NOTRE DAME'S CHARACTER:RESPONSES TO THE STATEMENT:
D., Sr. Marie Augusta Neal, S.N. & Ruether, Rosemary Radford & Sisk, John P. & Davis, Robert Gorham & Marty, Martin E. & Druska, John & Ratte, John & O'Brien, David J. & Zeik, Michael
may be studied at Notre Dame, especially what is best and most intellectually challenging in a robust Catholic tradition. This purposeful preservation of the Catholic interests of the University...
...It is not enough to grab an English course or American History 101, before settling down to the really important years devoted to the study of organic chemistry and tax law...
...none of us are...
...in most instances such universities extended the scope of catholicity-under pressure...
...Since the Church has courageously chosen to affiliate itself with a new direction of Christian endeavor, namely the elimination of the causes of poverty as distinct from its earlier limited mission to the alleviation of the results of that condition, I think some Catholic universities need to affirm this radically new direction as their policy base, and to focus their planning, programs, and personnel toward that end...
...In this situation, the Church seeks to uphold a vision of human possibility and a sense of providential hope, calling people to take control of and responsibility for their lives and their world...
...If we truly wish to lead and not to imitate, why not consider the adoption of one semester (or interim) of service (to the community, the inner-city, the third world, etc), as a requirement of graduation...
...Why, in fact, should there not eventually be Catholic Peace Academies offer ing scholarships to our brighter and more idealistic students, willing to serve the needs of the Church, the community, the poor, for a period of three or four years after graduation...
...Scholars here-as individuals and as a community with a common cause-must teach what they know to be true and proclaim to an often uncaring world what they know to be good...
...It is also assumed that something called 'truth,' fully grasped, automatically includes morality...
...At the same time, the thinking about the problems of Catholic higher education has been affected by the increasing secularism of our culture and by the related demand that colleges and universities be value-neutral enclaves-happy hunting grounds, so to speak, where the sweet bird of truth can be pursued to the exclusion of all other prey...
...It remains in a vague middle-ground...
...It seems to me that, when the Church deliberates its condition and then changes its focus, its new vision requires some radical transition in its structures if it is to remain in the locus of the living Word...
...Therefore, let us be a little bolder...
...Weep because in most of our tomorrows there will be few universities whose clienteles care about what is taught...
...It is ordinary, 'daily,' and not magical, bread that is lifted up at the offertory of the Mass...
...Of such intellectual comrades who live in and by the spirit of Notre Dame and respect her heritage and tradition, we have much need...
...In our times more than ever before institutions like churches and universities must find the inner resources to envision clear goals, establish appropriate priorities and develop programs which can engage the minds and hearts of their participants...
...The statement does not even try to avoid the issue by way of the now familiar ploy of making "Christian" rather than "Catholic" the key term-perhaps out of a conviction that an institution, like a person, must be Christian in particular (Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc...
...statement's imprecision of terms issues in recommendations that, from a certain perspective, could appear embarrassing...
...It must be fostered, encouraged and supported by people who believe it is important and it requires an institutional setting conducive to its accomplishment...
...For another (and this is the greater danger), it will have to battle constantly with the temptation to so redefine itself in operation as to be spared the pain, and creative tension, of being "constantly at odds with its own ideals...
...The Congregation of the Holy Cross are to be the special mentors of this institution and given preferential treatment in hiring, unless totally incompetent...
...No such problem exists today for Notre Dame's planners or administrators, unless the term is used to refer to the constraints imposed on the University by inflation in the economy and depression in the academy...
...At every stage it presents a history wherein inadequate outcomes suggest more challenging beliefs...
...Let's get specific...
...In its present appalling spiritual and cultural condition, the United States gets precious little help from its universities...
...That endeavor which may appear foolish from the point of view of the wisdom of the world, is quite in harmony with the yet unrealized tradition of the Catholic heritage...
...Do I have any suggestions for carrying them out in practice...
...the programs of business and government, law, library science, social service, and the other professional schopls and you find none that have implemented the cycle of action and reflection that includes preparation for the jubilee except in its transformed function of celebration of what is past...
