Chair of Catholic Studies at McGill.

In February, 1998, Dr. Dan Cere, director of the McGill Newman Centre, launched one of the many scholarly conferences he had organized over the years for the Centre. This one was entitled simply Fatherhood.

It was a splendid conference, one in which every paper was worth hearing, and one in which the follow-up discussions were thoughtful and pertinent. Another exceptional aspect of the conference is that it was the first time the Newman Association had ever advertised one of its conferences on the Internet.

One might say that this latter was hardly worth the effort since the Internet announcement attracted only one person, but the man who came all the way from Maryland to attend was very impressed with what he heard. Very impressed!

And so he visited the Newman Centre on Peel Street, read issues of the Newman Rambler, became familiar with the many scholarly and pastoral activities initiated and largely run by Dan Cere.

It was this man who eventually funded McGill's new Kennedy Smith Chair of Catholic Studies, named in honour of his father-in-law, and he who financed the renovation of McGill's Newman Centre, and who provided funds for the purchase of books and periodicals in Catholic Studies for the library.

"Now," you are supposing, dear reader, "he's going to claim it was Providence!"

That's right, I am!

And what better explanation can we find? Who would have predicted that a cash-strapped university with a certain history of antagonism to Catholicism would in the year 2000 inaugurate a program in Catholic Studies?

Occurrences at McGill since the announcement of the program have been astonishing to me. It seems that the first and most striking effect of the establishment of a Catholic Studies Program has been to give Catholicism a public face at McGill, and perhaps beyond. One of the most insidious phenomena of modern liberal secularism has been the ghettoizing of religion, the cleaving off of spiritual life from public life, or what has been called the Public Square. In a way strikingly similar to that in which the Victorians banished all reference to sex from public mention, contemporary secularists have censored the subject of religion as a rude and embarrassing intrusion into rational, polite exchange.

The idea that religion is a matter of private conscience and thus a subject to be kept to one's self, has a long history, but its truly dehumanizing effects and socially debilitating force have only recently become evident. The liberal, secular tactic of forcing religion offstage aims, not at the preservation of the citizen's spiritual life to be conducted in private, but at the steady erosion and eventual obliteration of religion altogether. This tactic has been remarkably successful.

Parents who have absorbed this sentiment feel vaguely uncomfortable about "imposing their values" even on their own children -- religious values, that is. Children who are not taught religion at home or in school are unlikely to become religious adults, any more than those who do not learn French or German can speak it as adults. Young people who see around them in their society neither signs of the vitality of religion nor any clear approbation of a moral code are unlikely to know where to turn in times of spiritual crisis. Even those who nowadays possess a religious understanding and conviction (kept private, to be sure) find themselves socially constrained in their spirituality by the absence of the public, communitarian support needed for ethical and spiritual growth.

Catholic Studies at McGill hopes to confront the presumption that religion belongs in the closet and open such received dogma to rational examination when its program gets underway in September 2001.

The McGill program is situated in the Faculty of Arts at the request of the donor, and its locus reflects the intellectual direction of the program. Without minimizing the importance of theology and Catholic doctrine, and certainly with no intention to dilute or relativise dogma, the character of our program is basically cultural. The required course, Introduction to Catholicism, will be cotaught by a professor of religious studies and a professor of literature. It will attempt to make students aware, not only of the basic teaching of the Church, but also of the vast and profound influence of Catholicism on every aspect of Western culture, from its early moments to the most contemporary. With special attention to the Catechism, every concept raised in the course will be related to present-day culture and its many problems. We believe that this approach is the most effective way to interest young undergraduates in our subject and to begin to instill in them the awe of Catholicism that this phenomenon has inspi red in their ancestors for two millennia.

Topics in Catholic Thought will use Monsignor Luigi Giussani's book, The Religious Sense, as a basic text to explore the human encounter with mystery in a religious economy that esteems reason. The relation of faith and reason in the life of the believer, the meaning of philosophical realism, and the wholeness of the religious self, are themes that will be looked at in literature and other cultural expressions.

In the second semester Catholic Moral Culture will examine the intellectual and philosophic basis of Catholic teaching regarding morality. While familiarizing students with the documents of the Church addressing ethical matters, theoretical reasoning will be related to contemporary experience and problems. Issues of interpersonal ethics, such as sexuality and marriage, will be stressed in this course.

We are most fortunate to have M. Claude Ryan, former head of the Quebec Liberal Party and former Quebec Minister of Education, to give our course in Catholic Social Thought. One of the emphases in the pontificate of John Paul II has been His Holiness' teaching on social issues (viz. Laborem Exercens). Workers' rights, the plight of exploited nations, war and ethnic violence have been salient among the preoccupations of the modern Church. These are complicated issues, highly resistant to solutions, and the teaching of the Church is equally complex. As rich as it is, this teaching is not widely known, and even where its principles are familiar, they are rarely identified as Catholic principles.

M. Ryan, who has vast practical experience of political life, also has a deep theoretical understanding of society and politics. A man who has been reading Cardinal Newman since youth, Claude Ryan will be able to impart to students a living history of Quebec and Canada from a profoundly Christian point of view.

It is incumbent on us to show students that the world that they see through the eyes of Dante is a Catholic world, that Chaucer's evocation of human community is a Catholic community, that Cardinal Newman's intellectual power is anchored in faith, and that, among many literary talents we all admire, Flannery O'Connor's wry genius, for instance, is a distinctly religious genius.

This does not mean that we will restrict our discussion of Catholicism to Catholic thinkers narrowly defined. Far from it.

All of the courses and other intellectual activities of the McGill Catholic Studies program are aimed directly at the postmodern moment -- the now that we and our students live in. Our time is multicultural and polyvocal, but this should not mean, as it does too often in postmodern discourse, that our culture is irremediably fragmented. One of the great, overarching bonds of Western culture and, more and more, of world-wide culture is Christianity. Whilst respecting the individual cultural vocabularies of the many diverse lands in which it is practised, the Church nevertheless lends to all a commonality that unites. It is that commonality that we wish to highlight in the McGill Catholic Studies Program. Nevertheless, it is not the intention of the program to present a hegemonic or triumphalist image of Catholicism, nor to minimize its imperfections and historical failures. Indeed, one of the great challenges of modern Christianity is to learn to be effective in a multicultural world without so diluting its o wn identity and distinctiveness as to become insipid and irrelevant.

At the same time, much of what is current in postmodern culture is antithetical to Catholicism and to all serious Christians. While the program wishes to delineate the wholesome nature of the presence of the Church in culture, there is no intention to avoid or gloss over those areas in which conflict with certain ideologies exists. Large sectors of feminism, homosexual activism, and scientific atheism, along with all hedonist and materialist worldviews, are antagonistic to Christianity and, in some cases, even to any and all spiritual visions. While we would not wish to minimize the difficulty of mediating between these positions and our own, the McGill Catholic Studies Program intends to engage these views as important contemporary discourses, without, however, compromising the intellectually substantial and spiritually hopeful discourse which is Catholicism.

Dr David Williams is professor of English at McGill and now also the Kennedy Smith Professor of Catholic Studies.