Members of the Notre Dame community filled the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on Monday evening, February 9, for a memorial Mass celebrating the life of Daniel Kim, a sophomore who passed away last week.
Kim’s passing constitutes “the loss of a member of our Notre Dame family,” as Student Body President Lauren Vidal wrote in an email announcing Daniel’s memorial Mass.
This phrase—“the Notre Dame family”—expresses a dynamic that sets our university apart from many others. Despite our differences, our community is marked by a profound sense of solidarity and a strong and lasting identification with the university itself. This campus has come to be a home away from home—a “home under the Dome”—for generations of students. At Notre Dame we come together to study, to pray, to live, to learn, and to play. And we come together to grieve—in these ways Notre Dame merits and lives up to the image of family.
But the image of “the Notre Dame family” is also sometimes invoked in contexts that suggest an underlying confusion about family and what it means for Notre Dame, as a Catholic institution, to identify itself as such. These are contexts in which the image of family is made the banner under which certain curious notions of “diversity” and “inclusivity” march. Those who invoke the “Notre Dame family” catchphrase in the service of these stipulated ideals would do well to consider what Inigo Montoya had to say in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Any community is marked by consent to pursuing certain goods in and through certain activities in the context of a commitment appropriate to those goods and activities. Consider Tom and Joe, who have consciously chosen to pursue certain goods—interpersonal harmony, knowledge, and health, for example—in and through regularly scheduled runs during which they discuss philosophy and theology. This form of community could be called friendship. Similarly, other types of community are distinguished according to their unifying goods, unifying activity towards those goods, and unifying commitment consistent with the realization of those goods in and through those activities.
What, then, distinguishes a university as a unique type of community?
To answer this question we need to be able to give an account of the various goods that provide reasons for action—the goods that members of a community consent to pursue together. In identifying reasons for action, one will ultimately arrive at some reason that ultimately justifies and explains action. These irreducible reasons for action constitute the most foundational ways in which we thrive as human beings.
There is no single good life, as anyone who is a member of a family will testify. Rather, there exists a range of good lives—different ways in which we can blend the basic ingredients of human flourishing. But these ingredients—we could call them “basic goods” or constitutive elements of any life well-lived—are limited. As conditions or activities that are good in themselves regardless of further goods flowing from their realization or our participation in them, we desire these goods for their own sake. What are these constitutive aspects of human flourishing? Any list should include: life and health; knowledge; skillful performance; integrity; friendship; marriage; and living in harmony with the greater-than-human source of order and meaning in the universe.
A university community is characterized by consent on the part of its members to pursue most centrally the good of knowledge through activities conducive to the realization of that good—scholarly engagement, free inquiry, teaching, and research, for example—in the context of a commitment to integrity and seeking after the truth. A Catholic university is further distinguished by consent on the part of its members—all of whom have freely chosen to integrate themselves into such a community—to pursue knowledge in the context of the synthesis of faith and reason and to form students in the Catholic intellectual tradition, animated all the while by fidelity and witness to the magisterial teachings and sacramental life of the Church.
To return now to Inigo Montoya’s linguistic concern, what is characteristic of a family? And how can the family and the Catholic university be brought together coherently to form one image?
The family is unique among the types of communities we have been considering in that the family is not marked in the same way by consent to pursuing certain goods in and through certain activities. Children in a family, after all, are not part of that family because they chose to be there. Rather, the family is an extension and embodiment of the marital union of a man and woman—in this sense it is possible to speak of the family as being inaugurated by the consent of the spouses. Each and every child constituting the family is the marriage of mother and father extended into time and space. This biological matrix ties the family together as a moral unity.
In the place of consent we find a web of familial equality, mutuality, and common identity among children that is the source of the love, duty, and loyalty characteristic of a virtuous family. The family is, in truth, oriented toward the whole array of goods constitutive of human flourishing and it pursues those goods through myriad activities. What most clearly distinguishes the family as a type of community is that the commitment appropriate to it is permanent and exclusive (exclusive, at least, with respect to biological membership in a family)—just as the commitment of the mother and father in marriage is permanent and exclusive.
The family is also characterized by a deep concern for what is genuinely good for its members. This concern, made manifest in love, or charity, consists in willing the good of the beloved. This often requires correcting the present pursuits of family members. An attitude of indifference towards the ends and goals pursued by one’s family members is poisonous to the health of the family. To fail to witness to and promote the most basic aspects of genuine human flourishing within one’s family is to fail to love.
To speak of “the Notre Dame family” in a way that does justice to the image requires understanding both the nature of the Catholic university and the essence of what it means to be a family.
Anyone who considers himself or herself to be a member of the Notre Dame community should be committed to the pursuit and sharing of knowledge for its own sake in the light of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the complementarity of faith and reason. To make any claim of constituting a “Notre Dame family” we must pursue these ends through activities infused at all times with a willingness to love our neighbors as Christ called us to love and to witness to the truth with clarity.
When stylized notions of “ tolerance,” “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “welcome” and the like are ingrained as ideals, or ends in themselves, to which we as a “Notre Dame family” should aspire, we lose sight of the unifying goods that hold us together not only as a Catholic university, but as a family. These catchwords tend to obscure the language of basic goods (and their absence, or privation), sound (and unsound) reasons, and true (and false) moral norms. To the extent that a shallow and sometimes mindless rhetoric of “inclusivity” and “welcome” dominates our discourse, we shrink more and more from any vision connected with a Church in which moral distinctions are made and absolute moral norms upheld—a retreat untenable for a university wishing to call itself Catholic.
Two examples suffice to highlight the problems that a rhetoric of inclusivity and welcome presents for Notre Dame as a Catholic university and a family.
Last October, Notre Dame announced its decision to extend employment benefits to legally married same-sex couples. As this decision was made willingly and without the coercion of civil law, the move was touted by University President Reverend John Jenkins, CSC, as one that would contribute to “a less imperfect community of love,” since “we recognize an urgent call to welcome, support and cherish gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.”
Here the tension between the ideals of inclusivity and welcome and the duty of the university to lend its institutional witness to the truths about marriage come into sharp contrast. How can Notre Dame square its decision with the teaching of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that, “In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty”?
With respect to marriage, we have not only failed to witness to our Catholic identity; we have failed as a family by failing to will the genuine good of all the members of our community.
Consider that the university defines discriminatory harassment, in part, as “Unwelcome … language that is based on an individual’s … sexual orientation, and that creates … an intimidating or hostile environment for that individual.” Numerous faculty and students on campus would consider the following statement unwelcome and hostile: “Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” This statement is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Will the Notre Dame community’s emphasis on welcome and inclusion, as embodied in its unsound harassment policy, lead ultimately to a situation in which articulating Church teaching qualifies as discriminatory harassment? If it does, we need to think much more carefully about what harassment is and is not.
These examples illustrate the inherent tension between two competing conceptions of “the Notre Dame family.” Both conceptions share the common notion that all members of the family should be respected and shown love. But to love properly in the context of a family requires a willingness to speak the truth, even when it may not be what someone wants to hear.
If “the Notre Dame family” has come to signify an unreflective and reflexively affirmative community in which there is no place for moral judgments grounded in the teaching of the Catholic Church, perhaps it is time to retire the image, as it does not mean what we think it means.
Tim Bradley is a junior studying economics and theology and residing in St. Edward’s Hall. Contact him at tbradle5@nd.edu.
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