...Certainly since the Church has espoused the development of peoples as a priority it should be a minimum test of the Catholicity of a university that its personnel, alumni and alumnae visibly give primacy to the free pursuit of restoring the land to the people...
...JOHN DRUSKA John Druska is a member of the Board of Trustees of Georgetown University...
...So some generous proportion of people who care for continuity, who are moved 19 April 1974: 158 by Christian beckonings toward various futures, would have to have their place...
...The life in our residence halls, and the interchanges between faculty, students, administrators and alumni must not give the lie to the faith which is false if not verified by love...
...Formerly segregated Catholic education often seemed parochial in the bad sense and even stultifying...
...In recent years, the leadership of the Catholic Church at every level has recognized that the drift of events, under control of modern bureaucracies, serves to increase the threat to human survival and deepen the economic, racial and national divisions in the human community...
...Nor will they distinguish themselves in the future unless something like the 'De Bary plan' at Columbia University is adapted and adopted...
...It talks of "proclaimed fruits," a "haunting stimulant" and voices that "sting...
...Such a commitment, in the light of the social and theological analysis in which it is enveloped, demands a dualistic stance of resistance to the destructive forces of the age and creative, realistic struggle to transform the world in which we live...
...Newman's problems in thinking about a Catholic university were, to be sure, partially internal: there was not, all that much consensus among Catholic intellectuals in his day as to just what the relationship ought to be between the Church as a magisterium and the world and work of the liberal scholar...
...Theology should not "permeate" nor pretend in its courses to a pastoral role...
...Its particularity is not sufficiently rooted in the actual ground that it occupies, and its catholicity is not yet catholic enough to embrace the world...
...To support the idea of a catholic character for a Notre Dame and its precious few kith and kin is not to speak in a traditionalist mode...
...That appointment to the faculty and staff continue to be offered by preference to competent members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, whose contribution to the University is a special guarantee of its Catholic character...
...To address itself to the reality of a present world situation that is mainly characterized by the fact that two thirds of the world's people live below subsistence level even though we now possess a technological potential that could be used to alleviate this problem, it is time for some Catholic universities to proceed toward the implementation of the jubilee year...
...ROSEMARY R. RUETHER Rosemary Radford Ruether is a member of the faculty of Howard University in Washington...
...Here we have the basic ambiguity of the concept of 'Catholic...
...Learning defies departmental borders, and every department impinges upon the inquiries of others...
...The element of risk involved in that focus ought to be a major factor in the structure of some Catholic universities...
...It begins like an emblematic sermon and as with many sermons of the type relies more on inflated rhetoric, often prey to contradictory readings, than on substance ("faith in Christ," for example, is "a haunting intellectual stimulant...
...From the start, though-a variation on the road-weary pilgrimChurch metaphor-the committee places its emphasis on the transient intellectual nature of the university "in search of wisdom...
...Frankly, they are 'heresy-in-stone.' In four years on a Catholic campus, a student is entitled to experience that environment of Christian friendship and support which is one of our most consoling anthropological rumors of heaven...
...In addition, such universities will have to acknowledge their accountability to one another and to the broader Catholic community which shares their vision and supports their work...
...that every seventh year all (male) adults take off a year to reflect on the injustices perpetrated by their choices and during that year live off the land and that every seventh day gather the community to reinforce that endeavor...
...I worry somewhat about the Committee's certainty of having the truth that is suggested by the section under "communication," by the clear separation of themselves from the world expressed under the "recommendations" where they speak of justice "among our own and also in a world too prone to forget the sources and bases for justice...
...Belief -should widen our purview rather than restrict it, and we should cherish the humane achievement of justice, not only among our own, but also in a world too prone to forget the source and basis for justice...
...In addition, the Catholic people require places of refuge for reflection and study, centers for the training of ministers and the development of skilled professionals, schools for education for a life of what Thomas Merton called "Contemplation in Action...
...The demand rests on the individual Christian and on the whole Church, but it is no less imperative for religious institutions...
...I do...
...Instead a single question comes: "And what is Catholic...
...Since I suspect that the answer to these questions is 'no,' the catholicity of this Catholic University is not catholic enough to embrace what I mean by truth and morality...
