Keeping colleges Catholic.

Introduction

The Catholic church in the United States shares in one of the nation's most distinctive characteristics: the New World's sense of exceptionalism. Neither history nor experience dictate the future. In the American context, energy and enterprise can reshape human lives in ways that astonished the Old World, and perhaps still do. The American Catholic church, as much as our political, economic, and cultural systems, took advantage of the expansionist and independent spirit of a frontier society. Pioneering bishops, priests, sisters, and lay people helped build a vast system of Catholic institutions, of which the most remarkable is the more than two hundred colleges and universities rooted in the most far-flung rural landscapes and in the most densely populated cities. Catholic schools have sustained in the most disparate regions the presence of a Catholic intelligence. They have handed on the practice of a Catholic intellectual life, at first mostly to Catholics, and more recently to all corners, especially those who are among the least well-off in our society. Indeed, their record in educating first-generation Americans must be unparalleled. These schools have been a gift both to the Catholic church and to American society.

Today the future of these colleges and univerSities is gravely threatened. We do not use those words lightly. Nor did we gather the unprecedented number of articles that follow in this special section without the deepest hope that they will cause not only our readers but the whole Catholic community to consider the consequences of what is about to happen.

Next November when the bishops of the United States gather for their annual meeting, they are very likely to approve a set of canonical requirements that would irredeemably alter the character and mission of U.S. Catholic higher education, both for those schools who accept the canonical requirements and for those who demur. The details of those requirements, how and why they have come so perilously close to enactment, and their potential consequences are explored in the six articles that follow. Not light reading we admit, but these essays are required reading for all who are beneficiaries of these schools and for all who care that the Catholic church in the United States remain an intellectually engaged religious community.

The first consequence of an affirmative vote by the bishops next fall will be dissension. Presidents, boards of trustees, and faculties will have to choose - Catholic or Not Catholic, by the Vatican's definition. That in itself will bring division. Those who adopt the canonical requirements will forsake several distinctive features of higher education in this country - autonomy, academic freedom, and pluralism. Those that refuse the requirements may face the anathema of a local bishop, a religious order, and the Vatican: they will be declared Not Catholic. All of this, mind you, in the name of maintaining the Catholic identity and character of Catholic higher education in the United States.

That the achievement of two centuries and a twenty-year conversation about Catholic character and identity should falter or even fail at this point is not only heart-breaking, it is intolerable.

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other observers uncertain whether the response by Catholic educators has yet been at all commensurate to the challenge.

For the bishops' part, they are currently moving toward a confrontation that is needless and, if not outrightly destructive [see Paul C. Saunders, page 24], wasteful of an opportunity that may not soon return. They are doing this against their own better judgement, pressured by Rome and by a minority within their own ranks. How did we work ourselves into this counterproductive state?

The current discussion actually encompasses three distinguishable concerns:

* maintaining a Catholic character and mission in American Catholic institutions of higher education;

* complying with the apostolic constitution Ex corde ecclesiae;

* devising local "ordinances" that apply the general norms of Ex corde ecclesiae concretely to the United States.

These concerns are obviously related but not al all identical. What has happened is that, step by step, the discussion has lid from the first to the third, and in that process the subject has been radically changed. The original question of how Catholic higher education's religious identity might be defended or renewed has given way to a largely different topic, how Catholic higher education can be subordinated to canon law. The latter question is what is now being pursued regardless of its significance for the former. The point is no longer to reach the destination; it is to pay homage to the road map.

The challenge of retaining this country's exceptional network of Catholic colleges and universities as a key resource of scholarship and critical intelligence for the Catholic community did not arise because of Ex corde ecclesiae. Suppose that no Ex corde ecclesiae existed. Catholic leaders would have been no less obliged to analyze and counter the many pressures driving Catholic institutions, like many other institutions before them, toward secularization. Those pressures are multiple and complex. They are financial, legal, and cultural. They include market competition for students and faculty, the prevailing academic ethos, including its commitments to academic freedom and evaluation by peers, and finally an appreciation for diversity and individual conscience that runs as deep in the Catholic population as outside it. The dynamics of secularization, furthermore, operate differently on small institutions than on large ones, on research universities than on liberal arts colleges, on urban commuter schools than or residential campuses. Anyone who thinks that these pressures can be dealt with by a simple act of will on the part of Catholic educators is blithely ignorant of the realities. Not that a show of will isn't called for (and been sadly lacking) in some cases. But it will prove fruitless without a thoughtful, long-range strategy tailored to the individual institution and its setting. No one stroke is the answer; nurturing a Catholic identity demands a whole repertoire of initiatives that stretch from student life to recruitment of key faculty and administrators, from campus ministry to new course development, from research incentives to interdisciplinary conversations. This is not an effort to be achieved by fiat, from the top down. It requires explanation, persuasion, consensus building. And money helps.

