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Brian Boyd
Executive Editor
This article is the second in a three-part series investigating the effects, rationale, and importance of President Jenkins’ Address to the Faculty, wherein he announced a renewed emphasis on the Catholic mission of the University.
THE TOPIC of Notre Dame’s Catholic mission is something which all concerned parties, from Holy Cross priests who are administrators to non-Catholic professors, consider a pressing question.
“I think it is of critical concern …. [The administration] and faculty talk about [the mission] all the time,” Executive Associate Dean Sterling said.
Yet while everyone agrees that it matters, consensus stops there. As Fr. Ted Hesburgh writes in the introduction to Dean Mark Roche’s book The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism and the Idea of a Catholic University, the question has at times reached the level of “intellectual warfare” on campus, and continues to produce debate on a topic that is often “barely understood.”
What is the distinctive mission of a Catholic university? What is a Catholic university to begin with? While a conclusive statement on such issues is next to impossible, these questions must be raised if Notre Dame’s status is to be understood in context.
The Still Point of the Turning World
At certain levels, such disagreement can be a sign of vitality. Professor Alfred Freddoso, in his essay “On Being a Catholic University,” writes that “a true catholicity is marked by a kind of “coincidence of opposites,” a plurality within a unity, or perhaps better, a creative anarchy within fixed limits.” Freddoso continues by quoting G.K. Chesterton: “St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. … By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists.”
Two characteristic traits of the Catholic faith are critical for this freedom within unity to be maintained: tradition and communion. As for the first, “central to the Catholic faith is the haunting conviction that to cut ourselves off from this tradition is to cut ourselves off from Christ. This is our inheritance, sealed from the very beginning with the blood of martyrs. It is not ours to reinvent; nor are we free to make it up as we go along,” writes Freddoso.
As this tradition is safeguarded by the successors to the apostles, communion with Church leaders, and particularly the Bishop of Rome, is also essential. And while at times and places Church pronouncements have been neglected or even dismissed as “grandpa’s latest antics,” the most authoritative statement of the mission of a Catholic university is clearly that made by the Pontiff.
From the Heart of the Church
The discussion surrounding Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an Apostolic Constitution written by Pope John Paul II in 1990, mostly has concerned two of its particular requirements for Catholic universities: that Catholic theologians must be faithful to the Magisterium, and that a majority of the faculty must themselves be Catholic if the university is to remain so. The document as a whole is far more positive by illumination than negative by proscription, however.
Over and above understanding itself as a university like any other which offers “institutional autonomy … within the confines of the truth and the common good,” there are four essential qualities possessed by a distinctively Catholic university. These are: That both individuals and the community as a whole find their inspiration in the Christian faith; continuing reflection upon and addition to “the treasury of human knowledge” done in the light of the Catholic faith; “fidelity to the Christian message as it comes to us through the Church”; and a commitment to service of the entire “human family.”
These general principles are spelled out in a number of ways that, when enacted, would make Catholic universities truly distinctive. Their sense of community, relationship to the Church, and intrinsic obligation to serve mankind all receive extensive consideration. But perhaps the most noteworthy example is John Paul II’s understanding of research, one which was informed by the two Ph.D.s which he earned and the years he spent teaching at the university level. In sharp contrast to an intellectual climate that generally views research as the pursuit of ever-more-specialized knowledge, Ex Corde insists that research in a Catholic university also “necessarily includes (a) the search for an integration of knowledge, (b) a dialogue between faith and reason, (c) an ethical concern, and (d) a theological perspective.”
For this reason, a Catholic university is a place where “scholars will be engaged in a constant effort to determine the relative place and meaning of each of the various disciplines within the context of a vision of the human person and the world that is enlightened by the Gospel, and therefore by a faith in Christ, the Logos, as the centre of creation and of human history.”
The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism
This is indeed in utter contrast to how the secular academy understands itself. Lawrence H. Summers, in his installation address as the President of Harvard University, remarked that “The university is open to all ideas, but it is committed to the skepticism that is the hallmark of education.” Notre Dame’s own President, Fr. John Jenkins, responded to this compellingly in his 2006 Address to the Faculty: “Because as a Catholic university we are heirs to an understanding of reason that is not only critical but open to the transcendent, one in which faith can exist in harmony with reason in its search for understanding, we can strive to make the hallmark of a Notre Dame education something broader and richer.”
