The Case for Catholic Education
McBrien, Richard P.
THE CASE FOR CATHOLIC EDUCATION RICHARD P. McBRIEN Placing Jesus Chr/st at the center q It has been forty years since Robert M. Hutchins delivered his stunning critique of Catholic higher...
...One might argue, rather, that it is not so much any one of these elements that specifies the Catholic tradition as it is their total configuration...
...Secondly, the values, ideals and attitudes of the institution must be derived from the constitutional literature of the Christian community, both Old and New Testaments...
...The exploration of Catholic distinctiveness is hamCommonweal: 41 pered, finally, by theological misconception...
...According to Ignatius we are faced with a fundamental option: to reject God's plan for us, or to follow Christ and collaborate with him in the remaking of the world...
...Justice, peace and love can prevail over injusrice, war and apathy because there is a power at work in the world that has been vindicated anew in a paschal cycle of service, death, resurrection and exaltation...
...Thirdly, the institution must provide, and even promote, opportunities and occasions for the ritualization and celebration of that fundamental conviction of faith in Jesus Christ...
...But, as John Courtney Murray observed, "when it comes to the realization of the ideal, the most stubborn enemy has always been the sheer nobility of the ideal itself, which---even apart from hindering circumstances --tends to defeat performance...
...The first view violates fundamental logic...
...That is not the case today...
...Where are they rooted...
...The thesis, it should be clear, is not only historical and educational (in the sense that it reflects a particular philosophy of education), but theological as well...
...and (3) the Christian faith embodied and proclaimed from within the Roman Catholic tradition provides the principle of coherence and the key to intelligibility...
...The subsequent development within philosophical studies was such that the world had not seen since the great age of ancient Greece...
...Jacques Maritain's Education at the Crossroads pursued the argument along similar lines...
...3) the liberal arts, which are at once the bearer and the product of the Catholic tradition, merit similar emphasis, even preference, and (4) within the liberal arts, the continued exploration of Latin and Greek literature and philosophy must be given a place of prominence and even priority...
...The doctlment speaks of graduates who should have made "mature and tested commitments to values which they understand and are confident about...
...Given a choice, they usually prefer the real thing...
...To what end are persons to be shaped...
...21 l ~ 1977:44...
...A past president of the Catholic Theo...
...It is a world created by God's loving care, misshapen and bent by human sinfulness, and restored to its order and beauty by Jesus Christ...
...So, too, throughout the whole of reality...
...It is theologically and even sociologically meaningles s for an agency, movement, group, or institution to speak of itself as Catholic (or even as Christian) without explicit reference to Jesus Christ...
...Fourthly, the institution must have a sense of corporate purpose and responsibility for the application of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to its own situation and the situation around it...
...The Church is the whole People of God: laity, refigious, and clergy alike...
...But in order to maintain this view," Dawson writes, "they were compelled to push their condemnation further, and to condemn the whole tradition of Western Catholicism right back to the age of the Fathers...
...The assumption is that an institution (or indeed any missionary activity) is not truly Catholic unless it is directly under the control of the hierarchy, whether the Pope, a Vatican congregation, the local bishop, or a national conference of bishops...
...The celebration of the Eucharist is the most appropriate way for a Catholic institution to express and embody its ultimate concerns...
...There are intrinsic qualities and a composite structure which differentiate the one from the other...
...The Catholic institution need not be "under the control" of the hierarchy, but it must have some sense of a$liation with, and participation in, the Church's total mission of word, witness and service...
...What is the nature and destiny of humankind...
...Projects are good or bad insofar as they contribute to, or impede, the course of the restoration of all things in Christ...
...The great interest of this synthesis," according to Christopher Dawson, "(was) not its logical completeness, for that was to be found already in a rudimentary form in the traditional curriculum of the earlier medieval schools, but rather the way in which the mind of Western Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hellenic science and annexed the alien world of Moslem thought without losing its spiritual continuity or its specifically religious values...
...They should be able to deal with diversity, whether social, cultural, religious, or personal and "to define their own standards and values within that diversity...
...It is to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus, to affirm that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and to shape one's life around the central confession of faith...
...A university can be Catholic because (1) knowledge, in the broadest sense of the term, is unifiable...
