Bland secularism?
Schroth, Raymond A.
timony on the evils of totalitarianism and his mostly clear-eyed understanding of the contradictions inherent in secular democracies carry authority. Still, Centesimus's warnings against...
...Here and elsewhere, candidates for faculty and staff positions asked to comment on a goals and mission statement, say they "have no problem" or "find it compatible...
...Nevertheless, the hiring process is the key to identity, and the chair or dean or president who will follow up on this is as rare as the philosophy candidate who has read Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson and plans to put them on the reading list...
...Six years ago, as Holy Cross dean, I proposed that the economics department search for a new faculty member who to some degree either shared or saw the relevance of those basic principles of economic justice developed in the American bishops' pastoral letter on the economy--for example, the need to consider the human consequences of economic decisions...
...That is the lesson the pope draws from Eastem Europe's miraculous victory over communism--the lesson he would like us to draw in the West in our own battle against indifference, depersonalization, and alienation...
...Priest-presidents, if they are not careful, tend to identify with their secular, fund-raising peers, and put as much energy into their own self-protection as does any politician...
...A Roman Jew, who often put more effort into critiquing student papers than students put into writing them, he would draw the students into long debates and pump them about what "Jesuit" education meant--something we Jesuits seldom do...
...I think it's high time that Catholics mobilized themselves to reject bigotry and insult...
...Yet, would anyone argue against that idea...
...Then, our almost favorite sentence: "Would you kindly bill me for $360...
...But can an institution where only a small minority of the faculty embrace rather than merely tolerate the institution's goals give a both catholic and Catholic education to young men and women...
...Of course...
...To the donees, a warning...
...Historically, Catholic colleges and universities have done two things well: As denominational liberal arts colleges, they have helped keep alive what Page Smith calls in Killing the Spirit, the "classical Christian consciousness," the conviction that we are governed by natural laws which mirror the mind of the creator...
...If this sort of thing is going on, I haven't noticed it...
...My best wishes to you...
...HOW TO KEEP THE FAITH he Catholic college, America's leading bellweather Catholic theologian, Rev...
...In Northern Ireland, yes...
...A good number of the faculty took this as an invasion of their prerogatives, an assault on their academic freedom...
...What we are complaining about are not the gross forms of discrimination you just itemized...
...Because the Catholic church dares to speak out against abortion--thereby confronting the press bias in favor of abortion on demand---Catholics become the victims of mockery and contempt," Bishop McHugh retorted...
...This is followed by a list often names with addresses, tastefully arranged on the page...
...I am for choice in education...
...Thus, the problem is often not a lay-clerical split, but a lack of common vision within a religious order...
...THE CHARACTER OF CATHOLIC COLLEGES BLAND SECULARISM...
...This means that just as they seek to hire blacks and women, they would seek religious order priests and nuns, and laypersons who, regardless of their religious commitment, are concerned about the ethical dimensions of the arts and sciences...
...You miss the point," someone will tell me...
...Avery Dulles, S.J., has warned us in the New York Times (May 1), is on "the slippery path" from strong religious identity it possessed at its founding to the bland secularism of state and Ivy League universities...
...Which means that they want a job in this part of the country and can tolerate the ideals of their employer...
...If I were to make the same request today, it might be for someone with expertise in the ethical issues raised by Centesimus annus...
...The trouble is, I am not aware that there is any significant bigotry directed against Catholics in present-day America...
...So when the bishop puts together his campaign to reject "bigotry and insult" against Catholics, he can sign me up...
...No, no...
...Which brings us back to where we began...
...Faculty politics and priorities being what they are, it would be an extraordinary accomplishment to teach every student something as brief and basic as the Four Gospels within four years...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...But today, how are these schools different...
...As professional schools, they have moved generations of Catholics out of the anti-intellectual ghetto of the immigrant church into the nation's courtrooms, legislatures, operating rooms, city rooms, and stock markets...
...The real problem is not the unending string of side-show controversies--homosexual or pro-abortion speakers, clubs, and student newspaper editorials at Fordham, Georgetown, Boston College, or Marquette--that raise ecclesiastical eyebrows, but much deeper: a lack of shared intellectual values for the institution to pass along...
...while priestfaculty identify with their professional peers and think they owe their fellow religious no more loyalty than they do their fellow laymen...
...The cartoon bishop then adds: / "I am for the state giving your tax money to parents to give to me so I can teach their kids to be against choice in abortion...
