The Future of Catholic Higher Education

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 9/19/02)

Three months ago a significant deadline came and went for the 235 American Catholic colleges and universities, and hardly anybody noticed. What was billed as a dramatic showdown pitting educators against bishops over the future of Catholic higher education turned out to be a total non-event.

"I think the patient is now dead," says Gerard V. Bradley, a law professor at Notre Dame, who is immediate past president of an organization of orthodox Catholic academics called the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. By "patient" he means Catholic higher education in the United States.

June 1 was the deadline set by the bishops two years ago for theology professors at Catholic schools to obtain the "mandatum"—a certification that they teach in communion with the Church.

The mandatum in turn was an element—by far the most controversial one — in Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), the document on Catholic higher education that Pope John Paul II published on the feast of the Assumption in 1990.

Theology professors at some orthodox Catholic schools publicly and proudly sought and received the mandate. Elsewhere, perhaps, some privately complied. Most, it is safe to suppose, did not. June 1 came and went. So much for that.

"The interventions of authority are done," Bradley writes in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly. "Nothing on the horizon suggests that the colleges left to themselves will get religion. The Catholicity quotient of our institutions is set for the next generation. What you see is what you are going to get."

Not everyone will share Bradley's dour assessment of the situation. Mandate or no mandate, optimists insist, Ex Corde Ecclesiae provided Catholic higher education with useful guidelines and promoted conversations between bishops and college presidents that would not otherwise have occurred.

That could be, but Bradley isn't buying it. The sine qua non for Catholic higher education—the Indispensable Conviction, he calls it—is the truth of the Catholic faith. And the ugly not-so-secret in many Catholic schools today is that a lot of the people in charge reject the idea that a Catholic education is "better because the faith is true."

To be sure, at many of these institutions one finds the trappings of Catholicism—religious exercises, student retreats, service projects, and the like. Bradley calls this The Formula.

"The nearly ubiquitous recipe for a Catholic college today," he explains, "is to surround an education indistinguishable from that at other schools with a Catholic collegiate atmosphere." Its constituent elements are good things in themselves. Unfortunately, they do not add up to a Catholic education.

The crucial factor is the faculty, and here the question is, "Is orthodoxy the norm or the exception?" Some schools don't know the answer while others know but aren't letting on. In either case, Bradley says, this is hardly information they share with parents, alumni, and wealthy donors.

So what now? Bradley proposes a 10-year program for re-Catholicizing a college, yet he believes that, with a few exceptions, most Catholic schools are "lost…beyond recall." Wealthy, elite institutions will survive, but many others will not. Still others eventually will face facts, stop calling themselves Catholic, and compete in the marketplace with their secular counterparts.

Most Catholics accept Catholic higher education as it is because they've been taught to. Alumni are propagandized to imagine that alma mater is the same wonderful place—only more so—of their student days. And often these schools really do have a lot going for them. But are they offering a Catholic education? If Bradley is right, they're not.

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