The most extended reflection from a Notre Dame administrator upon what this breadth and richness are can be found in Dean Mark Roche’s aforementioned book. Dean Roche finds the Catholicism of a Catholic university to reside in four features: its universalism, sacramental vision, elevation of tradition and reason, and emphasis on the unity of knowledge. While each of these is given positive elaboration, the distinctiveness again stands out best in contrast. Speaking of the need for moral education directed towards service, Dean Roche writes that “whereas Catholic universities may suffer the danger of hypocrisy when they do not live up to their ideals, the danger at many secular universities is greater still: quietly abandoning ideals that once motivated every university in this country and simply preparing students for critical thinking, divorced from the moral realm, and for career preparation, independently of the concepts of character, citizenship, and vocation.”
Dean Roche is similarly forthcoming about the damage that the loss of a traditional view of humanity with a particular role in Creation. “Because the modern self does not view itself as embedded in the cosmos and because the faculty member does not often see herself contributing beyond her subspeciality, her own endeavors are often divested of the dignity of contributing to a higher purpose. The modern secular university has become “an intellectual department store,” a “multiversity,” where disciplines develop side by side and scholars pursue independent pursuits with no sense of connection or overarching purpose. The Catholic tradition, inspired by the concept of the unity of knowledge, seeks in contrast to cultivate meaningful and integrative thought across the disciplines and argues that morality is not one sphere separate from the others but that it infuses all spheres,” he writes.
Two Possible Futures
As the term ‘multiversity’ suggests, without an integrative vision, Catholic universities risk ceasing not only to be Catholic, but also to be true universities. This is what Professor Alasdair MacIntyre contends in his essay “Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices.” Echoing John Henry Cardinal Newman, MacIntyre emphasizes the importance of liberal education, suggesting that without the ability to bring relevant information from varying disciplines to bear on a single subject, and moreover to view their own lives as integrated wholes instead of a succession of compartmentalized social roles, students will have difficulty in knowing how “to make the choices that will confront them throughout their subsequent lives.”
This, of course, is something that every person needs. The distinctive stamp of a liberal education from a Catholic university, however, would be that it not only grants students the ability to see how the major questions of life were confronted by the various outstanding figures of the Western heritage, but that it would additionally and particularly “introduce the student to a variety of culturally diverse forms of specifically Catholic achievement,” from Giotto to Edith Stein. “Such an education, if it is successful, will enable its students to view the world in a new and unexpected light. They will have a different and enlarged understanding of the multiplicity of human goods and of the human good,” MacIntyre writes. It is this knowledge of the good that will enable students to not only know how to make the crucial decisions in their lives, but moreover will aid them in making the right ones.
With this classical vision of education in mind, it is clearly of the uttermost importance that Catholic universities turn back towards “a retrieval of a kind of Catholic identity that will not only inform every aspect of the [universities’ lives], but will enable [them] to function as genuine [universities].” However, the opposite is more likely to occur: American Catholic universities, simply through “inertia and inaction,” will move “toward increasing assimilation to the conditions of the currently most prestigious American universities and a consequent replication of their fragmented condition.” MacIntyre suggests that a strong indication of how much a university has abandoned the ideal of a liberal education in favor of specialized research can be seen in light of its faculty retention policies. Who would receive tenure: A “wonderfully effective” undergraduate teacher who had published little specialized work, or an innovative researcher who is “either unable or unwilling” to teach undergraduates? If the answer is the latter at the expense of the former, “then that university is in need of radical reform.”
Crisis or Opportunity?
While these reflections upon what it is to be a Catholic university have ranged widely, they bear upon Notre Dame’s current situation in one particular way. In his annual Address to the Faculty last week, Fr. Jenkins spoke about the three “goals at the core of our mission”: unsurpassed undergraduate education, becoming a premiere research university, and ensuring that Notre Dame’s Catholic character informs all endeavors of the university. These goals are in theory compatible, but they have in practice proven difficult for other universities to maintain: few state schools combine the first with the second, and all Christian schools that have attained the second have abandoned the third in so doing.
For some at least, however, this is not so much of a warning as a challenge. “We’re trying to become a preeminent research university, and yet maintain our Catholic character. … You can argue that no one has successfully done that, and so really, we’re an experiment in trying to do that; and that’s the exciting thing,” Professor Ryan Roeder said.
Contact Brian at bboyd@nd.edu.
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