Communications
COMMUNICATIONS ORGANIZE THE GRADUATES! Cambridge, Mass. TO the Editor:—The controversy started by C. Molanphy seems to have brought out more abstract discussion than facts and figures. In 1907,...
...Let the Catholic colleges continue locally to make Christian gentlemen of the young men in their communities...
...Is it any wonder then that the above statistics also revealed the fact that in 1907 there were not twenty-five lay graduate students outside of theology, law or medicine in Catholic universities and, in the light of these figures and facts, that there are not more eminent Catholic scholars today in the United States...
...and 1500 A.D...
...TO the Editor:—Readers of The Commonweal especially in Boston and New England have read with pleasure, in the issue of November n, Cram: Master Builder, by Charles J. Maginms...
...Already, in 1880, 30,000 conversions had been made solely by the magnetism of "God with us" on our altars...
...The mediaeval Catholic university system was based on this idea...
...I58 THE COMMONWEAL December 16, 1925 The college is necessarily a secondary education institution and it should remain such...
...Cram's work is usually identified with the Episcopalians, who, though constituting numerically a small denomination, have a large share of the wealth, culture, and eoWioflal opportunity among the religious bodies in America...
...They should do so early enough to equip themselves with the best that the nation has to offer...
...December 16, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 159 CRAM: MASTER BUILDER Boston, Mass...
...Eminent men in any profession are, for the greater part, the product of graduate schools, not of colleges...
...And furthermore, as a matter of fact, the graduate schools in non-Catholic universities in many instances subsidize a good proportion of their students through scholarships, fellowships and instructorships...
...Worldly progress in other partsor^^^^^Bfcry among the Catholics was more rapid...
...A non-Catholic university combs the country and even Europe to fill a professional vacancy and esteems itself lucky if it succeeds...
...But certainly much thought may well be given by Catholics as to the ways and means of getting in touch with the reservoirs of scholarship existing in the land that they may come to contribute their share toward the transmission and increase of the knowledge of the nation...
...NORSEMEN IN AMERICA Staten Island, N. Y. TO the Editor:—May I venture upon a suggestion in connection with your article of November 25, on the Norsemen in America, bearing upon their mysterious disappearance...
...The articles on Adalbert and Adam of Bremen in the Catholic Encyclopedia also furnish information as to Norse missions in Greenland, as does the Landnama Bok, which I only know through quotations from Nicolls's Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes, and Lardner...
...I have in mind an eminent Catholic scholar now teaching in a non-Catholic university...
...which, however, provided better shelter than the sheds and basements of other days...
...Nothing would prevent them from having a religious centre of their own in connection with the great graduate schools of the country as there are various centres, clubs, fraternities, etc., for the different groups attending the universities of which they are a part...
...Non-Catholic colleges are now trying to get back to the humanistic methods never abandoned by Catholic colleges...
...Catholic colleges don't produce eminent scholars for the very simple reason that no college does or can...
...Lectures and discussions could be organized...
...as of the library of Church art "which Ralph Adams Cram has given to the church builders...
...Lardner states that a vessel from Europe is supposed to have brought the Black Death to their shores in the year 1418 A.D...
...A few figures for men's colleges at hand may prove interesting: Attendance at Catholic Men's Colleges...
...The proof is still with us of the educative value of these articles...
...In all the discussion raised by C. Molanphy it seems to me there has been too little emphasis on the distinction between the college and the graduate school and too little appreciation of the enormous difficulty for Catholics, with the resources at their command, to develop graduate departments that may turn out eminent scholars outside of theology, philosophy, Church history, biblical criticism, and allied subjects...
...Let the Catholic college encourage its graduates to go from it to whatever institution, non-Catholic or Catholic, is best prepared to equip them adequately to become contributors in the field in which they would gain eminence...
...What is the solution ? As I see it, it certainly is not in the disruption of the existing Catholic college proposed by C. Molanphy...
...Only the professional school can, and not any professional school, only the adequately equipped professional school manned by men who represent the best knowledge of the world on the subject...
...Corrigan's friendship for him...
...Let them grow and multiply wherever there is a Catholic community to supply them with resources and students...
...and tl^^hurch was not stinted of the first fruits of their young fan^HJb^^^kKiftgidly substance...
...Let the Catholic college alone...
...For to equip an efficient graduate school that trains in research, that can turn out eminent men in their specialties, whether education, history, economics, the languages, the literatures, the sciences, it takes an endowment of several millions for each specialty and there are only a few men in each specialty available for each chair...
...Official figures were sent me by the presidents of practically all such institutions in the United States...
...Education and religion must go hand in hand...
...It is an appreciative estimate by a Catholic architect with several decades of good work behind him, of Ralph Adams Cram, who may well be accounted the pioneer of true religious architecture and art In the United States...
...They must receive the torch from the hands of the men who hold it, whoever and wherever they may be...
