing," and "indoctrination."

For many people--some for it and some against it--the very heart of what is meant by the word "Catholic" has something to do with restrictions on one's freedom, as if the authentic catholicity of a university should be measured by what speech, what convictions, what kinds of gatherings it forcibly excludes. For others, the word "Catholic" will feel like something old-fashioned, obsolete, superstitious, legalistic, prudish, exclusive, or authoritarian. Although, for me, the word "Catholic" means redemptive, liberating, inclusive, reconciling, life-affirming, and reverent toward human reason and human longing and human culture, I realize that the above-named concerns and anxieties are by no means groundless. An arbitrary, obscurantist, and oppressive way of exercising authority within the Catholic church has been--and, alas, sometimes continues to be--grounds for a very reasonable kind of concern and anxiety.

In the background of these kinds of conversations is the fact that there have been dramatic changes during the last half-century, both in the basic characteristics and self-understanding of American universities and in the basic characteristics and self-understanding of Roman Catholicism. As a result, there are many different ways of thinking and talking about university life and Catholic faith represented on any large campus. We bring different personal histories, different experiences, different memories and hopes to all our deliberations on religion, higher education, curriculum planning, procedures for hiring and promotion, student recruitment, service learning, student-life policy, and civic responsibility.

This being so, all efforts to talk about the subject should begin by acknowledging its complexity; no single analysis of the situation, no single solution to the problem, is likely to be adequate. The fact is that what was once obvious, and could more or less be taken for granted, or entrusted to the care of special groups on campus--for example, the founding religious community--must now be made more explicit, and elaborated more fully, and become the informed concern of all the members of the faculty, professional staff, administration, and governing boards. This is going to be hard.

In my opinion, the greatest difficulties we face in thinking and talking about these issues are being caused by philosophical problems. And the most important philosophical questions we can ask are always those about the philosophy or philosophies that we are always already practicing. The source of much of the perplexity we face in reflecting on the idea of a Catholic university is the assumptions--or ranges of assumptions--that we bring to our work at universities that are shaped by philosophical attitudes or convictions that might be described as "modern" or "liberal."

Many of these perplexities are caused by the belief that we do not, in fact, inhabit any philosophical convictions, that it is therefore possible to leave this thing called "philosophy" to some others and to build our mutual self-understanding as scholars and educators on the basis of something else, something more obvious, or maybe even more objective. This notion that there are escape routes from philosophy, in fact, is one of the chief characteristics of the philosophy I am trying to describe.

Another characteristic of this philosophy is the belief that we ourselves do not stand in a tradition, but have a place on which to stand that lies outside of all traditions, from which place we can be critical of tradition as such. This confidence that there is an escape route from tradition is a second big problem. Thus we all live within a tradition of being against tradition, a tradition which therefore is systematically forgetful of its own history and systematically negligent of the conditions of possibility for its own survival.

A third characteristic of this philosophy is that its model for valid knowledge is a certain popular understanding of the procedures of the physical and life sciences and its belief that all scholarly disciplines should, as much as possible, approximate the methods and attitudes of these sciences. This view of serious knowing, when simplified and over-generalized, sometimes produces a view of the truth, as Bernard Lonergan once said, so objective that it doesn't require minds to think it. This objectivism, in turn, distracts attention from a disciplined exploration of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in knowledge and from the role played by feeling and imagination and practice and social location in human knowing. So thought is cut off from love, and facts are cut off from values, and theories are cut off from practices, and observing selves are cut off from the realm of responsible agency. And subjectivity is cut off from objectivity. These are part of the legacy of this philosophy.

A fourth characteristic of this philosophy is that it is individualistic, it tends to think of human life in terms of the decontextualized self. The inherently social character of human consciousness and the relational nature of selfhood itself are overlooked. The fact that language is necessarily interpersonal or that the search for truth is somehow always dialogical is repressed. The fact that the phenomenon of meaning itself can only be understood in connection with traditions of communal practices is obscured. Societies are therefore thought of as contractual relationships established by free-floating individuals for their own purposes; and we become inarticulate about all those things which Charles Taylor calls "irreducibly social goods."

In this framework, concerns about the good and the beautiful tend to be relegated to the realm of the merely subjective, of irrational and undiscussable preferences, urges, or tastes. The only choice is between Objectivism and Relativism. Art, literature, morality, and even politics drift toward this zone of essentially "emotive," noncognitive expressive values. Except for some professionalized, technical, and detailed aspects of the field, much of philosophy drifts this way too. And so, obviously, does the whole subject of religion.

For people who adhere to this philosophy, while probably denying that they adhere to any philosophy, there are no sensible, serious, objective, publicly meaningful ways of talking about religious beliefs or the meaning of religious practices, which whole subject is therefore better left to the private sphere. Many of these people no longer believe that it is really possible to be intelligent and honest and religious at the same time.

