Cavadini explores truth, theology, mission at Notre Dame
In partnership with the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (dCEC), John Cavadini delivered a lecture titled, “Having Your Cake and Eating it Too: Research at a Catholic University.” The Notre Dame Professor of Theology drew an audience that nearly filled the Andrews Auditorium in Geddes Hall on January 28.
Cavadini, a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1990, has served as the director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life for 25 years. He served for five years as a member of the International Theological Commision, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. In 2018, he received the Monika K. Hellwig Award from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities for Outstanding Contributions to Catholic Intellectual Life.
The lecture, drawing heavily from Pope Saint John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, addressed the fundamental paradox every Catholic university faces in its mission: How can such an institution, professing to know the fount of truth, simultaneously carry out a search for truth?
Cavadini addressed this tension using Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which he called “the most thorough and most sophisticated reflection on the Catholic university in the literature of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.” The document states, “The Catholic university’s privileged task is to unite existentially by intellectual effort, two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the fountain of truth.”
Cavadini noted that most prestigious universities fail to include the word “truth” in their mission statements and academic guidelines, opting to supplant it with terms like “knowledge” and “research.” Cavadini explained the danger of this, saying, “Truth is identified as the basic or fundamental value without which freedom, justice, and human dignity are extinguished.”
Cavadini clarified that the mission of a Catholic university is to search for the whole truth, and “no academic discipline, including theology, can claim that it has, by its research, exhausted the meaning of truth.”
At a Catholic university, different disciplines, including theology, are brought into conversation in order to see this whole truth. Cavadini described research at a Catholic university as “a multi-layered conversation among researchers and scholars in different disciplines.” Being a Catholic university, he argues, does not prohibit a search for truth, but aids it.
Cavadini concluded, “A Catholic university, unashamed of its spiritual and intellectual heritage and willing to speak its commitment in public to Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and truth, could find that it is a fountainhead of renewal, not just for Catholic education, but for education as a whole, encouraging the recovery of the essential identity of a university in the pursuit of truth for its own sake.”
In a Q&A session following the lecture, one attendee asked Cavadini his advice for researchers at a secular institution, whose administrations are not aligned under a Catholic mission.
Cavadini explained that all students are looking for something, regardless of religion. He noted that universities give their students the pressure for prestige, and fear of failure, but that the university can give students something else. Cavadini said, “You can give them something else, something that helps them see deeper ideals and deeper aspirations. You’ll see your life is not a failure.”
Tasha Januszewicz, a graduate student who attended the lecture, told the Rover, “This talk kind of gave that idea on an institutional level, that these Catholic universities are a place to express their research and to express their Catholicism through the research.”
Cavadini’s lecture is available to view on the dCEC’s YouTube page. The next lecture from the dCEC is titled “What We Owe to Each Other: Embodiment, Flourishing, and Public Bioethics.” Join O. Carter Snead to explore this topic on February 20, in the Eck Visitors Center.
Piper Burrows is a freshman from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She misses her goldendoodle, Buster, dearly. Send cute dog pics to pburrows@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: Angelus News
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