...Unfortunately, the Jesuit statement fails to develop an argument entirely consistent with its own Ignatian vision...
...logical Society of America, he is the 1976 recipient of its 1ohn Courtney Murray award...
...John Courtney Murray, S.J., made the same kind of argument at the Kent Seminar on "The Christian Idea of Education" in 1955...
...We are "wounded healers" (to borrow Henry Nouwen's image...
...Ritualization of institutional values occurs in various forms anyway (a presidential inaugumlion is a case in point...
...FATHER RICHARD P. MCBRIEN is professor of theology at Boston College and director of its Institute for the Study of Religious Education and Service...
...The statement is strongest where it moves, almost in spite of itself, into the realm of distinctive theological conviction...
...A truly great intellect," John Henry Newman wrote in his The Idea o / a University, "is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another...
...Fifthly, it must perqeive itself as part of a larger mi~ sionary enterprise, that of the whole Body of Christ scattered thzoughout the world..lust as an institution cannot be Christian if it prescinds totally from Jesm Christ, so an institution cannot be Catholic if it prescinds totally from the Catholic Church and from its traditions and structures...
...Education at Boston College," published by the Jesuit community and circulated both within the university and beyond it, a similar theological perspective is linked specifically with the question of Jesuit presence (but without confusing the two issues, as is sometimes done by others...
...The reality of "church" can be engaged in varying degrees...
...The Catholic Church," he declared, "has the longest intellectual tradition of any institution in the contemporary world, the only uninterrupted tradition and the only explicit tradition...
...Catholic graduates, the Jesuit statement insists, should have "a critical respect" for their cultural tradition, but what are the criteria for criticism, and on what is the respect based...
...In the writings of Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Dante, and many lesser figures, every aspect and facet of life was illuminated by a metaphysical vision of the universe as an intelligible unity...
...There is ambiguity, too...
...On the contrary, probings into the purposes and prospects of Catholic higher education, whether these probings occur in symposia, journals, or community room discussions, are too often marked by confusion, ambiguity, romanticism, and theological misconception...
...The acts of identification and specification are theological judgments...
...the latter insists that the formal approval of the hierarchy (depending upon the base and scope of the enterprise, it might be the local bishop or the Vatican) is required...
...But the point of reference is poorly chosen...
...Indeed, as Cardinal Newman insisted, "that only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence...
...There is nothing central and nothing peripheral, nothing primary and nothing secondary, nothing basic and nothing superficial...
...The latter, in fact, is described as "the fundamental manifestation" of the university's "religious character...
...And this means concretely that (1) the principal academic administrator must not 21 J~m~ry 1977:42 only know the Catholic tradition in a general sort of way, but also be able to think theologically, be versed in the methods of Christian theology, and be adept at systematic, and indeed synoptic, thought...
...Accordingly, a Catholic institution of higher learning not only must "have" a department of theology (as if it were simply another branch of knowledge...
...But that commitment seems to cover a broad area: from "a belief in God as Creator and Redeemer" to a more general "sense of community and witness [to the wonders of creation] shared by all...
...The former proposes that any enterprise is Catholic that calls itself Catholic...
...And that is what any university is supposed to be all about...
...On the one side, we have the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education presuming to determine the Catholic identity of given institutions of higher learning on the basis of their readiness to defer to the Vatican in the matter of recruitment and hiring of faculty, promotions and tenure, and even the approval of courses...
...There is confusion of the issue of Catholic identity with the issue of clerical and/or religious control...
...The idea is still a good one...
...We have, in Hutchins's words, "a great tradition to uphold...
...A Catholic university, however, identifies and specifies the center of the whole...
...Appearing before a Midwest regional meeting of the National Catholic Educational Association, the young president of the University of Chicago charged that "Catholic education is not Catholic enough," indeed that it was imitating the worst features of secular education (athleticism, collegiatism, vocationalism, and anti-intellectualism) while ignoring most of the good ones (high academic standards, development of habits of work, and research...
...The second view is inconsistent with the official teaching of the Second Vatican Council (not to mention the New Testament and other reputable sources...
...Human existence is not without ambiguity...
...That is "the significant thing" that "causes our approach to be Christian," Marirain insisted...
