Continuing the conversation: Catholic colleges: A historian and a bishop comment
O'Brien, David J.
Continuing the conversation A historian's view Two cheers to Commonweal ["Keeping Colleges Catholic/' April 9] for its contribution to the important debate about American Catholic higher...
...John P. Langan, editor, Catholic Universities in Church and Society: A Dialogue on Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Georgetown University Press, 1993...
...Almost two centuries later, in 1965, Carroll's Catholic church fi nailly agreed that yes, that was about right...
...It has been the consistent, and I would argue inevitable, stance of responsible American bishops and academic leaders since the revolution that separated control of most Catholic colleges and universities from their sponsoring religious communities...
...Readers should be reminded that after five years of extended and at times very heated discussion, the bishops with only six dissenting votes approved norms based on pastoral considrations and argued in terms of communio with its suggestion of shared responsibility for the life and work of the church...
...The experience of religious difference had produced in Carroll a new wisdom: When people engage in their common business, in marketplace and civic forum, and in laboratory and classroom, they must speak and act in terms of shared meanings and common values...
...Pastoral considerations blurred the edge of what has become since 1967 a chronic tension between academic integrity—which requires institutional autonomy and academic freedom—and the consistent Vatican argument that Catholic identity and integrity require formal accountability to ecclesiastical authority...
...Finally, I fear that some of the writers come close to giving away the game by acknowledging exclusive episcopal responsibility for things Catholic...
...Instead he responded with a careful argument about why it was bad for religion and for civic life to make religious preference the defining criteria for citizenship and public policy...
...muscle won't help...
...Founded "to bring a distinctive Catholic voice to the public conversation," Commonweal has always been independent of the hierarchy but unmistakably Catholic...
...For one thing, Andrew Greeley again reminds us of how Catholic we remain, perhaps in spite of ourselves...
...in short, for liberation The many public squares for which we now share responsibility may be empty, as the critics of secularization always suggest...
...Second, secularization is still the wrong word to describe what has happened to Catholic higher education...
...But they are, quite properly, ours, and they should be...
...David J. O'Brien is Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts...
...The transformation of Catholic higher education, like the arrival of many children of Catholic immigrants into the multiple centers of American culture it facilitated and reflected, did not arise from unworthy, even silly, yearnings for acceptance and respectability...
...We can help clothe their nakedness with meaning, in part by drawing on our own rich tradition, but we will never do that if we see the process that brought us here as simply an improper accommodation to "secular" culture...
...Carroll might have responded that he preferred to await a Catholic restoration, so that true religion, culture, and government could once more be properly integrated...
...Continuing the conversation A historian's view Two cheers to Commonweal ["Keeping Colleges Catholic/' April 9] for its contribution to the important debate about American Catholic higher education occasioned by proposals to implement the apostolic constitution Ex corde ecdesiae...
...I appreciated especially President John Piderit's vigorous defense of intellectual honesty when we speak of Catholic claims to truth and virtue, Francis Nichols's excellent survey of the prospects and problems of emerging Catholic studies programs, and Paul Saunders's hard-nosed reminder of what it might mean to put the proposed norms into practice...
...After a generation of expansion and change, most Catholic colleges and universities are ready for that new partnership, but it will require authentic dialogue...
...Of course we must try to "keep colleges Catholic" but their Catholic identity is not the goal...
...Komonchak ended with a good question: "Would [the bishops] like to see Catholic colleges and universities more closely resemble a typical diocesan newspaper than they do Commonweal...
...Peter Steinfels accurately shows the conflict between the goals of Ex corde ecdesiae and the canonical norms proposed for its implementation...
...Might I add that the experience of Catholic higher education, and of Catholic academics wherever they work, mirrors that of this magazine...
...His essay reflects the complexity and diversity of these more than two hundred remarkable inslilulioiis, each with its distinct mix of acai.li.Miik...
...I am not at all sure how we should define the relationship between the bishop and these institutions (or for that matter the relationship between the bishop and me) except in "pastoral" terms of communication, mutual trust, and shared responsibility for the life and work of the church...
...At an earlier stage of the Ex corde discussion, theologian Joseph A. Komonchak compared Commonweal and the Catholic university...
...The goal is a vital and intelligent American Catholic church, and the issue here is what the editors say it is in their introduction: "the practice of Catholic intellectual life...
...There are some problems, three of which I would like to note • First, the proposed norms are recommendations of an episcopal subcommittee made in response to a Vatican request for more juridical norms than the more pastoral approach approved by the hierarchy in 1996...
...The 1996 norms and the process of intense dialogue that produced them encourage that practice...
...In that text, canon 812 was shelved for further study, a step not taken lightly by anyone involved...
...I think it selfevident that what our American church needs is not more 11 episcopal muscle, though I yield to no one in my respect for a strong hierarchy, but more, not fewer, independent initiatives by clergy, religious, laity, and even bishops which manifest practical acceptance of responsibility for the life and work of the church...
...In 1759 young Charles Carroll of Maryland was asked by an English friend why he did not simply become an Anglican and avoid all the disabilities imposed on Catholics...
...Peter Steinfels has three "requires" in one paragraph, and in the next he explores how ecclesiastical "muscle" can be held in "reserve" to balance "communication and mutual trust...
...The 1996 resolution in favor of dialogue and mutual trust was not new...
...Sister Alice Gallin got it right in the title of her excellent monograph on separate incorporation: Independence and a New Partnership (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996...
...On the contrary, it arose from the deepest aspirations of real men and women for economic sufficiency, social equality, cultural respect, and political participation...
...the 1998 norms make it harder...
...But more important is a point that should be evident to Commonweal editors and readers...
...civic, and ecclesial responsibilities But two cheers not three...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 10