...Maybe that's enough...
...In religious studies departments, for example, the last generation of the broadly educated humanists may be the priests and ex-priests in their fifties, trained in philosophy and the classics as well...
...One thing is certain: what Catholicism has long called spiritual, the modem world may yet come to understand as a practical necessity...
...First, the faculty, freely and collectively, would have to decide that it is essential for their future for the college to stay Catholic and, according to its own tradition, different...
...There are three ways in which Catholic colleges might revitalize their Catholic character...
...Tell me where Catholics are discriminated against in housing, employment, admission to schools and colleges, access to government services, etc...
...Recently, a candidate for academic dean here, asked in an open forum what he saw as distinctive about Catholic and Jesuit education, replied that "education is education...
...I live in a student residence hall...
...The trouble is that--largely as a result of the hyper-professionalization of higher education and what Page Smith describes as the cult of "scientific" objectivity which has virtually purged the professor's moral judgment from the classroom--the Christian humanist as a species is almost extinct...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is a journalism professor in the communications department at Loyola University in New Orleans...
...Your renewal habits will be monitored...
...ET CETERA GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE We have received a magnificently brilliant communication from the brilliantly magnificent academic vice-president of a pre-eminently foremost East Coast Catholic university...
...I look out my window in the morning and see Tulane University, literally ten yards away...
...Otherwise, faculty and student critics, with some justification, will seize the unoccupied moral high ground and demand: "How can a university call itself Catholic and/or Jesuit and still (fill in the latest controversy): fire Professor Friendly...
...Above all, though this effect is hard to measure, they have taught many of their graduates that the love of learning and the desire for God can often be the same experience...
...Holy Cross was one of the "best" Catholic schools in the country, but I had badly misjudged the degree to which the faculty--many hired from top graduate schools in the last ten years--shared the mission of the institution...
...And that the New York Times has noticed in a front-page story what Catholic educators have been talking to themselves about for over twenty years may well be a sign that it's too late to do anything about it...
...Today's 1 June 1991:357 new religious studies Ph.D...
...LIGHTEN UP, GUYS GIVE AS GOOD AS YOU GET read recently that Bishop James T. McHugh of the Catholic diocese of Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia, has accused the Philadelphia Daily News of "crass anti-Catholicism" after the newspaper printed an editorial cartoon ironically contrasting the Catholic position on choice in abortion with its position on choice in schooling...
...Now, I'm as opposed to anti-Catholicism as the next fellow, and I want to go on record as being particularly opposed to "crass" anti-Catholicism, which sounds like an especially unpleasant variety of the species...
...Excerpts: "I am following up on our recent phone conversation and am enclosing the names of ten graduating seniors...that I am requesting you enroll as subscribers for one year...
...But that is perhaps a cultural deficiency of our own...
...Perhaps I lead too sheltered a life...
...Third, achieve some minimal agreement on curriculum wherein all students would read a few fundamental primary texts--Luke, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Newman---central to the Christian tradition...
...But moral leadership becomes more complex and difficult every day...
...Still, Centesimus's warnings against secularism and atheism may sound anachronistic to American ears...
...And to you, our optimal blessings...
...And here's the topper: "High among the desired outcomes of this little exercise is that the graduates will become lifelong readers of Commonweal...
...The real-life bishop was not amused...
...It must nourish, criticize, create, and communicate a "truth," an intellectual vision not available next door...
...that kind of thing pretty much died out earlier in the century...
...and have thus sent out "inner-directed" men and women who make both good graduate students and servants of the community...
...But in the United States...
...If the Catholic college, as a distinct American educational force, were to disappear, what would be lost...
...not fire an incompetent like Professor Friendly...
...At The College of the Holy Cross, for example, where I was academic dean, 1981-85, one of the most traditionally "Jesuit" faculty members was a young, non-Catholic political scientist, Maurizio Vanicelli, who died suddenly this winter...
...Second, the trustees and president must reinforce the college's identity through vigorous leadership---through eloquence, handson management, and, above all, governing with unquestioned fairness and integrity...
...may be a master of one sect or Epistle--and may or may not believe in God...
...358: Commonweal...
...If my own university's identity is to have any meaning at all, it must not be simply that it is "personal" or "caring" or "urban" or even dedicated to "peace and justice...
...The April 4 cartoon pictures a Catholic bishop saying, "Yes...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
