Catholics at Columbia:

...Show students that there's more to Catholicism than their stereotypes allow and you're on your way to helping them develop a very different sense of what it means to be Catholic...

...They generally want something more than they're getting in the classroom or in late-night bull sessions in the dorms...

...In reaction, Columbia adopted a "wall of REV...

...The model and the strategies I used flowed from my theological orientation, my personality, and the capacities of the students and staff who have been part of campus ministry over the last fifteen years...

...For five years we sustained a Vespers service in the chapel sponsored by our Women's Center...

...Some students start enthusiastically and are waylaid by academic agnosticism, sophomore cynicism, or by a first serious sexual involvement...

...Based on both my conviction, as well as my style (for want of a more appropriate theo- logical term), the CCM liturgy in the magnifi- cent Romano-Byzantine St...

...A great deal of change began to occur in the economic fabric of New York City, and around Columbia there was a new juxtaposition of wealth and poverty...

...Whoever's...

...leadership collapsed...

...So this campus minister has tried to do.s campus minister has tried to do...

...The few students with rigid Catholic certainties are often the most difficult to integrate into a mixed community of their peers...

...the university barely noticed my arrival...

...He opened his well-thumbed copy of The Seven Storey Mountain, read a passage by Thomas Merton, and said to me, "That's not him...

...He begins a sabbatical year of study on July 1. separation," secularizing its chaplaincies and discontinuing salaries for the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic "counselors" (what we today call campus ministers...

...This new activism coincided with a continuing effort to create a small community where students could live and study together...

...They remain loyal to their high school experience and don't participate with the ministry on a mixed campus...

...That spring, the nation's campuses became the staging ground for fervent opposition to the American government's policies in Vietnam: buildings were occupied...

...Columbia University was deeply affected by these events-Mark Rudd, the Strawberry Statement, and the Morningside Park gymnasium are benchmarks of sixties' history...

...Very directly, his homily citing the duty of the rich to come to the aid of the poor nationally and internationally struck a chord in a core group of newly active students Merton's impact, then John Paul's words, and a few talks by Dan Berrigan, S. J., all combined to orient the CCM in a new direction...

...Our Sunday liturgy has played a central role in that...

...PAUL E. DINTER is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York who has served as Catholic campus minister at Columbia University since 1973...

...For the former (often those who have had a good experience in a Catholic high school), the heightened demands of being Catholic outside the parochial culture can lead them to contrast the new setting negatively with the "good ol' days" at St...

...Finding a' 'critical mass" of interested students on campus in 1973, I sought to create a place for their questioning and their belonging, their intellectual strivings, and their religious imagining...

...Perhaps campus congregations make this particularly obvious...

...Happily, a large and healthy number of students are content to search more deeply in matters of faith...

...It would be fitting, and not a little ironic, if the underlying desire for more cooperative instead of competitive models of learning and social change, anchored firmly in the bedrock of religious humanism from which it was mined, could be brought home to the university by campus ministers, their staffs, and their communities whose main teaching function lies in their ability to set an example for the university and for the larger society...

...From this has grown the willingness of so many members of the congregation to act on their faith on the campus and in the community...

...All the members of this new community, both those in residence and those living elsewhere, assumed some responsibility for helping to run the CCM service programs (a soup kitchen, shelter, Sunday school, big brothers/big sisters, clothing closet, etc...

...The lack of welcome had less to do with me than the trauma of April 1968...

...Here, the next chapter in the life of Ford Hall dovetailed with the development of the outward turn of campus ministry...

...I have tried to interact with my congregation by asking them to own personally what we are about...

...By and large, Catholic students, especially undergraduates, are often surprised to find themselves at Columbia: surprised at the en- vironment, which is so different from their past experiences...

...The place was the renamed Catholic Campus Ministry (CCM) and the strategies we developed encompassed a liturgical community, counseling and teaching, and the establishment of a residence sponsored by the CCM for students interested in a "community" environment...

...If the first five years of work with the CCM was getting Catholics used to expressing their faith at Columbia, the last ten have meant getting the university used to Catholics willing to express and act on their faith...

