College Catholics: A New Counter-Culture.

In Commonweal's education issue of April 9,1993, Kenneth Woodward and Michael Hunt offered contrasting views on the state of Catholic students in higher education. Woodward focused on Catholic schools and lamented the general decline of liberal arts education, as well as the specific failure of Catholic colleges and universities to convey to their students the intellectual depth and breadth of Catholic high culture. Hunt took off from the annual UCLA survey of college freshmen and found in it a confutation of the popular notion that secularism or religious indifference is the regnant attitude among students on college campuses: more than three-fifths of the respondents described themselves as either Roman Catholics (30.5 percent) or born-again Christians (31.7 percent). These are contrasting views, but not contradictory ones, since Woodward's complaint is not with the "raw material" but with the end "product" of Catholic colleges. Indeed, Hunt's final point about a college-aged audience receptive rather than hostile to a religious message raises the stakes both for Catholic higher education and for Newman chaplains, like Hunt himself, at secular universities.

Based on eighteen years' experience at three such secular campuses, most recently at Tufts, Michael Hunt has written his own largely anecdotal account of religion on campus, and, like his reading of the UCLA survey, it is generally upbeat on the subject, especially where Catholics are concerned. The central image of the book is a chapel filled on a Sunday night with several hundred students coming on their own to participate at Mass. What percentage of the Catholic population at Tufts this represents is not indicated, but it does make up, as a non-Catholic colleague comments to Hunt, "the largest voluntary, not-for-credit gathering of students that takes place on a regular basis."

Hunt sees the Mass as central not only theologically but also psychologically and even sociologically to Catholic identity, and he gets this from the students themselves. As one woman tells him, stopping "being" a Catholic for her meant stopping going to Mask on a regular basis. Surely, there's more to it than that, and Hunt methodically covers all the other bases (social justice, sexual morality, personal spirituality, etc.), but common worship remains a touchstone for his ministry, as it does for parish life.

Indeed, one of the several useful suggestions he makes to his fellow campus ministers is to use the parish as a frame of reference, not in a mechanical way but as a reality check on a ministry that can otherwise become rarified and precious. College students live in a four-year bubble that can inhibit as well as promote their maturing: good liturgies, retreats, and spiritual counseling can channel their inevitable introspection toward contemplation that establishes a personal relationship with God, but they need as well to hear the gospel's challenge to change the world beyond themselves, the larger world of business and politics they're presumably preparing to enter. That world includes parishes very different from college chaplaincies. Wisely, Hunt insists on a two-way conversation: graduates need to make an effort to find and join vital parish communities, but parishes need to adapt as well if they want to draw the thousands of enthusiastic young adults for whom their college years have indeed been formative of their Catholic faith.

The refreshing realism of that suggestion pervades the rest of the book. Just as Hunt resists the prevailing wisdom that college students are confirmed secularists, he warns against the temptation to accept rather than challenge the current zeitgeist on campus. Students are looking for adult role models, not overaged adolescents; and many of them come bearing the wounds 6f a society that has forced them to "grow up" far more rapidly than earlier generations: broken homes, addictions, promiscuity, phony sophistication. Combine that with a multibillion-dollar youth culture and you get a generation often wary of making life decisions and commitments. Ministering to them effectively requires the same virtues as good parenting: attentiveness, patience, and good judgment. Reading the many stories in Michael Hunt's book and meeting a couple of students who have worked with him lead me to suspect that he possesses those virtues and that the Catholic students who became involved in the Newman Center at Tufts are onto a good thing.

But that leaves open the question about the Catholics at Tufts and elsewhere who don't get involved as well as the even larger group who attend Catholic colleges and whose fate Ken Woodward lamented. What of the latter? Well, first of all, the Catholic college's responsibility for its Catholic students goes far beyond that of a Newman chaplain's; in addition to providing a campus ministry program which often includes resident chaplains, the college (or university) provides the framework for the students' whole experience on campus: from admission to curriculum, from student life to volunteer work.

Is Catholic intellectual life alive and well on such campuses in the way Woodward recalls from Notre Dame in the fifties? Based on a dozen years at Georgetown and some secondhand knowledge of other (mainly Jesuit) schools, I'd say that the general level of academic life is probably more sophisticated (less parochial, more rigorous), and that there is a growing interest among some students and faculty for a Catholic Studies program as part of the curriculum. The latter represents in part an admission that faculty are being hired for their specialized knowledge rather than their faith commitment, but also a realization that faculty members, not always Catholics, are teaching courses in the social and hard sciences as well as the humanities that deal with Catholic themes and issues.

Consolidating such efforts will provide not only a coherent intellectual discipline for the student but a forum for faculty interested in the rich Catholic tradition to share ideas. Similarly, a summer program called Collegium for advanced graduate students and young faculty with similarly Catholic interests had its first session at Fairfield University this past June.

There's no going back to the fifties, but a revival of interest in the Catholic intellectual tradition is underway. It needs much more nurturing within and beyond the classroom on Catholic campuses, as well as within and beyond the chapel at secular universities. It also needs gadflies like Ken Woodward and pastors like Michael Hunt.