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A “catholic” Intellectual Traditiontimothy p. muldoon

The desire which motivatedmedieval religious communi-ties to found the first universi-

ties was rooted in a basic confidenceabout the knowableness of reality, atrust that all things to be known founda unifying principle in the belief thatGod created them. Some—ThomasAquinas most notably—carried thisconfidence enough to engage eventhe intellectual work of Jewish andMuslim thinkers.

It is this sense of confidence aboutreality that has animated Catholicintellectual life at its best. Today,however, some question the possi-bility and relevance of an intellec-tual tradition that calls itself Catholic.It was during the modern periodthat the Middle Ages were called“Dark,” precisely because modernsjudged religious belief to be unsci-entific and therefore inconsistentwith the methods of rational inquiry.If one cannot prove God or any ofthe doctrines about God, how coulda Catholic intellectual tradition beanything more than a myopic pre-modern world view?

There is an inherent paradox in theterm “Catholic” when used to describean intellectual tradition. On the onehand, it is a specific term used to makereference to a specific community ofpeople. Ignatius of Antioch was thefirst to use the term around 110, todescribe the nascent Christian com-munity: “Wheresoever the bishopshall appear, there let the people be,even as where Jesus may be, there isthe universal [katholike] Church.” Onthe other hand, Ignatius sought, as doCatholics today, to describe the Churchin a way that reflects the universal the-ological import of Jesus’ commission

to the disciples: “go, therefore, andmake disciples of all nations” (Matthew28:18). The Catholic Church seeks tobe a catholic community—that is, acommunity spread throughout theworld, sharing what Jesus taught forthe welfare of all people.

Today it is common to use the term“Catholic” in the former, specific sense,as a reference to a particular commu-nity and its history. To be sure, in aworld in which only one of every sixpeople is Catholic, and in which an-other one of every six is a member ofa Christian community which is not incommunion with the Catholic Church,it seems presumptuous to suggest thatthe hallmark of the Catholic Churchis universality. Yet the peculiarly theo-logical import of catholicity is that itsuggests a kind of reaching for univer-sality. Using the image of yeast, WalterOng suggests in his essay (beginningon p. 10) that the Church is “a lim-itless, growing reality, destined ulti-mately to be present everywhere andto affect everything, though by nomeans to convert everything intoitself.” The catholicity of the think-ing Church is not to be found in anattempt to colonize human reason,but rather in a desire to know whatis true. It was this desire which ani-mated the original university com-munities, and it is this desire whichcan re-animate intellectual life today.

In this issue of C21 Resources, wehave brought together essays whichexplore dimensions of the Catholicintellectual tradition as a resource forboth the Church and the world. Thereare four essays (by Margaret Steinfels,Sidney Callahan, Robert Imbelli, andWalter Ong) that address the traditionas a whole. Further, the essays by JohnHaughey, Alan Wolfe, Michael Himes,Alasdair McIntyre, J. Michael Miller,

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and Stephen A. Pope focus morespecifically on the college and uni-versity context which nurtures thistradition. Finally, the essays by MaryAnn Glendon, George Coyne, andGreg Kalscheur offer specific exam-ples of how the Catholic intellectualtradition has informed our understand-

ing today in the areas of humanrights, the origins of the universe,and democratic political life. Inter-spersed throughout these essays areshorter reflections from a number ofthinkers, including faculty membersat Boston College.

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by margaret steinfels

Catholic intellectual life is cen-tral to Catholic identity. It isfundamental to the life of the

church, big C and little c, cathedraland congregation—to its continuedvitality and to the Church’s missionsin this culture. This is not a narrowecclesiastical tradition, but a broadand infinitely useful one. Commonwealhas fostered and questioned that tradi-tion. Our writers and readers reflectthat affection and that criticism. Theyare university people and journalists,book editors, lawyers, physicians,scientists, politicians; they are bish-ops, clergy, and ordinary Catholics,who in their daily lives practice anddepend upon the kind of thinking,reasoning, reflection that make up theCatholic intellectual tradition. Further-more, this tradition is also exploredand appreciated by writers and read-ers who are Methodists, Episcopalians,Orthodox as well as Catholics, and notonly Christians—Jews, secular human-ists, those lapsed from every religionknown to humankind.