...As Cardinal Newman proposed in his Idea of a University, the purpose of the university is to educate for the world...

...Along with this sense of choice came a renewed ability and desire to participate in the life of the community...

...Their risking puts me on notice that I too must grow and change...

...Columbia University, its administrators and faculty, was still trying to grapple with the breakdown of community it had suffered...

...Preaching and liturgical community have been at the heart of my campus ministry, an opportunity not available to many Catholic campus ministers or even possible on every campus, but an opportunity to be faithful that I would have been a fool to undervalue...

...Less well remembered is the impact of those events on the National Newman Apostolate...

...students set upon their teachers and other students...

...The need to attend to Lazarus at our gates received a significant impetus from Pope John Paul's speech at Yankee Stadium in October 1979...

...Though still refuges for sincere humanist scholars, who are tolerated for their colorful eccentricities, campuses are losing their souls...

...I lectured him, in turn, on the ministry of preaching and its proper function at the Eucharist...

...It probably helps account for the high mortality rate of celibates in campus ministry-the young people attracted to a vibrant ministry are so easy to love...

...On the other hand, the CCM encouraged and promoted lay preaching in other liturgical contexts...

...Congregations and the priests who serve them have to work out their relationship as carefully as do lovers and spouses, parents and children...

...If they are willing to risk their attraction for each other, they will have to negotiate fears and anxieties, loves and hates, wounds and healing...

...The way the house worked and the role it had in the broader community depended almost entirely on the maturity of the students and their relative honesty or dishonesty about their communitarian commitment...

...Unfaithfulness in this task through neglect, lazy moralizing, or intellectual or emotional coldness seems to me to be at least as bad as sexual infidelity...

...Masses in the dorms, my presence at other-than-chaplaincy events, guest lecturing, running campus-wide events, such as an Oxfam hunger relief campaign-all are ways of encountering students who don't have a clue that I am there to begin with...

...or surprised that, in the midst of such noble intellectual pursuits, there is so much loneliness and lack of caring...

...I remember being pressed by a priest from a New England campus to allow my students to preach at Mass...

...Graced with talented musicians, the community has done its utmost to make the Sunday Eucharist the heart of who we are on campus...

...and blood flowed in the halls of academe...

...This emphasis on re-explaining a community of faith ten years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, combined with the baptism and confirmation of students at the Easter Vigil, helped to give people a sense of choice about their faith...

...The results have been the consistent attendance of hundreds of students as well as the loyalty of alumni and alumnae to the celebration...

...Though individual Newman groups survived, the dominant apologetic model of Catholic campus ministry ceased to exist as a usable framework for Catholic ministry on secular campuses...

...But it introduced a whole new generation of students to Merton, his life and his writings...

...The pastoral tension that this creates is further aggravated by the desire of groups such as Opus Dei to promote a moralistic and repressive notion of Catholicism...

...as we do on campuses, so our constituents will do in their lives and in their careers...

...In order to tie our residential facility to the new pastoral outlook of the active members of the CCM, a new core community moved into Ford Hall along with me (regrettably displacing some less committed residents...

...Others find themselves seriously in need of some intellectual and moral moorings and seek out the chaplaincy because it offers an alternative, especially in the Sunday liturgy, to the highly competitive classroom environment...

...or surprised that they've made it to the "big time...

...One of the ways it did so was by distancing itself from the religious groups whose more activist chaplains had associated themselves with the student protests...

...This new organization (a not-for-profit corporation) represents a partnership among Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant agencies and campus ministries along with the Earl Hall Center at Columbia and is attracting wider support from private philanthropy as well...

...Acting the landlord and the disciplinarian when necessary, I realized early in 1982 that providing affordable housing on a campus and in a city short of it was not the best invitation to gathering a community...

...When the house worked well, everyone benefited...

...The real grace we received in those years was primarily evident when the community had run its course and finally dissolved in 1986: that despite the tragic death of one of our members in the first year we lived in community, the jailing of another member for civil disobedience, the strife over the role of women in the community, the tensions caused by a few uncompromising and unstable members, the enormous problem of hospitality and whom we could shelter, and the group's ambiguity over functional as well as formal authority (all New Testament issues mind you...