...The Great Thousand Years makes a strong appeal to the children or the Churcn ot the Ages...
...A way must be found to blend religious and secular instruction in the schools...
...He would soon realize that the republic of scholarship is in the main made up of men of good will, too well aware of the difficulty of attaining certitude to be intolerant, and with whom he could find ready bonds of union in the common ideal of the search for truth, so well defined by President-emeritus Eliot—"It characterizes the searching, open, humble mind which prizes above all things accuracy, thoroughness and candor in research...
...This idea is wrong...
...Catholic laymen must go to non-Catholic universities whenever these institutions offer the most authoritative teachers and the best equipment...
...The university student traveled about to seek the most eminent master in order to become eminent himself...
...But such a man cannot be produced except by contact with institutions that have the equipment to equip him in turn to rise to such eminence...
...But humanistic secondary education on the other hand cannot turn out professionals, much less eminent ones...
...and also, as to the bull of Gregory IV, Lardner...
...Now, His Eminence, our Cardinal Archbishop, in each annual confirmation of converts, counts from 1,000 to 1,500...
...Beazley's Dawn of Geography...
...Why should they segregate themselves when this segregation condemns them to mediocrity ? To become eminent in the nation, they must enter into the life of the nation sooner or later anyway...
...Cram's ideas, but what of the Catholics, children of the Church of the Ages, the supreme inspirer of sacred art, as represented in a new land...
...He and his associate here have been prominent in the restoration of Gothic in New England and elsewhere in this country...
...Now for the question raised by C. Molanphy...
...All honor then to the members of the religious orders who have labored over the years so unselfishly and so well for the Catholic college...
...The Catholics, landing in Boston or New York or coming down from the Canadian ports, were at first made up mainly of men and women who had grown up in the two decades following Catholic emancipation, and had only the traditions of ruined abbeys and cathedrals to bring...
...They are not going to become eminent without getting in touch with the best that has already been done...
...James H. Burns, C.S.C., pointed out at the time that on the basis of those figures, Catholic college-grade attendance had increased on an average of 5 percent a year between 1890 and 1907, while the non-Catholic collegiate male attendance had risen 7 percent or only 2 percent more...
...Early in the 'nineties, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Rochester, N. Y., came into possession of a lovely little chapel, which the Bishop of Rochester, an early promoter of true Catholic art and architecture, declared to be, at the time, the best specimen of pure Gothic architecture in the United States...
...Maginnis is a recent Laetare medalist of Notre Dame University...
...The Gothic churches of the middle-ages rose to the music of the Lauaa bion, tnat immortal hymn or oaint 1 nomas Aquinas to the Blessed Sacrament...
...Some of us still remember the impression made by the author's Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, a few years ago, out of the intensity and passion of his conviction...
...or of the splendid church of some strong religious order...
...and Boston has been transformed from a Puritan to a Catholic stronghold...
...He says more in the same generous spirit...
...In the first stages of this marvelous transition, the Catholics were increasing like the Israelites in Goshen...
...Catholic schools and colleges are part of the educational system of the country...
...America...
...S. Von Rycken Wilson...
...Within the same decade, the Very Reverend John B. Hogan, S.S.T.D., of Saint John's Seminary, Boston, and the Divinity School of the Catholic University, Washington, wrote a striking series of papers on Church architecture in the Ecclesiastical Review...
...In fact since 1907, the trend in non-Catholic colleges has been back to the methods of the Catholic college...
...Moreover such a Catholic house could very well become a centre of scholarly explanation of Catholic doctrine...
...He declares there was something abnormal in the long degradation of Catholic art, "for all the Christian art we had 'was the product of Catholicism...
...1889-90 1899-OO 1906-07 College Course...
...Mr...
...It seems to me that the answer has nothing to do with the Catholic college...
...The full report is no doubt still available in the files of the association...
...Cram, may well be accounted the spokesman of the Catholic advance...
...But the Catholic Church, already awakening, had not been standing still...
...This trend is away from electivism and away from the lecture system, toward personal supervision and guidance of the student's work and, for the literatures, discussion of selected texts...
...Cram between 500 A.D...
...He would discover many unsuspected sympathies awaiting him...
...In 1907, I was asked by the Catholic Educational Association to gather full statistics on attendance at Catholic Colleges and universities...
...He would have many a chance to dispel misunderstandings...
...The prospective teachers in Catholic colleges for all secular branches, except perhaps for the classics, need to attend them, if not to keep their teaching abreast of the progress that is made elsewhere, at least to fit themselves to become contributors to that progress in all branches for which Catholic institutions are not the best equipped at a given time...
...In Boston and New England, the austere houses of worship of the Puritans and Pilgrims softened a little as the nineteenth century grew old...