...Our destiny, and that of the whole world, is the Kingdom of God...
...The Roman Catholic tradition provides an integrating principle to higher education which is distinctive and irreplaceable...
...The "tradition" of which Robert Hutchins spoke finds its classical expression in those books of the B~le, the norma normans non normata of Catholic, and indeed of all Christian, theology...
...But we are faced here once again with formany theological questions: "What does it mean to be human...
...It cannot be indifferent to the inevitable social and political impact it makes as an institution, and, more positively, it musf exert its institutional force for justice, in accordance with its competence, resources and opportunities for effective action...
...It is not enough to follow the spirit of Christ (many non-Christ i n do that, in fact) but to confess publicly and openly that Sesus is indeed the Lord of the universe, the focal point of history, and- that the renewal of the earth is undr through the power of the Spirit...
...theology must provide the integrating principle for the whole educational process...
...On the opposite side, we have otherwise serious people insisting that it is the commitment to social justice which makes a college or university Catholic, as if such a commitment were peculiar to Catholics, or even to Christians generally...
...Faculty and administration begin believing their own rhetoric about becoming a "Catholic Harvard" or a "Catho!ie Amherst...
...It is this sacramental or incarnational view which Protestant theologians like Langdon Gilkey (Catholicism Con/fonts Modernity) have identified as distinctively Roman Catholic, along with the drive toward rationality, an emphasis on tradition, a strong sense of authority and a cultivation of the spiritual and the aesthetic...
...Significantly, students do not take to this sort of extrapolative enthusiasm...
...All this was questioned by later critics of scholasticism, like Martin Luther and his contemporaries, on the grounds that medieval philosophy had abandoned evangelical truth to follow Aristotle and the vain deceits of human wisdom...
...According to one line of thought, if a college or university confers its principal administrative offices upon lay persons, it has, for all practical purposes, renounced its distinctive religious character...
...2) reality is coherent and ultimately intelligible...
...In my judgment, the case for Catholic higher education depends, more precisely, upon a principle that is at once educational, philosophical and theological...
...They should have acquired the "self-discipline necessary to live by these values...
...It is also a world whose transformation is not yet complete...
...The Hutehins charge reverberated through the academic corridors of American Catholicism for more than two decades, and few, if any, serious educational discussions prescinded from it...
...But an air of neutrality lurks in the corners...
...With the great influx of new knowledge and new ideas, the universities and the vast community of scholars and teachers were provided the materials from which to construct a new intellectual synthesis...
...What is crucial is "the light in which all (reality) is viewed" (his emphasis...
...without which there is no whole, no centre...
...The Christian, and indeed the Catholic, answer to such questions as those focuses upon the histoflc ~ drama played out in Palestine some two thousand years ago...
...One might make a case against Catholic higher education on the grounds, for example, that resources are limited and that other areas of missionary responsibility have prior claim...
...Romanticism also mars the discussion...
...No humanly significant activity is excluded from this process...
...that is, it is the only institution which is conscious of its tradition . . . . The best service Catholic education can perform for the nation and all education," he continued, "is to show that the intellectual tradition can again be made the heart of higher education...
...Graduates of the Catholic college or university should have "a sacramental view of the world: that ~s, they should be able to see in their own lives and in the world they live in signs of a transcendent life and means of access to it . . . . Ultimately, they should be able to see in Jesus Christ the best sign of the meaning of their own lives and of the perfect life they can in a fragmentary way imagine, and they should believe that by the power which Jesus Christ offers to all of us we can mend the broken order of the wodd and come to share that perfect llfe forever...
...I should prefer to call these "descriptively" Catholic rather than "distinctively" Catholic...
...The statement tries to put the discussion "in terms of what qualities our graduates should ideally have...
...Catholics are not alone among Christians in accepting the Incarnation and its implications, even though much of Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy has, in fact, italicized transcendence more readily...
...But no case should be made, on the basis of some corporate inferiority complex, that an institutional commitment to the Catholic tradition is incompatible with quality education and the highest standards of scholarship...
...Catholics are not alone in their regard for rationality, even though other Christians have revered more surely the non-intellectual dispositions, such as trust, spontaneity, or the feeling of absolute dependence...