...I myself am a non-believer, fearful of the Church when it is allied with state power, troubled by much Catholic doctrine, and at odds in many ways with the Christian tradition itself...
...The trend is against such character...
...Shortly, I would presume we could expect to see the deprived peoples of the world streaming to the university to work out as scholars and students the skills necessary for reclaiming their land and using it in their interests...
...That it fails to notice that it resides in the center of the militaryindustrial capital of the world, in a time of growing human crisis over the trends which America represents, in most advanced form, gives its call to prophecy a docetic character...
...Given the right circumstances theology courses, as Dr...
...And this concern for the values of man before God occurs in every learning opportunity afforded by Notre Dame: in residence hall life as in the classroom or library...
...Nor is it an outsider's business to be involved with the political question of how many C.S.C...
...The genius of a school is not self-perpetuating, however...
...Studies in history, ethics, theology, etc., ought to be continued throughout...
...Althougn universities traffic in ideas, concepts and knowledge, an adequate humanistic and religious education cannot be primarily intellectual...
...This purposeful preservation of the Catholic interests of the University will need the continued guidance and support of the Congregation of Holy Cross...
...Search the literature, the arts, the philosophies, theologies, scientific endeavors...
...In return, we hope that those who guide the studies of young members of the Congregation will give emphasis to the educational and pastoral needs of the University...
...But Catholic Christians have certain embracing reasons (Colossians 1) for this caring...
...Last year he chaired a university essay-writing committee on "The Problems and Scope of Graduate Work...
...True believers at Notre Dame and elsewhere, I trust, will do this statement the service done all poor sermons...
...That the University have a faculty and a student affairs staff among whom committed Catholics predominate...
...However, it will not be easy for Notre Dame to do what its Committee on University Priorities has proposed...
...Our Catholic character should, as we say, have its first impress upon our intellectual work...
...Granted, it necessitates risks that sound business administration cannot handle, still universities are not supposed to be business systems, nor political systems, but communities of scholars and apprentice scholars in pursuit of the truth...
...and by the careful balance of membership to assure that the majority of staff and faculty appointments go to committed Catholics...
...If I were to pursue a line of scholarship that unsettled doctrine, would this be welcomed there...
...I commend the inclusion as stated of exploration of the consequences of faith in Jesus, of the high value placed on the age-long tradition of Catholic learning, open teaching of the Christian heritage and of the moral witness implied in that heritage...
...Not only was no one harmed by this...
...In its statement on "Catholic Character" the Notre Dame committee chooses to identify the university as a community in transit...
...Many of us would like to be a part of such a university endeavor...
...But when the learners choose to engage in the study of certain disciplines, it seems essential that a Catholic university offer them theology as a discipline of systematic courses drawn from a particular religious tradition, against which it is possible to test, as the philosopher-theologian Louis Dupre once told me, "new information, new knowledge, new scholarship...
...Christian humanism is not alone...
...To announce to the world: "We are distinctively Catholic" will no longer bring down accusations of parochialism, un-Americanism, obscurantism, bigotry...
...But he also had problems with the secular world, to use a distinctive tautology...
...Finally, we get really concrete...
...Unfortunately, time in the form of rude economics caught up with our report almost before it was published...
...Also, they should be aware of the numerous scholars who, while not sharing either the Catholic tradition or the Christian faith, abide here because they lead lives of inquiry which include a sensitivity to and respect for the commitment to investigate the moral realm...
...The western world is virtually starving for values...
...if it is to be Christian at all...
...But a distinction must be made between culture and belief, and between belief and knowledge...
...statement distinguishes between the learner as intellect and the learner as social being, rather than making clear the far more vivid and necessary distinction between scientific theology and pastoral theology, it speaks in rhetoric as imprecise as the following: "Theology must permeate much of what is studied here...
...We recommend: That the University continue its traditional commitment to freedom of inquiry and thought...
...But today's Catholicism, when it matches anything of the character described by the Notre Dame formulists, is experimental and exploratory, open and probing...
...Yes, if statements like Notre Dame's are not permitted to remain collections of pious phrases...
