The Dying of the Light by James Tunstead Burtchaell
Coughlan, Neil
Something lost* something gained? The Dying of the Light The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches James Tunstead Burtchaell William h. lWrdm<m<, S.s'J, S6S...
...Burtchaell, I think, would say, everyone considers it good to study nature and society—but you Jesuits claim something else, too...
...He wants a college or a university that is first an organ of the Catholic church and only then an affiliate of American higher education...
...It was instinct with grace...
...Eventually, the question occurred: Exactly how is this college Catholic now...
...What do these words mean, exactly...
...Manicheanism was the philosophy of the ghetto...
...The departments of English, biology, etc., became full members of their national academic guilds: When they hired, they hired the best biologist, no longer the best Catholic biologist...
...This point of view discloses God to the discerning eye and discloses God drawing all that is of our world and all that is human into God's own life...
...Burtchaell, however, has been more forthcoming elsewhere, in First Things (April and May 1991...
...All students must take two courses in theology, the first a foundation in biblical studies and patristics, the second an elective "theme" course...
...2. Most (90 percent) of the students must be Catholics...
...6. And finally, they must be reintegrated into the church, be part of the sacramental community and apostolic mission of the dioceses and Rome (this would serve, inter alia, to foster conservative Catholic theology—though Burtchaell is wary of fools and ham-fists both to the left and the right...
...3. Most faculty must be Catholic...
...He wants economics professors who ask as a matter of course "what insightful element of perfection [does Catholic faith bring] to the practice and critique of economics...
...In The ¦ WiW^ Fading of the Light Burtchaell AjAjfl holds back...
...If this is Burtchaell's remedy for the dying of the light—and I have little doubt that it is—it is radical, particularly, perhaps, in its last point: most American Catholic colleges and universities now are independent entities...
...It presented a complete philosophical system, its logic, epistemology, psychology, cosmology, natural theology, metaphysics, and ethics...
...Slowly, and then more quickly, members of other faiths were admitted to the student body and to the faculty...
...The courses themselves, in many schools, began to come as a smorgasbord (pick two, any two...
...There is a similar two-course progression in philosophy required of all students...
...As Burtchaell tells it, Catholic college leaders, still largely clerics, did not often give their own question a straight answer...
...The faculty, 60 percent—"affirmative action" for Catholics is the rule...
...This arrangement had its problems, however...
...Our very yearning for fulfillment directs our search Godwards and will be satisfied only in the possession of God for which we have been made...
...Would such schools become centers of excellence, or only backwaters, curious reminders of a conservative critique of the 1990s American Catholic church and of some aggressively secularizing forces in American society...
...The world itself, we rather suddenly saw, was not an ungodly other—Christ's sacrifice had saved it, too...
...I don't think so...
...Heil Coughlan Hountless colleges and universities in the history of the United States were founded under some sort of Christian patronage," James Burtchaell begins, "but many which still survive do not claim any relationship with a church or denomination...
...Will the idea that their faith can inform and advance their intellectual lives be foreign to them...
...Are we Catholic...
...Each college had been founded with two purposes, to foster the students' piety in their church's faith and their morality, and to educate them...
...This philosophy major was an entirely prescribed curriculum of eight or ten courses in neoscholasticism...
...As late as the early 1960s, Burtchaell reminds us, Catholic colleges and universities required their students (almost all of them Catholics) both to take a set of courses in their religious faith (the life of Christ, the sacraments, etc...
...the academic departments pursued value-free inquiry as at any other college...
...Their answer is not as forthright: Unlike religious traditions that have distrusted or fled the world, Ignatian [Jesuit] spirituality sees the world of nature and culture in and around us as graced at its core by God's self-giving, therefore worth our work and our study...
...Therefore, it is good to study them...
...Everything would work out just fine...
...The philosophical heart had been taken out of the curriculum...
...We students and liberal faculty had our answers...
...You claim you see God here...