Efforts to address questions of Catholic identity and Catholic higher education predated Ex corde ecclesiae and continue to exist independent of it. Of all the current initiatives to revitalize this identity on campuses across the nation - and there are many - I cannot think of one that would not have been undertaken even if John Paul II had never issued his directive. In fact, the relationship of Ex corde ecclesiae to these efforts has always been ambiguous. Unquestionably the prospect of such a document, which was long in the making, concentrated the minds of not a few Catholic educators who might otherwise have preferred to avoid an uncomfortable self-scrutiny. At the same time, the document - or the fears associated (not entirely without reason) with virtually any Vatican document - was often an albatross around the neck of campus advocates of reasserting Catholic identity. Of course, when the pope's statement finally appeared, after extended consultation, it proved to be a reflection rich in guidance about what being a Catholic college or university might mean. At least, to those who actually read it.

Even so, moving from the original objective of retaining or renewing Catholic identity to the secondary or intermediate objective of complying with Ex corde ecclesiae has important consequences. For one thing, although some people consider it heretical to say, the pope is not necessarily the repository of all wisdom on this or any other subject. Especially in view of the extent of his remarks, it is not unlikely that some of them may be mistaken or at the very least in need of qualification. All faithful, theologically literate, and grown-up Catholics know this. Presumably that includes bishops, even if they sometimes pretend otherwise. More importantly, Ex corde ecclesiae, like the majority of papal documents, is the far-from-seamless work of many hands. It reflects compromises among competing interests and priorities; it retains ambiguities, inconsistencies, lacunae, and loopholes.

What if the Catholic university's mission of establishing a Christian presence in the university world, or of freely and fearlessly pursuing truth, or of engaging the local culture, or of fostering dialogue between science and religion - all purposes eloquently emphasized by John Paul II - should, in given circumstances, directly conflict with his concern that non-Catholics not constitute a majority of the faculty? If one is to be true to the document, which consideration is to give way? Which is to prevail? Clearly, Ex corde ecclesiae, like other texts of any complexity, requires a controlling hermeneutic, a principle of interpretation. This touchstone, I submit, is the pope's call for Catholic colleges and universities to assure an effective Christian presence, first, in the world of higher education and advanced learning and, second, in the culture generally. This note is entirely in keeping with his vision of a "new evangelization" and of rescuing a crippled and demoralized humanism from its modern flaws by opening it to the transcendent and recentering it on Christ.

But this note, it must also be admitted, is less apparent in the "General Norms," part 2 of Ex corde ecclesiae, than in the papal text that constitutes the bulk of the document. Indeed, the General Norms introduce themselves as "a further development of" the Code of Canon Law. So the question arises: Are those norms to be read in the light of the pope's text, especially in cases of conflict, tension, or ambiguity? Or are they to be read independently of it, as though the text were a merely inspirational introduction to an extension of canon law? If the latter, then we have taken another decisive step. First, the papal prescription for Catholic higher education, rich as it may be, has been substituted as the object of attention for direct confrontation of the problem on the ground. Then, a set of norms based on canon law has nudged even the papal prescription from center stage.

Which brings us to the 1998 text applying Ex corde ecclesiae to the American situation. Rather than providing the framework for returning to the concrete campus reality and measuring it by the papal vision, the "application" currently on the table has become a further exercise in applying canon law. For almost a decade, the discussion on how to apply Ex corde ecclesiae has been dominated by the question of canon 812 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which requires Catholics teaching "theological disciplines" to "have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority." Can canon 812 be honored without impinging on the academy's principle that it alone should judge who is qualified to teach? The point is not whether that circle can be squared. It is that enormous energy, ingenuity, and emotion have been expended trying to do so with virtually no examination of its real importance to the overall question of Catholic identity. Out of the roughly forty courses required for a bachelor's degree, the majority of students at Catholic institutions take two in theology. If the distinctively Catholic element in the curriculum or in the research agendas of the faculty is limited to the theology department, those two courses could be taught by the bishop himself without it necessarily distinguishing the Catholic campus from the state university down the road. And if the price of putting an extra-academic, episcopal stamp on Catholic theology professors were to reduce their viability as conversation partners with scholars in other disciplines, or to reinforce the already existing tendency to fence off religion as a subject not susceptible to genuine inquiry, would it be worth it?

Questions like that cannot be discussed without returning to the basic concerns.

What is the whole effort trying to accomplish? Protecting students from exposure to heterodox ideas? Relieving the bishops or the Vatican of the burden of explaining to angry, disquieted Catholics that allowing such exposure does not automatically constitute scandal and betrayal? Making sure that dissenting positions are clearly labeled as such? Getting a hammer to use against individual outspoken critics of official teaching? Stamping out hotbeds of heresy? Controlling the Catholic theological guild as a whole by controlling one of their chief job markets? Barring questionable Catholic theology from reaching the general Catholic public?

Or should the overriding concern simply be, first, to assure that Catholic institutions graduate students with a reasonable level of theological literacy and, second, to foster theology as an academic discipline that attracts serious and creative scholars passionate about knowing and serving God and equipped to engage the rest of the university and the broader culture in the way John Paul II acclaims? Once one got clear which of these goals are central, and which are inappropriate, unachievable, unnecessary, or merely secondary, then one could decide about how to use - or not use - canon 812. As it is, canon 812 has become not a means to an end but an end in itself.