...We even find that the scholarly Dictionary of the Bible says of jubilee "it is the universal opinion of exegetes that this law represents an ideal rather than a practical law" (p...
...In short the statement strikes me as poor sermonizing...
...Yet Christianity is a tradition for teachers, as is liberal education, and if this statement is the assertion of the desire of a large family to keep together and avoid alienation, I am for it...
...MICHAEL ZEIK Michael Zeik is a member of the faculty of Marymount College, Tarrytown, New York...
...Today we still have some large state universities-Wisconsin, California at Berkeley, Virginia, or Michigan-whose names connote something to people...
...I think Notre Dame's problem is similar to the problem of the liberal arts college today...
...they will be historyless, interchangeable, diffuse...
...Notre Dame lawyers, doctors, businessmen, etc., have not distinguished themselves in the past few decades for heroic or even conspicuous service on the side of justice or on behalf of the poor and exploited...
...Though the university is one guardian of the Church's highly elaborated symbolic tradition, its spokesmen write as if metaphors had no meaning but were only sentimental embellishments useful in "selling" an idea...
...Vast impersonal dorms are suited only to that 'regimentation of the faithful' which marked the pre-conciliar Church...
...No one by supporting the Notre Dame statement is contributing toward tall-tower high-wall Christendom's return...
...fathers or practicing Catholics such a university needs to preserve a distinctive character...
...JOHN RATTE John Ratte is chairman of the Dept...
...It should create such a hunger for Christian community that he will endeavor to build one, and live in one, for the rest of his life...
...In justice, the cost of these scholarships ought to be defrayed by the bishops and the entire Church (as are the expenses of Catholic University today...
...I feel, indeed, that I have a personal stake in the strengthening of universities like Notre Dame as Catholic communities and not only for their Catholic scholarship...
...They have not been worse or better than their colleagues...
...I affirm the "Catholic character" statement proposed by the Committee on University Priorities for Notre Dame University as one option for Catholic education...
...What of life on a Catholic campus, itself...
...and this holds just as true in Commonweal: 157 the case of inter-disciplinary programs, where the integration of knowledge ought to occur through the learner's own holistic growth and not through the dilution and mixture of disciplines...
...What a Catholic university can legitimately do that other universities cannot freely choose to do is to claim a measure of commitment to direct service to the poor of the world as a raison d'etre simply because the gospel does so...
...And one need not apologize, by the way, for lay professors...
...460), and so turns its back on return of property...
...The old accusations came from the non-Catholic...
...Catholic universities could not be catholic when, in a secular culture, they were integralist, repressive, dogmatic in the bad sense of the term...
...By beginning to define the Catholic quality of Notre Dame through a kind of Platonic rhetoric of the mind's quest, speaking at once of "Catholic character" and "theology" in an intellectual landscape, the statement skews the reality and possibility of Catholic presence and practice at a university...
...D o you fundamentally agree or disagree with the Notre Dame statement on the university's "catholic character...
...Such a discipline needs to be presented with the same technical integrity as other disciplines at the university not just for the above reason, but so that non-believers who do not presuppose faith in the Christian God, and who do choose to join a predominantly Christian community, may study theology as a distinct version of reality, as valuable in its way as any art or science...
...But our tradition makes the excellence of this one department singularly imperative...
...These are the paradoxes that make the faith in Christ such a haunting intellectual stimulant, and they should always be part of the mind's occupation at Notre Dame...
...Bearing witness, even just surviving in this society, they keep open a special living access to the past that is necessary if human selfhood is to counter successfully the pressures of impersonal technologies and totalitarian politics...
...Raised to its highest dimensions, this Catholic humanism would appear to be identical with the highest humanism that might be found by exploring the true depths of any religious or secular traditions, since all explore the same humanity, even if the words for the divine roots are difCommonweal: 161 ferent or remain anonymous...
...The latter might well play an indisputable role in the community made of learners participating in the full life of the university, and especially among those who are believers...
...We do not seem to be able to tell dollar-conscious parents or value-seeking students what it means to be liberally educated...
...For a university to preserve and impart a genius of its own will be a very radical idea in the future...