Now in a situation where philosophy, tradition, knowledge, community, and religion are being thought of in this way, it truly does become difficult to think through "the idea of a Catholic university." Some time ago, it became difficult to think through the idea of a Protestant university, and the shimmer of the false universality of modem liberalism--of being a tradition which is no tradition and having a vantage point which is the view from nowhere in particular and having as one's chief value the ideal of value-free inquiry--is part of the story of the somewhat well-intentioned, somewhat unintentional secularization of institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

I'd like to say that I am neither for nor against this whole, complicated thing that might be called "modernity" or "liberalism," which has, in fact, many different currents and many good qualities as well as bad. But I am in favor of a critical, reflective, and discerning attitude toward it, trying to figure out which things we want to treasure and preserve and which things we want to question and resist. I confess I have some sympathies toward words like "hermeneutics," and "communitarian," and even "postmodern," provided, of course, that they're properly understood! In any case, I think we are facing a new opportunity to think in fresh ways about these issues. I believe that helpful resources are accumulating in philosophy, social science, and the humanities--in the natural sciences too--and even, if I may say so, in theology, that could help us enormously in advancing this conversation if we wanted to make use of them.

These philosophical questions and answers affect the way we think about education, and about what a university is, and about what it might be for, and so about how we are to determine concretely what should be meant in this context by "excellence." They affect the way we think about our options in the face of certain cultural trends, market forces, and government policies, and the way we make decisions about them--the way we become more conscious, more thoughtful, more intentional in relation to them.

These philosophical questions and answers also affect our theologies, our ways of thinking about the meaning, relevance, value, and truth of religious teachings and practices. And so they will help determine the way we answer the question: What is meant by "Catholic"--whether a "Catholic" university or a "Catholic" anything else.

I want to resist a little the initial assumption that being Catholic means mainly being willing to subscribe to a long list of propositions making truth-claims about something. Being Catholic means belonging to a tradition, being related to a religious community, that is characterized by certain practices, stories, symbols, and beliefs.

And a tradition is not a bunch of people all saying exactly the same thing while talking to no one in particular. It is a community living in history, interpreting its past and present circumstance and future possibilities in the light of certain memories, texts, hopes, and ways of proceeding. It is different people with different perspectives, talking with one another about the things they cherish, as well as talking with people representing alternative traditions.

Furthermore, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in After Virtue, "when a tradition is in good order it is partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives that tradition its particular point and purpose." He goes on to say: "So when an institution--a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital--is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is.... A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition."

This seems to me to be true not only about a university, then, but about Catholicism as well.

So what is a Catholic university? How should we imagine its meaning more concretely? A Catholic university, it seems to me, will be a place where a significant number of its faculty and professional staff and of its student body are Catholics and people well-disposed toward Catholicism. It will be a place where being Catholic is taken seriously by most faculty and staff as an intelligent and morally responsible option for contemporary people.

It will be a place where people are cultivating distinctive ethos, shaped by distinctive practices and memories and concerns. And this ethos will be reflected in hiring and recruitment policies, in curriculum planning, in available student-support services and extracurricular activities, in the physical features of the campus, and possibly in special academic centers and programs. Saying this leaves a lot of questions unanswered, I realize, and different universities will work out the details in different ways; but some acknowledgment of these basic features seems sensible to me.

A Catholic university should be a place in which the cultivation of a particular ethos is taking place, an ethos which involves, for example, compassion, humility, honesty, gratitude, critical reflection, spiritual discernment, a love of learning, and a generous concern for people who are suffering, or poor, or oppressed, or excluded--a place where faith, hope, and an intelligent love are somehow operative and discussable. It should be a place where many dedicated scholars and intellectuals share the conviction: that it matters what we invest our hearts in, what we give our hearts to, what we set our hearts on; that a search for truth cannot be separated from issues like friendship, and community life, and a love of virtue; and that self-fulfillment might inherently entail a concern for the common good, a hungering and thirsting for justice, and a search for a transcendent truth and goodness and beauty.

A Catholic university would be distinguished by its tradition of practices, including its characteristic worries, and narratives, and daily and seasonal celebrations. One of these practices will be a search for the essential, an inquiry about the heart of the matter, a conversation about the meaning of being Catholic in a particular culture and in a particular age. Creeds and other formulas of faith will play a role here, as will the appropriate, just, and prudent exercise of various kinds of authority; customs, prayers, and liturgies will play a role, and so will conversations, conferences, and arguments. Hand-out sheets and oaths will probably not be so helpful. What seems most important is that the question about the essential be the focus of particular practices.

What is needed, I want to say, are particular practices--inquiries, gatherings, arguments, and celebrations--that could remind us of some history, focus our attention, and cultivate particular habits of mind and heart that hold together our concerns for truth, for goodness, for justice, for beauty, for peace, for critical intelligence, for freedom and responsibility, for research and careful scholarship, for friendship and conviviality.

My own sense is that the future of Catholic universities will depend a lot on border crossings--the French might say "on transgressing boundaries"--but I would rather say, on border crossings: between our individual offices, between our different disciplines and departments, between our various schools and programs, as well as between knowledge and love, between theory and practice, between the local and the global, between the mystical and the prophetic. The irreducibly social good of a Catholic university will be available to us only insofar as we recognize our interconnectedness in new ways and revitalize our search for more coherent and integrated ways of thinking and teaching--and living.

Robert J. Egan, S.J., teaches theology and spirituality at Saint Michael's Institute and Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington. This article is adapted from an address given last month at a Symposium on Catholic Identity and Intellectual Tradition at Seattle University.