...To be a Catholic is not simply to be religious, to believe in God, or to accept the ideal of human solidarity and fellowship under God...
...Moreover, Murray continued, "you don't really have a Christian school in the proper sense of the word unless that school is explicitly pledged to the transmission of the Christian religion and the intellectual heritage of Christianity in an organized, integrated form...
...And the same result is said to follow even more surely upon the transition to "separate incorporation," where the ultimate governance passes to a board of trustees no longer dominated by the institution's original religious sponsors...
...And Catholics are not alone in their respect for tradition and authority, nor in their openness to the spiritual and the aesthetic, even though Protestants have often allowed their regard for freedom to diminish the first two values and their fear of idolatry and Pelagianism to undermine the other two...
...Such a school thereby "participates, to some extent at any rate, in the mission of the Church, both as a prophetic mission and also as a pastoral mission...
...Simplistic Answers When, in fact, does an institution qualify as a Catholic institution...
...The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius have as their foundation the conviction that the world is a field where divine and human activity intersect...
...The ideal was most sharply defined during the high Middle Ages...
...The final report of the University Academic Planning Council at Boston College, for example, reaffirms the school's commitment "to remain a strong and distinctively Catholic university recognized by its ideals and its activities...
...In a generally constructive statement entitled "Jesuit...
...This is clearly a matter of perspective and of centering, of which Newman spoke...
...Reconciliation is the gift of God through Jesus Christ and his Spirit...
...First, an institution's stated purposes and goals must be linked explicitly with Jesus Christ...
...It possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual and true relations...
...What are the theological criteria by which institutions and the like are characterized as Catholic...
...which can, under certain circumstances and according to certain theological criteria, be described as Catholic, not to say Christian...
...The romanticism is not unmixed with some religious cynicism, however...
...I should reject at the outset two simplistic answers: one from the left, the other from the right...
...2) the program of theological studies and its correlates (e.g., religious education), if they are genuinely first-rate in both conception and execution, are to be preferred in academic planning and in the allocation of limited financial resources...
...How are they justified...
...The failures of Christian education," Murray acknowledged, "are normally multitudinons, sometimes scandalous and occasionally spectacular . . . . What matters in every age is the idea that inspires its efforts, and the integrity of these efforts...
...What grounding do such "values" have...
...Although the hierarchical ministries axe essential to the life and order of the Church as a totality, they are not so constitutive to every group, movement, agency, or institution within the Church that such cannot be called Catholic without direct and immediate hierarchical participation...
...What of their truth...
...Christian education tries "to integrate the whole of human knowledge under the primacy of the word of God . . . . It is this effort to construct the Christian view, to integrate everything in a Christian view, that would seem to me to be the cardinal ideal of Christian education...
...The chief task of education is the shaping of persons and of the human community...
...knowledge, not merely considered as acquirement, but as philosophy...
...The crucial error," Robert Hutchins had said on a later occasion (Yale University, 1940), "is that of holding that nothing is any more important than anything else, that there can he no order of goods and no order in the intellectual realm...
...They should be open to "the possibility of radical change in themselves as their values deepen and mature...
...It is the central argument of this essay that the Hutchins critique is still valid...
...There is a future for Catholic higher education as long as there is a future for an integrated approach to education, a philosophy which respects the coherence and intelligibility of reality, and a faith that places Jesus Christ at the center of the historical process...
...It assumes that there are groups, movements, agencies, and institutions beyond those of a formally ecclesiastical nature (e.g., parishes, dioceses, religious orders, etc...
...We can overcome our estrangement and alienation if we are open to the grace of GOd in Christ...
...An apple does not become a pear because I prefer to call it a pear...
...THE CASE FOR CATHOLIC EDUCATION RICHARD P. McBRIEN Placing Jesus Chr/st at the center q It has been forty years since Robert M. Hutchins delivered his stunning critique of Catholic higher education...
...In the minds of several, apparently, Harvardization is in inverse proportion to Catholicization, as if commitment to specific religious values and symbols were radically incompatible with commitment to the highest of academic standards (an assumption that Robert Hutchins vigorously denied...
...This integral vbion of Catholic higher education is Commonweal: 45 not without its proponents today...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 2
