From the Heart of the American Church: Catholic Higher Education and American Culture.

From a Protestant perspective, American Catholic higher education is puzzling. At a distance, Catholic colleges and universities might seem to be drifting with little regard for their being in the same waters that swept all the leading Protestant schools far from their religious identities. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that "inadvertence" is among the least appropriate words to apply to the process of religious change that has marked the past forty years. The question of Catholic identity in America is passionately debated on campuses and has been for more than a generation.

Yet the leadership that encourages these discussions seems almost immobilized by its own ambivalence on the issue. On the one hand, the administrators of Catholic colleges and universities vigorously insist that their schools are still Catholic, perhaps even, as Notre Dame's Father Theodore Hesburgh argued in 1986, "more professedly Catholic than ever." On the other hand, when there are rumblings from the Vatican, most notably Ex corde ecclesiae, suggesting that bishops ought to exercise some oversight of Catholic academic theologians, Catholic administrators are of virtually one voice in insisting that such practices could not possibly apply to the American setting. Catholic colleges and universities, we are assured, are not Catholic in that sense.

David J. O'Brien provides a valuable overview of the contexts for assessing these ongoing discussions. An American historian at the College of the Holy Cross, he has been an active observer and participant in Catholic higher education discussions since he began teaching in 1965. Most recently he drew on that expertise to chair the committee which prepared the mission statement for Holy Cross.

As his title suggests, O'Brien thinks it is a mistake to talk about American Catholic higher education outside the context of the American Catholic church. One of his chief complaints is that too much of the discussion has been either too abstract or too institutional, forgetting that the future of American Catholic education is inextricably bound to the American Catholic experience which shapes the church. The American Catholic church, he suggests, can not act without the voluntary support of American Catholics and so American Catholic education cannot survive unless the American Catholic community sustains such an enterprise.

Providing very helpful summaries both of the changes in Catholic higher education since the 1950s and of recent debates on the Catholic character of higher education, O'Brien suggests that too often the debates have been framed in a simplistic context of "secularization." A much more useful altenative, he argues, would be "Americanization." That word far better suggests the ambiguities of the topic. During the 1950s and 1960s most Catholics welcomed many dimensions of Americanization as they were at last accepted as full participants in the dominant culture. Now, however, many conservative Catholic critics talk of Americanization as equivalent to secularization, meaning that the chief task of the church is to protect its constituents from the "neopagan" culture that surrounds them. To the contrary, O'Brien points out that there is no clear line between the American Catholic church and America. Since the church is hopelessly Americanized, it makes little sense to call for a simple separation of the church from the world. Such talk presumes an idealized church that has little to do with ambiguous American realities.

The application of these insights to higher education involves the very sensible suggestion that there is going to be no strengthening of the Catholic character of schools unless Catholic faculty voluntarily develop a substantive interest in the project. Neither the rhetoric of mission statements nor the mechanical method of setting percentages of faculty who are Catholic will get anywhere without an indigenous intellectual community. Moreover, maintaining theology requirements does not have much impact beyond that increasingly specialized discipline. O'Brien suggests three principal alternative strategies. First, colleges should emphasize the faith and justice dimensions of recent Catholicism. Second, they should establish programs and institutes to stimulate Catholic intellectual life. Third, they should hire faculty who reflect such commitments.

Despite the helpfulness of O'Brien's account of the problem - which is as informative as anything I have seen - there is some ambiguity as to how he hopes to generate interest in these solutions. It seems correct that there is no way to maintain the Catholic character of schools without developing a critical mass of faculty who are excited about Catholic intellectual life. And establishing institutes and programs for encouraging committed scholarship are excellent proposals. Yet the clarity of these proposals fades as O'Brien emphasizes the virtues of Catholic Americanism. He rejects the option of Catholic "distinctiveness," which "is what got us in trouble in the first place." Religion, he says, should be understood as "the search for meaning and value." The engagement with America must always be positive, with emphases on cooperation and dialogue that promote justice and good citizenship.

O'Brien's model seems to be much like H. Richard Niebuhr's ideal of the Christian "transformation" of culture. This model O'Brien contrasts with those whom he represents as advocating separation from American culture. His outlook seems formed, like many of his generation, by the ideals of the Kennedy era. Catholics can be fully American but without giving up their religious idealism, now directed toward making America and the world better and more just places in which to live. All this is fine so far as it goes. But one has to wonder how long such ideals could sustain a recognizable Catholic identity. Without some sense of real tension between the church and the rest of culture to complement a sense of a transforming cultural mission, there will be little way to sustain the religious sensibilities that can turn these ideals into more than conventional rhetoric. O'Brien's proposals seem to follow the path taken by mainline Protestants earlier in the century, when the mission of the churches was so blended with citizenship and morality that the churches became superfluous to the mix.

The validity of O'Brien's diagnosis of the problem, however, does not depend entirely on the type of Catholic Americanism he promotes as a cure. O'Brien is entirely correct that Catholic higher education is not going to survive without voluntary support from faculty. And such voluntary support needs to be cultivated through institutes and programs for recruitment and development of faculty who regard the intersection of faith and reason as worthy of their best efforts.

As O'Brien suggests, the very word "Catholic" is part of the problem because it can mean so many things in higher education. Expanding on that point, it might be helpful to note some of the many meanings "Catholic" might have when applied to a college or university. It might mean any combination of the following: (1) a school has a relationship to a religious order; (2) it has a more direct relationship to the ecclesiastical hierarchy; (3) it is a place where the church is present via its priests who celebrate the Mass and minister to students; (4) it serves the church as the people of God; (5) it has a historical association with the Catholic community; and (6) it is a place where at least some faculty make efforts to relate certain principles of the Catholic faith to the rest of learning. While a number of these meanings are essential to the survival of Catholic colleges and universities as such, it makes little sense to sustain Catholic higher education without the last.

O'Brien recognizes the need for an academic component among the things that relate Catholicism to higher education. Yet, like so many Catholics who can remember the church before Vatican II, he seems gun-shy of anything distinctively "Catholic," since that conjures up the ghost of resurgent ecclesiastical authority. O'Brien's solution is to emphasize "American" as the dominant adjective when thinking about American Catholic scholarship.

Perhaps, however, there is a more constructive solution. Perhaps if the word "Catholic" scares people off, another word is needed for reviving the project of relating faith to learning among Catholic scholars. Perhaps Catholic schools should join with the more traditionally minded Protestant scholars who speak of promoting "Christian" scholarship. The term "Christian," of course, has even more meanings than "Catholic," but in this context it signals a tradition of recognizing that there are distinctive affirmations of traditional Christian faith that ought to have implications for some of the rest of what one believes or teaches. In affirming that ancient enterprise there is virtually nothing that should separate Catholic and more traditional Protestant scholars. Yet Catholic schools seem reluctant to use the word "Christian." As one Notre Dame undergraduate explained to me, "Christian" is seen as a Protestant adjective. So it is "Catholic" scholarship or nothing. Given that choice, most Catholic academics know where they stand. The result is that, after a generation of attention at schools that otherwise are flourishing academically, little headway has been made on the project of relating faith to contemporary learning.

If "Christian" elicits too many negative images as well - as it probably does, especially when non-Christians are to be full partners in an institution - another term might be found. "Faith-related scholarship" may be the best. Although it is a bit vague, it has the advantage of recognizing that Catholic colleges and universities are diverse places. At the same time they should differ from the standardized American "diversity" in that they should encourage not only Catholics, but scholars of other faiths, to relate their faith to their learning. In any case, some positive new steps must be taken to counter the paralyzing negative reactions to Catholic distinctiveness that haunt so many intellectuals in the American Catholic community.