This tradition is carried on, pur-sued, criticized, developed, wrestledwith by example from many differentbackgrounds. The way they think andwrite, read, and reflect very frequentlyrests on their education in AmericanCatholic colleges and universities. Soalong with the preservation of knowl-edge, the scholarly work of retrieval,the building up of bodies of knowledge,and the education of the young, yourschools are central to the practice ofthe Catholic intellectual life. Collegesand universities cannot claim to beCatholic if this tradition is not part ofits core understanding; this traditioncannot survive if Catholic colleges anduniversities do not renew it, maintainit, nourish it, support it, and pass it on.

In the last several decades, Catholi-cism in the United States has becomemore charismatic, more Pentecostal,more experiential, open to both oldand new currents of spirituality andmeditation; it absorbs individualisticand congregational attitudes fromAmerican religion generally. ButCatholicism is also and always hasbeen a church with a brain, with amind. So as important as these new

manifestations may be, it is essentialto the Church, to its mission in theworld, to the lives of ordinary people,that there be a vigorous and Catholicintellectual life. And Commonwealcan’t do everything!

Of course, the Catholic identity ofCatholic colleges and universities canhave many expressions: honoring thefounding mothers and fathers; worshipand prayer; service projects; works ofsocial justice like basketball and foot-ball; campus ministry; statues, medal-lions, and endowed lectureships; thework of notable alum and prestigiousfaculty. But all of this would be a thin

facade if it did not include at its core aliving experience among students andfaculty of Catholic intellectual life.

Yes, carrying on this tradition isan enormous challenge. You have toovercome bigotry and bias, includingespecially the prejudices Catholicsthemselves have against their own tra-dition. A Catholic intellectual is notan oxymoron. You do not have to be a Jesuit to be a Catholic intellectual.Yes, Catholicism and Catholic ideashave a checkered history. What insti-tution, tradition, idea does not? FromPlato to Foucault, from nominalism todeconstructionism, if human ideas haveconsequences, we can be sure some ofthem are bad. We have our fair share.

Many people, perhaps some of you,consider that the Catholic intellectualtradition is singular in its intellectualrepression and oppression, its narrow-

ness and dogmatism. Well, I say goread a history book! Some of you maybe skeptical that the adjective Catholicadds anything to an institution or dis-cipline except the judicial authority ofecclesiastical officials. I disagree. For2,000 years, Christians have struggledin multifarious ways with everythingfrom body and soul to kingship andregicide, from usury to voluntary pov-erty, and today still struggle with every-thing from medical decision makingto political theory, from child care tospiritual counsel, from race to gender.It is this tradition that pressed throughthe centuries—and reminds us in theGulf War, in Bosnia—the idea of civil-ian immunity. The distinction betweenordinary and extraordinary care of thesick and the dying remains a viable onebecause this tradition teaches it.

It is a deep and rich tradition; it is atradition worthy of our attention andstudy. If this tradition does not have aplace in Catholic colleges and universi-ties, what is that you are doing? Whattradition has a better claim?

All thinkers and thinking are basedin some tradition. A tradition is not abrowned and dried-up certificate ofdeposit in the bank of knowledge, but a locus for questioning, a frameworkfor ordering inquiry, a standard for pre-ferring some sets of ideas over others;tradition is the record of a community’sconversation over time about its mean-ing and direction. A living tradition is a tradition that can raise questionsabout itself.

What am I talking about? Let me atleast sketch what I think the Catholicintellectual tradition looks like.

“The joy and hope, the grief andanguish of the women and men of ourtime, especially those who are poor orafflicted in any way, are the joy andhope, the grief and anguish of the fol-lowers of Christ as well. Nothingthat is genuinely human fails to findan echo in their hearts....Christianscherish a feeling of deep solidaritywith the human race and its history.’’