...Will they ever have seen Catholicism or theology as a subject of serious academic study...
...Also, it is covertly more sectarian than it appears...
...In a 1994 document, Jesuits and Boston College: Six Propositions for a Conversation, the Jesuits ask the right question: Some would say that [the colleges founded by the Jesuits] have adapted too thoroughly to the standards of secular academic life...In the 1990s, the argument would go, these institutions offer upper-middle-class students a vaguely liberal education colored by a rhetoric of spiritual values....Particularly in graduate programs and in the research agendas of faculty, these institutions take most of their values from mainstream American academic life, offer curriculums not notably different from what is available elsewhere, and work to advance the same kinds of knowledge as do secular institutions...
...every year fewer of the faculty and students were Catholic....How are we Catholic...
...Even on most of the campuses which are still listed by churches as their affiliates, there is usually some concern expressed today about how authentic or how enduring that tie really is, and often wistful concern is all that remains...
...I wonder, for instance, what Burtchaell thinks of the University of Notre Dame, run by his own Congregation of Holy Cross, and where he once taught...
...They are enthralling—Burtchaell cannot write a dull page—and vastly different from each other...
...The system comported with and buttressed Catholic belief...
...Staffing the religion and philosophy curriculums had always been difficult...
...Is not Boston College really a secular university with a (declining) Jesuit presence...
...The terms of governmental funding, ever more important, suggested it was perilous for a school to be too Catholic...
...At Boston College, for instance, the philosophy requirement was reduced in 1964 from ten courses (twenty-eight credits) to five...
...Go forth...
...Really only this—we Jesuits see God lurking behind nature and society...
...Presidents of Catholic colleges and universities came to function less as members of their religious communities running church colleges and more as executives in American higher education...
...What would fill that need now...
...How is B.C., then, different from N.Y.U., which also has some hundreds of Catholics on the faculty (discerning God lurking...
...And no longer were they necessarily in Catholic theology, or "Catholic" philosophy...
...The teaching of defining religious dogma became an embarrassment, as did distinctive moral doctrines (abstinence from alcohol, from dancing, from ems...
...This language is more visionary than expository...
...The 1960s and '70s brought a dam-burst of other changes, too, and Burtchaell shows that the Catholics in those few years reenacted pell mell the earlier histories of the Congregational-ists, the Presbyterians, and the rest...
...His prescription is along the following lines: 1. New Catholic colleges/universities must be founded or existing ones profoundly redirected...
...Neil Coughlan is a lawyer and the author of Young John Dewey...
...By 1971 it was down to two...
...fear nothing...
...In their hands the curriculums commonly became a protracted, amateurish dosing in Catholic apologetics, boring most of the students, infuriating the engages...
...Finally, though, he argues, the stories are the same...
...H V^H Had not the prescribed cur-^M B^| riculums in neoscholastic ¦¦¦H philosophy and Catholicism, however poorly taught, been "the integrative finale" of a Catholic college education...
...What Catholic historians and biologists would choose to teach there...
...In the end, colleges became nominally Baptist, or nominally Lutheran, or secular...
...They papered over radical change with a rhetoric of continuity—really, a rhetoric of fantasy...
...The Dying of the Light The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches James Tunstead Burtchaell William h. lWrdm<m<, S.s'J, S6S nv...
...What students (and parents) would pass up Yale or Pomona or Notre Dame to attend the Catholic college/university of the diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, or Houston, Texas...
...5. These colleges must have vigorously supported liturgical and praying lives...
...A radical solution sometimes is a sign that the problem has been overstated...
...were brought on campus...
...The university makes every effort to "Catholicize" the campus...
...The student bodies went from 95 percent Catholic, to 80 percent, to 70 percent...
...Incarnationalism, we called it...
...The university has made a major commitment to Catholic theology: the department has forty members, all with doctorates in theology (though the department is predominately Catholic, Protestant and Jewish scholars are hired for their specialties and perspectives...