(The malleability of canon law, when malleability is desired, seems suggested by the virtual carte blanche that the "General Norms" of Ex corde ecclesiae give the Holy See to intervene regardless of existing church legislation. Note that canon 812 is technically not limited to theology departments; "theological disciplines," as it happens, include church history. As a Catholic and a historian teaching a course on American Catholic history in a Catholic university history department, I suppose I, too, need a mandate and should take an oath of fidelity - and, according to at least one canonist's opinion, would be required to do so even if I were teaching at Yale or the City University of New York. Those who protest against "bending" canon 812 should explain if they are truly going to apply it strictly.)

Much the same can be said about the proposal in the "application" that Catholic presidents of Catholic institutions take a profession of faith and oath of fidelity. What is the real point, and will this serve or undermine the larger mission of assuring a Catholic Christian presence in the university world and the culture? Similarly with the proposal that "faithful Catholics" constitute a majority of the faculty or the trustees. Apart from the potential flypaper of presuming to judge which Catholics qualify as "faithful," this is a standard that would probably be unproblematic at many institutions. At others, however, it could be enormously mischievous to apply, destructive of collegial and scholarly relationships, and quite counter to that ideal of "an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ" the pope asks Catholic universities to pursue.

If the touchstone for any application of Ex corde ecclesiae and its norms to the United States were the on-the-ground problems of Catholic identity or even the papal vision, the effect would be a revision of the 1998 "application" going well beyond its contested parts. It would change the entire focus and emphasis of the document. It would build on elements in the General Norms and the proposed "application" that are now subordinated to considerations of canon law. It would institutionalize procedures of self-scrutiny undertaken in conversation with the episcopacy. It would require institutions to answer for themselves exactly how they conceive of their Catholic character and mission, not just compartmentalized in one department but as affecting, in nuanced ways, the research and teaching agenda of the entire institution as well as the ethos of its communal life. It would require a definition of Catholic identity that was not reduced to extracurricular honorifics or equated with the generic "values" or even "ethics" so hallowed in academia. It would require schools to set benchmarks for measuring how they are living up to that conception. It would require them to devise strategies for meeting those benchmarks and to assess their successes and failures frankly.

Could this approach have muscle? Hasn't there been enough mindlessness or avoidance on the part of Catholic educators to justify the Vatican's demand for a "juridical" approach? Doesn't anything less leave the bishops and the church generally at the mercy of recalcitrant educators' protestations of good intentions? If the Vatican's demand for a "juridical" approach were freed from its canon law specifics and simply translated into a search for some practical leverage, a workable compromise might be within reach. Catholic bishops always retain the prerogative of unilaterally announcing that a college or university no longer meets the minimal conditions for being considered distinctly Catholic. There would be legal consequences but the reverberations would be potentially great, and I think most institutions would strive to avoid such a public rift. And given the danger that such a break could be irreversible, bishops would avoid it too. If a declaration of this nature were issued lightly or eccentrically by a local bishop, it would quickly backfire, generating solidarity from other schools, and alienating scholars and educated Catholics. The bishops might do well to devise procedures for insuring that such a declaration of last resort were used rarely and responsibly, in view of an institution's overall posture rather than some narrowly defined dispute, and only after an appeals process, broad consultation, and institutionalized opportunities for dialogue and resolution. Should an approach based on communication and mutual trust need to be balanced with a little bit of muscle in reserve, this seems like a more flexible and restrained way than applying canon law.

I am convinced that the American bishops can find a way to implement Ex corde ecclesiae that has real bite but does not sabotage Catholic higher education and the current initiatives to affirm its Catholic identity. But they will have to keep several things in mind.

* Back to basics. Return to the papal vision enunciated in the first part of Ex corde ecclesiae and, beyond that, to the concrete reality of the campuses. The goal is preserving the distinctly Catholic character of these institutions. It is not abstract compliance with a code or even a papal text. It is not mounting a weapon for penalizing dissenting theologians. It is not to keep Catholic students or the Catholic public innocent of objectionable ideas. Clarity and realism about the objective are primary.

* There is no single model for being a Catholic college or university in the United States. Different histories, different locales, different constituencies, different opportunities, resources, and aspirations suggest different models. Let there be a strictly doctrinally defined Franciscan University of Steubenville and a cosmopolitan Georgetown and a more religiously homogeneous but academically open Notre Dame, and also liberal arts colleges serving working-class women or minority and often non-Catholic returning students. Let the bishops show that the one university they already collectively control, The Catholic University of America, can finally, after more than a century, become a presence in the first rank of American universities. See which one of these institutions or, more realistically, which ones best live up to the pope's culturally evangelizing vision. Perhaps that vision will be best served by a variety of models emphasizing different aspects of the task.

* Let canon law be a means not an end in itself. Let bishops be bishops, not errand boys. Take what time is needed. Refuse to be bullied by deadlines into rash or unwieldy or irrelevant or self-destructive actions. Insist on the responsibility of bishops. That responsibility is to recover, to preserve, to renew what has been built up in the United States over generations - and not simply to reach a paper solution or get a good report card from Rome.