...bound for a common shrine . . . through the land of Christian belief," rather than on the implications of the school's communal life...
...Nor is it triumphalist...
...It is good to see a school of Notre Dame's prominence come down so unequivocably on the side of Augustine and Polanyi (to say nothing of theology and the Congregation of Holy Cross) at a time when many other Catholic schools are trying to decide similar questions of priority and identity...
...Some centuries ago Leviticus recommended that every fiftieth year be a year of jubilee-a year in which the property that had been wrested from the people be returned to them...
...anyone with his head screwed on right knows that there is no danger that more than a very few private universities will survive as exceptions or that more than a few of these will be Catholic...
...For one thing, it may have to pursue its objectives with the assistance of a fair number of people (not too many, I hope) who are either ambivalent about the objectives or convinced that they are altogether wrong...
...one is about as rare as the other these days...
...Evaluation of society and the politi cal economy, and the search for solutions to social problems are serious and complex matters which require the aid, support and guidance of scholars dedicated to the task...
...The central questions in many disciplines, as they pertain to human action, are made whole by their consideration in the light of theological values...
...Anyone who takes the Incarnation seriously must begin, although he cannot end, with architecture...
...Internal pluralism is and should be rich...
...Those who fail to do so will continue to live in the illusion of freedom while in fact taking their signals and shaping their policies in response to the enormous and subtle pressures imposed by the dominant institutions of corporate capitalism...
...Values which emerge from the life and lessons of Jesus Christ should have room here to intensify the value of literature, of the arts, of the professional traditions studied by Notre Dame students...
...they could instead be monuments to American Catholicism's determination to take seriously the demands of its mission in our complex world, a world with very powerful mechanisms for taming the intellect and enforcing conformity...
...Notre Dame has been more fortunate: planning of this sort had best be done in times of relative adversity when plans are less likely to get confused with daydreams...
...It does this most crucially by obscuring the distinction between theology (positive and speculative) as a scientific discipline and pastoral theology as a redemptive ministry...
...They are general enough about the theory and practice of faith so as to offend no believers, and precisely ambiguous enough about whom the university might hire, and how a competent department of theology might operate, so as to at least hint that behind a rhetorical mask of truth the university seems inclined to forfeit its own integrity to the tyranny of loyalty oaths and/or benign condescension...
...This is a controversial position, though not nearly to the degree it was ten or fifteen years ago...
...They will peacefully sleep through its performance, and awake rested for other spirited tasks...
...Concepts are basically ways of taking experience, categorizing it, evaluating it, responding to it...
...In view of past efforts of American Catholics, especially at Notre Dame, to prove themselves 200 percent red-blooded Americans, it is interesting that nothing is said about a responsibility of this university to the nation in which it resides...
...it can mean today many things, as being a Roman Catholic means many things, including not knowing what it means but not wanting to stand under any other umbrella by state or culture or neighbor...
...Dupre put it nearly seven years ago (interviewed in the Georgetown Hoya, May 5, 1967), may "be integrating factors for believers, but only if given in a really scientific way . . . some systematic theology is essential in the liberal education of a Christian university...
...We announce that we are giving a "liberal education" but in most cases the only required work in the college is the traditional major, where departments rule supreme either in search of creative mastery or mere protection of inherited turf against interdisciplinary schemes and affective-education fads...
...I stand within a secular liberal arts institution, I say that I and my colleagues are "committed liberals"-in the educational, rather than the political sense, though the two enterprises are of course linked -but I can only tell you what I am doing in giving, or trying to give, such an education to my students...
...Nothing is said about any special allegiance to the magisterium, as the teaching authorities of this tradition, however...
...others care (and sometimes cared when Christians did not do well) about earth, community, and person...
...And yet a real exorcism, a banishing of the greedy, filthy, powerhungry spirit that presently informs so much of our technology, politics, entertainment, and even professional life, is very much in order...
...Yet their very existence shows how unsatisfying-apart 19 April 1974: 156 from work in the exact sciencesthat education has turned out to be...
...To study the Catholic tradition is to study an institution constantly at odds with its own ideals...