...The piety, separated from the intellectual life of the colleges, was pushed over into the chapel, and chapel became optional...
...There are serious people, who, while seeing many of the failures Burtchaell does, see them as events along the way, not calls for a whole new beginning...
...Anyone who requires further imagination to recognize and remedy them is not up to the task of trying again, and better...
...these people, he says, could have revitalized theology in the colleges, made it a center of "broad spectrum, scholarly, and critical discourse...
...we no longer systematically educated the Catholic students in their faith...
...The priests and religious who were induced (or assigned) to teach them typically did not have the scholarly graduate education or aptitude for effective college teaching of theology or philosophy...
...Would it...
...Burtchaell wants them brought under episcopal authority...
...more than half the student body regularly attend Sunday Mass...
...Of the Protestants, only some of the evangelicals have not succumbed yet...
...his point is that we threw out bath and baby just as a generation of Catholic clergy and theologians was being educated in the sophisticated historical study of Scripture and tradition, the dogmatic and speculative theology that flowered in the church after the 1943 encyclical Divino afflante spiritu...
...and to complete two "majors," one in the student's chosen field (history, mathematics, whatever) and the other in philosophy...
...applicants must be Commonweal 2 O January 15,1999 told they are coming to a thoroughly Catholic college...
...More and more noncollegiate but lucrative vocational curriculums and schools (business, nursing...
...His book, he HiH says, has not been written to provide instruction on how to avoid the mistakes of the past, "so clearly patterned,...so lethally repeated...
...Yet, you don't say a word about programmatically teaching the student body how to see God through their studies...
...4. All students must complete a substantial curriculum of Catholic theology, taught for the most part by Catholic theologians (Burtchaell does not argue for neoscholasticism and 1950s Catholic "religion" courses...
...The pervasive "Catholic atmosphere" of the colleges, the self-confidence of our march out of our precincts into American national life, these would foster Catholic faith and intellectualism as effectively as ever did a drilling in apologetics and the Catholic catechism...
...all departments must seek out and prefer faculty who are active Catholics (do not dismiss this—would David O'Brien's work as a historian be half so interesting if he had not had his career at Holy Cross College...
...Rather than try to tease out its meaning, I would ask a blunt question: Who would go to these colleges and universities...
...The message to the students: in the religion classes and the philosophy major we have taught you the basic truths about God, the human condition, and the world...
...Commonweal 1 I January 15,1999...
...In the 1960s, this way of doing things—cloistered and dated— collapsed...
...Congregational (Dartmouth, Beloit), Presbyterian (Lafayette, Davidson), Methodist (Millsaps, Ohio Wesleyan), Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic (Boston College, New Rochelle, Saint Mary's of California), Evangelical—Burtchaell tells their stories, college by college...
...The theology requirement was reduced from four courses to three to two...
...Burtchaell is a Holy Cross priest and, although he spends less than a quarter of the book on the Catholic situation, his particular interest in it is apparent...
...In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, most of the Protestant colleges became increasingly independent of their founding churches, their presidents less likely to be ministers, more likely to see themselves exclusively as educators, educators in secular learning (theology never really had a place in these colleges or was soon sent off to seminaries and independent schools of divinity...
...BHBQBH hat is to be done...
...Morals gradually became manners and "social outreach...
...And won't most of its Catholic graduates have at best a rudimentary notion of Catholic dogma and doctrine...
...HPB^H ut what of the students...
...there is no conflict between reason and faith...
...And the Catholics...
...He wants a faculty peopled by "learned and articulate believers who [are] not only open to all truth, but possessed of advantages in approaching all truth: graced master insights, an interpretive community, and an authentic tradition...
...less and less did we pray or worship together...
...This is too coy...
...The student body at Notre Dame is roughly 80 percent Roman Catholic...
...Would this please Burtchaell...
Vol. 126 • January 1999 • No. 1