...We strove to overcome exclusivity by welcoming all who associated with the community's mission and, though we were supported both financially and morally by many members of the Saint Paul's congregation, the intensity of the commitment and the intemperance of some of our stances against poverty, injustice, and the arms race did alienate others...

...most of the members grew as individuals and in their understanding of our differing vocations to be disciples...

...Despite our failures, the Cor Jesu community's brief history provides us with much to celebrate and its legacy endures in the CCM and through two diverse institutions that evolved from it: the Pax Christi organizations in metropolitan New York and the large volunteer organization based at Columbia University, now called Community Impact...

...While it suffered from a lack of general congregational support and from younger students' shyness on women's issues (!), it did help some women reach for their leadership potential and articulate both their struggle and their faith...

...As I prepare to take my leave of Columbia, I would like to reflect on the campus ministry I have shaped and which has shaped me as a man and as a priest...

...More than ever, they need to hear the challenge of repentance and the call to new life that ministry must have at its heart...

...as well as its education and action for peace...

...the police were called in...

...In the years preceding my arrival at Columbia, the Jewish Chaplaincy had opened two "communal houses" in renovated brownstones and the idea had caught on with a number of Catholic students...

...One day a disaffected student nervously walked into my office after returning from a semester in France...

...Like it or not, young Catholics have (at least since the time of James Joyce...

...Under these dual conditions-of uncertainty in campus ministry and drift in the university-I found myself suddenly assigned as Catholic chaplain to Columbia after the term began in September 1973.1 had a master's degree and a penchant for working with young people, but my only experience in campus ministry was a few months of service as a deacon at Vassar College...

...I can only minister to them if they will allow themselves to be served...

...If I had known then what I was in for, I would have refused the assignment...

...It is harder, though, to serve them by struggling with them so they can find themselves and discover the uniqueness of their own journey to God...

...In the face of this and other gimmicks that have plagued liturgical ministry on campuses, I have always opted for the traditional framework of liturgy, especially as regards preaching...

...I doubt I made much of an impression...

...I may be rash to harbor any sense of permanent accomplishment, but it certainly seems to me that the chemistry let loose when you combine a good worshipping community with attention to our spiritual tradition of growth and development (augmented by a psychologically attuned staff), when you enfranchise the laity and open up for them the challenging as well as the comforting aspects of Scripture, and when you promote both a sense of the church as inclusive and Catholic and a confidence that faith and learning go hand in hand, then you make it possible for even a minority community like the Catholic Campus Ministry to affect the day-to-day life and values of as large an institution as Columbia University in the City of New York...

...That's me...

...other times it's taken early on and by junior year there is a drifting back...

...Catholics have earned the right not merely to practice their faith unmolested at the secular university, they must now mature into communities whose conviction that faith enhances learning rather than diminishes it can help shape a campus environment more responsive to the needs of all its members to practice their humanity...

...A Columbia journalism student did a master's essay on this phenomenon in our congregation (later published in America, "Six Who Came Back," September 26, 1976...

...Other students were less dramatic, but I came to appreciate that I was facing a rare opportunity in 1978 of bringing Merton back to his Alma Mater forty years after he had been baptized a Catholic at nearby Corpus Christi parish and ten years after he had died...

...Not content with arguing economics, philosophy, political science, history, or theology in the classroom, the students increasingly wanted to bring what they learned to the streets of New York, to the gates of weapons' laboratories and production facilities (even walking to Amarillo, Texas one summer), and into the homes and lives of the disadvantaged families living in the arc of poverty that surrounds the university, Morningside Heights...

...This means that they must risk growing and changing...

...For those who were "turned off" early, the art of ministry resides in getting them to encounter a community of faith in a new light...

...classes were suspended...

...A variety of factors created a new market for private investors willing to gamble on the repopulation of formerly run-down areas of Manhattan...

...decision to pick up the ball and run with it stemmed from a desire to put down roots on the campus, to provide a service as a way of staking a claim to ministry at the university, and to create an identity symbol for Catholics on campus...

...bishops in 1962...

...Campus ministry" is not merely ministering at a college or university but ministering to the campus, its administrators, staff, and students...