...19 April 1974: 164...
...The research the Church so badly needs into its own tradition and into the world in which the Christian people must make that tradition vital will not "just happen" through the benevolent operation of the academic market place...
...or because through legislatures they will have power to suppress freedom in them...
...Paul...
...Without the presence of a rigorous academic theology program at the university it seems to me unlikely that a mature catechetical ministry, which would hope for learners to sensibly evaluate and engage in its promulgation of the truth, could exist...
...That plan calls for the enrichment of professional training by humanistic studies, right through graduate school...
...The Catholic university should be especially open to all truth and to every human insight, more even, than other universities...
...The belief that "Christian university" is a contradiction in terms (a belief that has at times existed at the pitch of dogma with many Catholic university people) was once a sign that Catholic higher education was coming of age and beginning to realize that there was much in preVatican II Catholicism that was indeed narrowly parochial and incompatible with a commitment to freedom of inquiry...
...However, since all truth is contingent on the structure of the society in which it is discovered, as the society changes, so must the structure of the system that dedi cates itself to the pursuit of knowledge...
...Where we would not expect to find the graduates of Catholic universities of the future is in those posts that assure the preservation of the unequal distribution of the goods and resources of the world, out of reach of the two-thirds of the world now rising to claim what is rightfully theirs...
...Finally, Catholic universities should seek to regain the role and stature they once enjoyed in the life of the Church...
...absolutizing its particularity...
...Christian organizations," Pope Paul states emphatically, "have to express, in their own way, the concrete demands of the Christian faith for a just, and therefore a necessary, transformation of society...
...In their growing self-consciousness it has been easy for Catholics to miss the extent to which this demand expresses a suspicion that culture itself, being everywhere credal and biased, is as hostile to the pursuit of truth as to authentic existence, just as it has been easy for them to miss the extent to which this suspicion exists in institutions that are structures of biasing pieties in their own right-so that the latter have all along been demonstrating their de facto adherence to the Augustinian formula: "crede ut intellegas...
...In spite of the strong upbeat rhetoric of the Committee, I can't help but think that teachers within the University of Notre Dame would find themselves in a similar situation: each might be able to say, as an individual, just what he or she was doing to deal with "the para doxes that make the faith in Christ such a haunting intellectual stimulant" but with no more confidence that their colleague down the hallor in the same department-would say the same thing than I have for mine on the matter of liberal learning...
...Such places need not be ghettos for sectarian self-perpetuation...
...It needs representatives and contenders...
...Universities can be monuments of this sort only if they acknowledge and implement their commitment and exercise their responsibilities with the free and full participation and consent of all sectors of the community, embodying in their own life the democratic values of human dignity, human freedom, and human development on the basis of which they would judge society...
...DAVID J. O'BRIEN David J. O'Brien is a member of the History Dept., Holy Cross College...
...mystifying its catholicity...
...Because the N.D...
...Americans see today that many of their doctors, lawyers, and businessmen are on the same ethical level as their politicians...
...Indeed, many Catholic intellectuals have remained nervous about the place of religion in education long after it has been respectable to agree with the Augustinian position 19 April 1974: 162 of the philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge...
...r e Notre Dame statement on goals and priorities has special interest for me since I once spent several months on a committee to which a similar charge had been given...
...What then emerges as the specificity of the word 'Catholic...
...of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University...
...We are led to believe that the word `Catholic' means, simultaneously, a special tradition, and the highest meaning of true humanism...
...If it wins the endorsement and support of Notre Dame's students, faculty, trustees, and friends, it will pose enormous challenges in its implementation...
...Scholarship supports, corrects, refines and refutes ideas, but always as an instrument, not an end...
...My deepest unease comes when I ask myself if Christianity as a cultural and historical reality, however great and enduring it may be as a religious language and cult for those who inherit or discover it anew, is really the most universal context for the intellectual enterprise at this moment in world history...
...MARTIN E. MARTY Martin E. Marty is a professor at the University of Chicago...
...Though preferable to the brutality and tasteless materialism of much of the culture, these movements are ephemeral, mindless, rootless and totally uncoordinated with formal education...
