The Pope, the Press, the Profs, and the People.

The Pope, the Press, the Profs, and the People, by Dick Goldkamp (Human Life International, 7845-E Airpark Road, Gaithersburg, Md. 20879; 20 pp., $3)

WOULD the FTC flunk Catholic University for violation of truth-in-packaging laws? Essentially, that is the question posed by Dick Goldkamp in his monograph, The Pope, the Press, the Profs, and the People. Goldkamp chronicles the near-wholesale secularization of virtually all U.S. Catholic universities and colleges since the close of Vatican II. The usual horror stories that he succinctly covers should give pause to the most die-hard Catholic alumnus: Notre Dame's Father McBrien advising the Pope to stay in Rome and mind his own business; Georgetown's former president, Father Timothy Healy, refusing to continue the fight against forced university financing of "gay" clubs; St. Louis University permitting the invitation of two signers (nuns) of a 1984 pro-abortion ad to speak on campus; and so on, ad nauseam. The history makes interesting reading, but Goldkamp's thesis that we're witnessing a battle of the Pope and the Catholic faithful versus university administrators and professors is unconvincing. It's not just the fault of the omnipresent university liberals. For a start, Rome--even under this Pope--has been discouragingly timid. It took 12 years just to start proceedings against Father Curran and another eight to remove him from Catholic University--so he could go on to publish and teach elsewhere. The same frustrating pattern has been followed with other infamous dissenters: either they were just rebuked, or, if they were removed from their positions, they have gone on to repeat their performance elsewhere. More depressingly, in some senses--at least compared to thirty years ago--we're all dissenters now. The rot is so deep and so pervasive that it is, humanly speaking, intractable--large crowds of celebrity-loving Roman Catholics at Papal Masses notwithstanding. The faithful remnant of orthodox Catholics will find the sad story chronicled in this work worth the read.