...Still other students are clearly ready for a vacation from the church and everything it represents...

...Some students from strongly Catholic backgrounds have a homing instinct and make for the campus ministry office as a place of refuge...

...Sometimes the vacation lasts all four years...

...tended to become fixated with the church in their adolescent years: they are either for it or against it, both equally uncritically...

...Showing strong growth in the immediate post-World War II years, the Newman Apostolate was formally recognized by the U.S...

...This meeting has been the crucible for my ongoing reflection on preaching: my Eucharistic preaching is a primary expression of my marriage to the community of faith I serve...

...This renewal of Merton's memory in 1978 helped to turn our attention outward to a society where renewed draft registration, an accelerated arms race, and economic policies began to shape the culture of the selfish eighties...

...Central to our Sunday liturgy is my weekly meeting with the liturgy and music committee to read the Scriptures, puzzle over them, and set them in a musical framework for the following Sunday...

...They sense there is more to life than just thinking about it and they are willing to listen to the hints from their own experiences of guilt and grace and to move to some fuller understanding of creation and their place in it...

...If either remains aloof, their roles and their lives will remain uncomplicated, * but little of what the Gospels proclaim and the sacraments symbolize will take flesh...

...Once they know that you have joined them in their struggle, there is little they won't undertake with you, as my students have shown me over and over, most recently in the return to campus of the honored name of Cardinal Newman which today graces both an active undergraduate group and an ambitious new magazine of which I am particularly proud...

...But in 1973, armed with a certain enthusiasm, strong convictions, and not a little neurotic energy, I strode into this stridently secular setting hoping to nurture a community of faith among its Catholic members...

...Only eight years later it had passed from the national scene...

...The events of the Thomas Merton Commemoration at Columbia brought two thousand people to campus for a series of religious events, inaugurated the Merton Lecture which has continued for ten years, built a sense of pride in the students who helped run it, and put the CCM in a financial hole that, for a few depressing months, we thought we would never be able to climb out of...

...What's the sense of being celibate and struggling with this vocation, as the church presently defines it, if it does not free the ordained minister to risk intimacy with his congregation as a way of uncovering the mystery of God-with-us at the Eucharist...

...My teaching and counseling have often, but not exclusively, been directed to those Catholics who have taken a vacation either explicitly or casually from the church...

...Preaching, praying, and singing done with conviction, sensitivity, and skill should characterize liturgical celebration...

...Its mission remains true to its initial goal of serving the "least ones," but has been augmented by a serious effort to broaden the educational experience of the students by involving them in concrete, well-managed, and professionally directed service projects...

...Since I was the fourth priest in five years to occupy the Catholic chaplaincy, my new colleagues at Columbia's Earl Hall greeted me with polite skepticism...

...I have never been convinced that students, in particular, or a campus congregation, in general, are the proper subjects for experimentation in worship...

...Campuses are increasingly succumbing to the forces of the marketplace and becoming trade schools for our advanced capitalist society...

...Paul's Chapel on campus has always favored contemporary music (based on biblical, not sentimental, texts) set within an otherwise "traditional" Mass...

...For better or for worse, this chaplaincy has been shaped by my personality and style of ministry...

...Single-room occupancy hotels (often populated by the elderly and deinstitutionalized mental patients) were emptied and converted to upscale housing...

...when jealousy, cliques, and couple-politics dominated, we had headaches galore...

...While there he had discovered something about being a Catholic his parochial upbringing had not prepared him for...

...The former residents found themselves in the streets and their presence has characterized the neighborhoods since 1980...

...The occasion for this transition was a piece of history, which, when activated, had a way of changing people's lives...

...The university itself became an actor in the struggle for affordable housing in a way that, fairly or unfairly, has given this venerable institution as black a public eye as it has ever received and threatens to perpetuate the worst of the town-gown housing rivalry...

...It was not a liability they were saddled with, but a virtuality they could choose for their adult life...

...For the first eight years of the house's existence (named Ford Hall after my esteemed predecessor), I tried to finesse a sponsor-relationship that provided oversight through an elected council, a graduate resident, or a peer minister responsible for liaison with the larger campus ministry...