...Remembering that these poor immigrants and their immediate forebears had given up the chance of what they loved so well—education, scholarship—for what they loved still better, their Catholic Faith, let their more fortunate descendants look back, not scornfully but tenderly, on the ugly, high-colored plaster of park statues and the artificial flowers under glass shades...
...and Mr...
...Cram in the recent new edition was too vigilant and fair, too anxious for her powerful alliance in the Gothic cause, for aught but the welcome which he gave it, with, as he says, a sense of relief rather than of surprise...
...In fact the non-Catholic universities that have adequate departments in every field of research are very few...
...In New YorlJHp^ Pennsylvania, Maryland, the anti-Catholic spirit had long subsided...
...It has been built solidly from the ground up, and it has fulfilled and is fulfilling its function in a truly wonderful way...
...Non-Catholic universities understand this so well that very often they do not duplicate one another's work in the higher fields, that they often facilitate residence at another university to their own students, giving credit for such residence, and that they constantly and systematically invite experts from other institutions to lecture...
...The Catholics not only increased but progressed...
...He has an international reputation, has been decorated by three governments, holds foreign honorary degrees, not to mention all his titles and functions...
...The Catholic at the non-Catholic university would give as well as receive...
...up to which time they paid an annual Peter's Pence collection of 2,600 pounds of walrus teeth...
...I don't know whether there are later figures available but there seems to be no doubt that, scholastically, Catholic colleges have continued to compare favorably with non-Catholic colleges...
...On the other hand the non-Catholic universities of the country belong to Catholic citizens as much as to non-Catholics...
...If religion should be an integral part of education during the formative years of adolescence then, the nation does not need fewer but more Catholic colleges, and colleges never so large that intimate contact between teachers and students becomes impossible...
...It should continue to give a liberal education, give the student a humanistic formation so broad, and so deeply impressed upon him, that later the professional may not kill the man in him...
...Why should not Catholics avail themselves of their resources...
...and aa the natives opened new residential sections the Catholics bought up many a left-behind meeting house...
...4,749 6,234 10,798 In seventeen years the high school attendance had increased 127 percent, the college grade attendance 87 percent and between 1900 and 1906, twenty institutions had risen to college grade...
...Charles D. Maginnis, of close intellectual and artistic kinship with Mr...
...There are no MDark Ages to Mr...
...and they have won high awards at home and abroad in various international architectural expositions...
...When Ralph Adams Cram wrote his first great book on Church Building in igoi, he had as yet found no glimmer of hope in the Catholic Church in...
...They can't evolve this eminence out of their own substance...
...Why not more eminent Catholic scholars...
...But let the young men—and women too—in these Catholic colleges understand that any college is but the first step in the preparation for distinguished service, that like their non-Catholic brethren, they must fit themselves through long and arduous study of some specialty before they can become prominent in any one field of endeavor...
...And twentyfive years from now, in the United States, contributors to the secular knowledge and progress of the nation in every field of activity will number many more men and women, whose religious life is grounded on the Catholic faith, than are today to be found in their ranks...
...It therefore seems to me that the solution is in organizing the attendance of Catholic graduate students at non-Catholic universities...
...It is well to remember, too, that these were the days of many extraordinary conversions from among such pioneer stock as the Adams, Quincy, Endicott, Winthrop and Bradford families...
...It was easy to educate the Episcopalians to Mr...
...all this not merely on a national but an international basis...
...The Mother Superior, a daughter of the New York banker, Bernard Corrigan, devoted a portion of her patrimony to this chapel 5 and its construction was superintended by iJisnop McQuaid in memory of Mr...
...Kathbrinb E. Conway...
...And all along the Catholic colleges have continued to answer the demand expressed by President Hadley of Yale, about 1905—"I do not believe you are going to make the right kind of a citizen by a godless education and then adding on religion afterwards...
...Education and foreign travel were more common...
...2,284 2,595 4,232 High School Course...
...and now and then, we heard of the wonderful memorial chapels to millionaires who had been devout Catholics...
...They had nothing to learn of either art or architecture from these "converted" structures...
...To the poor immigrant, hungering for Mass and the Sacraments, our bishops and priests, far too few in number, especially in New England, were glad to open dingy basements and raise structures little better than sheds and shanties, within which the Sacred Mysteries could be celebrated and the word of God preached...
...Mr, Cram's expression is so original and fascinating that the reader having even a little artistic perception, and especially the Catholic reader, will find it difficult to close the book...
...As you probably know, a bull of Gregory IV, 835 A.D., conferred on the church, or diocese, of Hamburg-Bremen, the privilege of converting the heathen in Iceland and Greenland, and it is from the Chronicles of Adam of Bremen that we learn many valuable particulars of explorations in Greenland...
...It would be curious indeed to have Catholic college organization make for bigness and unmanageable units at the very time when non-Catholic institutions are spending millions to give their students the benefit of individual guidance and thus obviate the disadvantages of bigness of numbers...
...Louis J. A. Mercier...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 6
