KEEPING COLLEGES CATHOLIC: WHAT'S AT STAKE?
Editors, The
V o £ IB U n e n e •mi a COMMONWEAL Keeping Colleges Catholic: What's at Stake? Peter Steinfels does rome have the best answer? 14 John J....
...Those who adopt the canonical requirements will forsake several distinctive features of higher education in this country—autonomy, academic freedom, and pluralism...
...In the American context, energy and enterprise can reshape human lives in ways that astonished the Old World, and perhaps still do...
...Indeed, their record in educating first-generation Americans must be unparalleled...
...All of this, mind you, in the name of maintaining the Catholic identity and character of Catholic higher education in the United States...
...The American Catholic church, as much as our political, economic, and cultural systems, took advantage of the expansionist and independent spirit of a frontier society...
...They have handed on the practice of a Catholic intellectual life, at first mostly to Catholics, and more recently to all comers, especially those who are among the least well-off in our society...
...14 John J. Piderit academic credibility 18 John C. Cavadini avoiding a rush to judgment 21 Paul C. Saunders look before you leap 24 Andrew M. Greeley what catholics do well 26 Francis W. Nichols catholic studies are here to stay 30 Introduction ¦ The Catholic church in the United States shares in one of the nation's most distinctive characteristics: the New World's sense of exceptionalism...
...Pioneering bishops, priests, sisters, and lay people helped build a vast system of Catholic institutions, of which the most remarkable is the more than two hundred colleges and universities rooted in the most far-flung rural landscapes and in the most densely populated cities...
...We do not use those words lightly...
...Today the future of these colleges and universities is gravely threatened...
...Catholic schools have sustained in the most disparate regions the presence of a Catholic intelligence...
...The details of those requirements, how and why they have come so perilously close to enactment, and their potential consequences are explored in the six articles that follow...
...These schools have been a gift both to the Catholic church and to American society...
...Next November when the bishops of the United States gather for their annual meeting, they are very likely to approve a set of canonical requirements that would irredeemably alter the character and mission of U. S. Catholic higher education, both for those schools who accept the canonical requirements and for those who demur...
...Not light reading we admit, but these essays are required reading for all who are beneficiaries of these schools and for all who care that the Catholic church in the United States remain an intellecutally engaged religious community...
...Presidents, boards of trustees, and faculties will have to choose—Catholic or Not Catholic, by the Vatican's definition...
...Those that refuse the requirements may face the anathema of a local bishop, a religious order, and the Vatican: they will be declared Not Catholic...
...That the achievement of two centuries and a twenty-year conversation about Catholic character and identity should falter or even fail at this point is not only heart-breaking, it is intolerable...
...That in itself will bring division...
...The first consequence of an affirmative vote by the bishops next fall will be dissension...
...Nor did we gather the unprecedented number of articles that follow in this special section without the deepest hope that they will cause not only our readers but the whole Catholic community to consider the consequences of what is about to happen...
...Neither history nor experience dictate the future...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
