KEEPING COLLEGES CATHOLIC: WHAT'S AT STAKE?
Greeley, Andrew M.
Andrew M. Greeley A SOCIOLOGIST'S VIEW What Catholics do well Hatholic colleges and universities (hereinafter to be referred to simply as "colleges") are in serious trouble in great part...
...Although most of the women college presidents in America were nuns (and in my experience very able administrators), the religious communities seemed to vie with one another in a race to find lay presidents, male presidents, presidents who were not Catholic...
...Rules, regulations, requirements disappeared from Catholic campuses...
...These campus events were part of a larger and a more general flight from Catholicism...
...The problem rather is the flight from Catholic content and substance which occurred in the wake of the destabilization of structures by Vatican II (and which I discussed in "The Revolutionary Event of Vatican II," Commonweal, September 11,1998...
...Andrew M. Greeley A SOCIOLOGIST'S VIEW What Catholics do well Hatholic colleges and universities (hereinafter to be referred to simply as "colleges") are in serious trouble in great part because neither their administrators nor their faculties seem to have a clear idea of what it means to be Catholic...
...The altars, as Eamon Duffy says in the title of his magisterial book about the English Reformation, were stripped—saints, stations of the cross, crucifixes, souls in purgatory, votive candles, and private devotions disappeared...
...The Catholicity of a college, I will argue, is not finally affected by requirements for theology and philosophy courses, ownership by "secularized" boards, crucifixes in the classrooms, Catholic proportion of the faculty and student body, mandates for theologians, oaths by presidents, prohibition of gay and lesbian clubs, juridical control by bishops, or any of the other issues so hotly debated today...
...indeed they often looked like Quaker meeting houses...
...The sentiment was part of the era...
...Pastors announced that their parishes were now ecumenical...
...Gregorian chant was replaced by guitar music from the Saint Louis Jesuits...
...New Catholic churches didn't "look" Catholic...
...By way of an example, a certain Catholic woman's college in that turbulent era announced that it was no longer Catholic but ecumenical...
...The school had a wondrous history of educating the first women from ethnic families to attend college...
...The Christian Family Movement informed its members that it was now an ecumenical organization...
...If it were no longer Catholic, why should parents pay the tuition for a Catholic college when an education which was also not Catholic came at a much lower cost at a state school...
...Priests and nuns showing up on secular campuses wanted to be "like everyone else...
...His most recent novel is Contact with an Angel (Saint Martin's...
...The baby was thrown out with The Reverend Andrew M. Greeley teaches sociology at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