...19 April 1974: 160 Rather Catholic universities are free from the antiquated strictures of the past in order to assist the whole Church to understand and implement its mission in the world of today, "building a world" for tomorrow "where every man . . . can live a full human life, free from servitude imposed on him by other men or by natural forces over which he has not sufficient control, a world," Pope Paul tells us, "where freedom is not an empty word, and where the poor man can sit down at the table with the rich man...
...they haven't...
...The N.D...
...At that time the lawmakers did not know the truth of the personhood of women...
...I agree 0 I disagree Weep not over the fact that last year a retarded element in Notre Dame's clientele was angered over a seminar on abortion, nor weep because there may have been arrogant and dogmatic people in that university's past...
...That should be reflected in the curriculum they provide, the research they encourage and support, and the career choices they stimulate in their students...
...The difficulties involved will prove a small price to pay if the result is that Notre Dame begins to fulfill its enormous potential as a creative center for the renewal of the Church in this country...
...Most of the institutions taxpayers support do not have and will not have a flavor or a genius...
...It is simplistic, though, to posit this as theology's role in higher education, unless one is committed to pure triumphalism...
...Communication...
...Universities go on "pilgrimages" to a "common shrine" and draw "wonderment of mind" past "barriers...
...But with the openness of the present-day ecumenical Church and with the overwhelming task, directly accepted by Catholic theologians, of meeting the challenge of Kierkegaard, Marx, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud and Jung such parochialism is hardly a danger now...
...My own suggestions for a Catholic university, however, are historically contingent on the developing implications of the Second Vatican Council...
...It seeks to find a distinctive meaning in the word 'Catholic,' different from `Christian' and still more from `secular.' Yet the content of this difference does not appear from its generalities...
...It is a hopeful sign, therefore, when a university like Notre Dame, which does have coherent values, based on beliefs with a living existence in the West for two or three millennia (I include Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and the Old Testament) refuses to secularize itself and surrender to the general flux...
...The time is ripe for 'witness,' and Catholicism ought to provide today's counterculture...
...SISTER MARIE AUGUSTA NEAL Sister Marie Augusta Neal, S.N.D., is currently Professor of Sociology of Religion at the Divinity School, Harvard University...
...In this renewed vision of Christian responsibility, the role of the Catholic university is critical...
...If the University is to have a Catholic character, it is obvious that all who play a role in recruitment should exercise care to attract and appoint from among the most competent teachers, scholars and scientists available those who are articulate believers: brilliant scholar-teachers who respect Christ in man and who are committed as He was to service and sacrifice...
...Even such a program offers no guarantee of Christian commitment...
...There is some reluctance to let this kind of Catholicism go since it helps to keep the lines of certain arguments crystal clear...
...As I remember Notre Dame, it is not even architecturally suited for the creation of those small human communities which ought to be the nucleus for Christian life, because they are first of all the basis for personal growth...
...But it appears to give no content other than that general 'logos,' which is the depth spirit of man, in communion with God, available to all men...
...at Gonzaga University, Spokane...
...In the characterless landscape, it is good to have someone somewhere speak up and make provisions for survival and support of some of those reasons...
...Their final test and goal is moral action and self-realization in human or transcendental community...
...something simultaneously particular and yet raised to the absolute...
...I basically admire the 'spiritual chutzpa' that went into the formulation of the Notre Dame statement...
...In an era of intellectual nonchalance there should be voices here-chorused when possible-that challenge as prophets do, and even sting...
...It is hard, then, to be sure that this university really knows where it is...
...No one can spell out in detail and in advance what the definition of a Christian character will be...
...I do not think it is a model for all Catholic universities, nor is it the one I would like to see the Sisters of Notre Dame, with whom I am affiliated, choose as a vehicle for realizing their educational priorities...
...Its allegiance is to an international ecclesiastical organization and intellectual tradition...
...A large proportion of the population experiments desperately with body language, sex techniques, orthodox and heretical psychoanalysis, en counter sessions, communal living, consciousness raising, transcendental meditation, occultism, magic, shamanism and a blending of acid rock with Eastern mysticism...