That opening paragraph fromGaudium et Spes speaks of our respon-sibility for all that is genuinely human,for what draws the minds and hearts

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The Catholic Intellectual TraditionC21 Resources

editor

Timothy P. Muldoon

Director, The Church in the

21st Century Center

advisory board

J.A. Appleyard

Jonas Barciauskas

Ben Birnbaum

Robert Imbelli

Gregory A. Kalscheur

Nancy Pineda-Madrid

Barbara Radtke

designer

Progressive Print Solutions

C21 Resources is published by theChurch in the 21st Century Centerat Boston College, in partnership withthe publications from which thesearticles have been selected. C21 Re-sources is a compilation of the bestanalyses and essays on key challengesfacing the Church today. They arepublished with the intent of stimulatingdiscussion and thought among bishops,priests, deacons, religious, and laymembers of the Catholic community.

Keep track of lectures, paneldiscussions, and all events

sponsored by TheChurch in the 21st Century

Center at our Web sitewww.bc.edu/church21

Tradition is the recordof a community’s conversation over

time about its meaningand direction. A livingtradition is a tradition

that can raise questionsabout itself.

scholar acknowledges them. There arevirtually no value-free facts, from theconstruction of public opinion polls todescriptions of brain synapses or histo-ries of the decision to drop the bombon Hiroshima. The Catholic traditionreminds us that the fact/value distinc-tion is practically a nil one, althoughour tradition is tempted sometimes tothink there can be fact-free values.

Nonetheless, in our tradition epis-temology and ethics are always inter-related. So, for example, the notionthat education can be a value-neutralprocess in which teachers simply conveyfacts and the students simply receivethem, in which behavior is neitherright nor wrong but a matter of per-sonal choice, in which judgments areneither better nor worse but simplysomeone’s opinion, is nonsense, as thecondition of so many schools grimlyillustrates. This same analysis could beapplied to psychotherapy, opinion poll-ing, political analyses, medical decisionmaking, etc.

This brings me to a fourth and lastpoint: It is a characteristic of our tra-dition, at its best, to resist reduc-tionism; it does not collapse categories.Faith and reason are compatible butnot equivalent. Our tradition rejectsfundamentalistic readings of Scripture;the human person is neither radicallyindividualistic nor socially determined.Empirical findings are not solely de-terminative of who we are and what wedo. Yes, absolutely: Findings in psy-chology, sociology, anthropology,history, neurobiology enrich our under-standing of the human person and thehuman project, but they do not exhaustthat meaning or determine that trajec-tory. We are neurons and neuroses, butnot only neurons and neuroses; neitherDNA or TGIF fully determine who weare or what we will do this weekend.There is space for grace and free will,thought, conscience, choice.

Time flies, and the list goes on:Symbolism is taken seriously; so is ana-logical reasoning; images provide uswith alternative ways of knowing. Allof these are implanted in minds andhearts by our sacramental and liturgicalpractices. Our tradition takes mysti-cism seriously, so we know that ordi-nary everyday consciousness is not thelast word about reality. The practice ofcaring for the poor and thinking aboutcaring for them shapes political philos-ophy and social theory. The struggle

everywhere to link faith and cultureblesses us with an abundance of fictionalworlds from Shusaku Endo’s DeepRiver to Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna.

To sum up: Yes, these characteristicscan be found in other traditions. Yes,the Catholic tradition has been untrueto them at times or embraced themonly kicking and screaming; but finallythey have been embraced because ourtradition becomes part of the culturein which it finds itself—it must becomepart of the culture intellectually as inall other ways. Why? Because of its mis-sion to transform the world, as weread in Gaudium et Spes (No. 40): Thechurch, a visible organization and aspiritual community, “travels the samejourney as all humankind and sharesthe same earthly lot with the world; itis to be a leaven and, as it were, thesoul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into thefamily of God.”

Today in our culture, where thecommodification of human life, hu-man relationships, body parts goeson everywhere, that engagement, thatmission, means keeping the humanperson at the center of our inquiry.The human person must be seen in his or her social context, where an implicit and shared understanding ofthe good can be found and expressed.

