The Gospel on Campus: A Handbook of Campus Ministry Programs and Resources.

Before Vatican II, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the counterculture had their say, the national Newman movement was a growing component of the U.S. Catholic subculture. But it quickly unraveled in the heat of protest and aggiornamento. Since the collapse in the late sixties, campus ministry for and by Catholics has had to struggle mightily to redefine itself. Having flown by the seat of my ministerial pants in a campus setting throughout the seventies, I envy those now filling the academic vineyard this succinct review of programs and resources.

The publication of such a substantial handbook only twenty years after everything about campus ministry went up for grabs, is no small feat. Not only that, it sets a standard for defining and describing the components of ministry in an academic setting that could well be emulated for other chaplaincy and pastoral activities.

As I describe the Handbook's benefits, I hope its creative contribution will be made plain. But the outcome of this creativity raises deeper issues for the future of ministry in a clericalized church, an issue that goes beyond the editor's and authors' charge--an issue that I will return to at the end of the review.

The Handbook's first benefit is its comprehensiveness. Too often pastoral presence is lumped together as campus ministry in so many differing settings that we often make the task more difficult for those working in it. When the Handbook's predecessor came out in 1976, it was so exclusively focused on ministry on a traditionally Catholic campus that it virtually disenfranchised everyone working in other settings (in fact, the majority). I once received a directory of persons working in campus ministry in my diocese that listed those of us on "secular' campuses as "Non-Catholic Campus Ministers." The current effort happily avoids all such parochialisms.

Because the environment of higher education has become more homogeneous since Catholic campuses were "mainstreamed" after Vatican II, they represent a unique context for the church's ministry. The Handbook offers an analysis of this context, describing the different settings and challenges for a ministry of presence to higher education.

An effective presence demands organization lest campus ministry be some vague hand-holding operation for students who find the atmosphere intimidating. An important and often neglected aspect of organizing campus ministry is fund-raising. Campuses and students can present a real challenge for what is often a poorly handled activity, but this resourceful book bites the bullet and outlines fund-raising tasks as well as its rationale. In this the Handbook represents a professionalism too seldom considered a part of ministry. The section on organization also outlines legal issues, considers goal-development, and recommends evaluation schemes. The last, in particular, should help some campus ministers fend off the prejudicial measuring of their work by church officials with little experience or sympathy for campus ministry. This professionalism also extends to the question of personnel involved in campus ministry.

Unlike parish ministry, which often muddles along under the same premises that Bing Crosby portrayed so idealistically in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, campus ministry has had to professionalize to survive. Because it was perceived as so much on the fringes of both church and society, it was the entry point in ministry for many women religious and laity. Neither academic nor ecclesiastical authorities knew quite what to expect of campus ministry, or who should do it. So "necessity became the mother of pastoral invention" and a ministry uniquely collaborative, nonauthoritarian, collegial, and peer-oriented was born. But ironing out the kinks, weeding out the kooks, and providing leadership for campus communities then became a priority. Both the Catholic Campus Ministry Association and the Department of Education of the USCC have worked hard to create structures that will accomplish this.

Commissioning this Handbook was a specific attempt to put flesh on the bones of the bishops' 1985 pastoral letter, "Empowered by the Spirit: Campus Ministry Faces the Future." Where the letter was general and theoretical, the Handbook is specific and practical. What's more, it has excellent ideas and suggestions about initiating contacts, promoting volunteer work on campus, planning liturgy and music, developing peer ministry, forming conscience, evangelizing, educating for justice and peace, working ecumenically (never easy in any setting!), and developing leadership for the church. The section on "spirituality" panders to an adolescent rather than an adult model of faith ("If I invite God, the perfect lover , as my partner...." is a sure recipe for narcissism, not growth). Other sections are more properly strategic without being prescriptive.

For all the Handbook's strengths, there are also weaknesses--some of them are as much the larger church's failures of resolution as those of the church-on-campus. Although the Handbook tries to situate ministry within the "total world of higher education,'' it repeats the idealized picture of the 1985 Pastoral: "Throughout its history, the church has been instrumental in cultivating the intellectual life." The inference is that the Catholic church in all its members has always done this, a generalization that overlooks some painful chapters of suppression in more than the modern era. The alienation of many cultural and scientific leaders in Western societies contradicts the idealized picture the Handbook asks us to accept, a schism that anyone on a campus ("secular" or not) knows and swallows daily. No one should idealize the academy in reaction, but ignoring the split that virtually defines academic culture is a weakness, both in the church and in the Handbook.

Second, the Handbook tries to have its cake and eat it too when it speaks of the "prophetic yet reconciling voice" of campus ministry and its role in building the "wisdom community." In fact, by speaking of both church and academy as "two wisdom communities," the authors seem to be trying to bridge the divide I just described. But, to presume that the concerns of "prophecy" (especially when justice is concerned) and those of "wisdom" will be the same fuses two very different modalities both on the biblical horizon and in contemporary culture. Prophecy and wisdom make valid claims, but they are not the same ones. Nor does the church today have a corner on the market in either area. The Handbook does not speak of the church's need to listen and learn from universities and their constituencies, does not acknowledge that they, too, are a province where the Spirit acts without waiting for permission.

Finally the Handbook does not point to some of the unanticipated consequences that flow from the promotion of lay leadership in campus ministry and the larger church's reluctance to benefit from it. The creativity of campus ministry can subvert what remains of the preconciliar Catholic subculture. This may not always be so desirable, but the future of church leadership will not be what it once was. How the church at large accepts the challenges presented by successful campus ministry is the unstated outcome of what the Handbook chronicles. Campus ministers who have worked for "excellence in liturgy, preaching, and music" and have promoted "new styles of leadership and ministry that no longer depend solely upon ordained priests" can testify to multiple cases in which student leaders upon leaving school have been refused any role in parishes whose clerical leaders do not want competition from uppity laity. Having enfranchised these baptized, campus ministry has created ecclesial monsters.

If they are not permanently alienated by a still-resistant episcopal leadership and by a younger, more conservative clergy, these lay leaders threaten to subvert the hierarchical order on which the immigrant church's

subculture thrived. In their rigidity and their pretensions to ontological-change-through-ordination, such clergy seek to keep Catholics in the very ghetto out of which any campus ministry worth its salt has coaxed them. For the Handbook to engage in a prophetic challenge to church leadership on this neuralgic issue of listening to the laity would probably have meant biting the hands that fed its authors. Yet, this is the dangerously creative work that campus ministry, at its best, is engaged in today.

The gift that so many of the laity, and the Spirit that moves them, bring to the renewable life of the people of God is the gift of subverting the clergy's insistence on their privileges. The church order that is aborning is yet in the future, but its seeds are being sown (even if the outcome of the growth will remain in doubt for some time) in places where the laity is truly "empowered by the Spirit."

Reverend Paul E. Dinter was director of Catholic Campus Ministry at Columbia University and Barnard College from 1973-1988. He is presently associate professor of New Testament at the Maryknoll School of Theology, Maryknoll, N.Y.