...Worry over the fact that in the future most higher education will be marked by sameness, mediocrity, lack of distinctiveness or color or character...
...Responses to the Statement ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Robert Gorham Davis is a member of the Dept...
...In the light of faith the truth is best seen as a moral need, and its study as a moral duty...
...Loyal, in the deepest sense, they did not hesitate, like Paul "to withstand Peter to his face," when that was necessary for the Church's health...
...If I were to suggest that authentic morality may clash with the reigning code of good citizenship, would that be welcomed there...
...Among the results of such a drift and division is a deepening paralysis of popular will and narrowing of the bounds of intellect and imagination...
...Theological values may indeed "permeate" most of the practicing believer's experience at the university...
...Meanwhile, partly as a consequence of this neutrality, strange things are happening outside the universities or in their interstices...
...Officially most of them feel compelled to declare their teaching "value-free" or "valueneutral" at a time when values are precisely what everyone is-or should be-worried about...
...Were we to implement the intent of the jubilee year, we would expect soon to find faculty and students devoted to the development Commonweal: 159 of theologies, economic, political, and social systems, models, law and health programs, all directed toward returning the land to the people...
...Having quite rightly established their autonomy from the rigid and repressive system of control imposed by the post-modernist Church, Catholic universities, like Catholic scholars, are not free simply to do as they please...
...But it should also permeate-in a way we could hardly describe as secondary-the community of learners...
...Can a Catholic university contribute to such an exorcism...
...Ah, the solid Christian marriages and the religious vocations that might arise out of such experience...
...JOHN P. SISK John P. Sisk is a member of the English Dept...
...Platonic Christianity triumphs again...
...Again, it is lack of faith in the Incarnation not to recognize that God utilizes human confrontation, dialectical give-andtake, to make known His will...
...The statement of Notre Dame's Committee on University Priorities concerning that University's "Catholic character" is excellent and constitutes a significant event in the life of the contemporary American Catholic Church...
...I rejoice that there exists a group of men willing to continue to try to realize this model...
...If I were to point out the male chauvinist character of Roman Catholic theology and institutions would this be welcomed there...
...All that I find disquieting is the incongruous and unconfident language in which the university's statement is written...
...Not every form of Catholicism will mix with what a university ought to be...
...These three factors, it seems to me, reduce the element of risk sufficiently to fend off any real challenge to established powers, even should these powers develop the complacency of phariseeism that the gospel finds that people are prone to acquire...
...Hesburgh has...
...e Notre Dame statement is written in a special code language that largely conceals its specifics...
...we ought to be able to come up with more than a movie on "Exorcism...
...That the University continue to sustain an increasingly competent Department of Theology...
...Faith in Jesus Christ would appear specific...
...The land which it proposes to explore is called the 'Christian land.' It appears to occupy no particular country in actuality...
...Catholic universities are supposed to be devoted to ideals not in the abstract but in their realization...
...They add essential meaning to our striving to be Catholic...
...The honesty and scientific rigor that study requires are virtues as much in a church as in an academy...
...The problem with the Catholic character of Notre Dame does not lie in the University but in the Catholic Church, and in its American incarnation...
...I don't think a university could implement anything on a basis of the sort the Notre Dame committee offers...
...The new question comes from the faithful, some of whom may not be en tirely sure what it is that they have faith in...
...Rather than permeating "much of what is studied here," theological values, as discovered through the discipline of theology, ought to offer certain qualifications for other disciplines, just as, for example, literary and scientific values offer certain qualifications for the study of theological texts...
...As to the statement itself, the striking thing, of course, is its confident assumption that a university may be committed to Catholicism without impairing its commitment to the freedom of inquiry and thought...
...of History at Amherst College...
...Universities could be Catholic when the whole culture was Catholic...
...Plato would like that better than St...
...There also appears to be a specific body of tradition, presumably medieval philosophy and Roman Catholic writers since the Reformation, who are to be cultivated here...
...Perhaps they are intended to be included as the mentors of the Congregation of the Holy Cross...
...That Notre Dame no longer needs to prove its patriotism may be good...
...Fighting over the definition is one of the best things a university could do...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 7