All of this is deeply congruent witha religious tradition that is incarna-tional and sacramental, that keepsbefore us the idea of a God who actsin history on our behalf, a God whosent Jesus, who lived among us, whotaught, who died for us, who rose fromthe dead and is present in the eucha-rist. We are to love the Lord and loveone another as he has loved us.

And there’s the rub and that’s thechallenge. Catholic higher education,Catholic identity, Catholic intellec-tual life, the Catholic Church and itswork in the world must finally be thework of a community of believers. Inour culture that is a suspect category,nowhere more so than in the university.

Margaret Steinfels is the past editor of Commonweal, and currently serves asco-director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Reprinted with permission from Origins: CNS Documentary Service, August 24, 1994.

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of women and men. The Catholicintellectual tradition is universal inits breadth and its interests, that is a notion set forth, defended, repeated,and encouraged throughout the Pas-toral Constitution on the Church inthe Modern World.

I quote the quote because there is an odd nostalgia for somethinglike Neo-Scholasticism, if not Neo-Scholasticism itself—nostalgia for a framework that provided the highlevel of integration said to have been the guiding light of preconciliarCatholicism. From my post at Com-monweal, I am inclined to think that we are a long way from holding oreven recovering, at least with anyintegrity, that kind of framework. Ina postpositivist, post-Enlightenmentworld, no body of human knowledgeenjoys that degree of authority.

But if we do not have such an inte-grated system, we do have ideas, habitsof mind and heart, we have preferencesand predilections, intuitions, and prac-tices. We have a history. As Gaudium etSpes says, our tradition is not set againstthe world. But neither is it naively ac-cepting of every current of opinion thatwashes up on the shores of a pluralisticculture. It helps us to maintain a robustand refreshing level of skepticism. Whatdo I find of value? A tradition wherereason and discourse based on reasonare honored and practiced.

Let me describe just a few of itscharacteristics.

First, reason and faith are notantagonistic or unconnected. In theCatholic tradition we do not acceptwhat we believe blindly or slavishly—we are urged to think about and tounderstand what we believe. This is insome contrast to the society in whichwe live. American culture, with itsProtestant history, tends to see religionas an expression of the individual, thesubjective, the emotional, the immedi-ate. In public life, religion and religiousbelief are confined to the realm of theprivate and personal, sometimes in anabsolutist reading of the First Amend-ment, sometimes with the prejudicethat religious thought has nothing tocontribute. For the revivalist, faith is a personal and private encounter. Formany in the cultural elite, as StephenCarter argued in The Culture of Disbe-lief, faith is understood as a curiousavocation, a personal hobby.

It is a loss to the whole society whenany religious group accepts that role.In contrast, Catholics—the bishops,but many Catholic politicians and citi-zens as well—have often brought aphilosophical and linguistic sophisti-cation to public policy issues. If, forexample, laws that would permit eu-thanasia and assisted suicide are keptat bay in the United States, it will bebecause the bishops, Catholic institu-tions, nurses, doctors, lawyers, ordinarycitizens, have been willing to expresstheir deeply held beliefs, religious andphilosophical, in a reasoned discoursethat can build consensus across thewhole society.

A second and closely related char-acteristic: Catholics have a traditionthat takes philosophy and philosophi-cal thinking seriously. This means thatfrom the beginning, Christianity hadto adapt systems of thought that werealien and even contrary to its religiousbeliefs and yet were crucial to its mis-sion: that is, rendering its knowledgeof God’s presence and action in theworld in a way that would make senseto others.

We don’t usually think of Paul ofTarsus as a philosopher, but there hewas in the agora debating Epicureansand Stoics, and in front of the Areopa-gus explaining the heretofore unknownGod. Nor did it stop there. Eusebius,Bede, Augustine, Ambrose, Anselm,Thomas, Catherine, Teresa, etc., rightdown to our own time: AmericanCatholic colleges and universities inthe years after World War II were oftenthe home to diverse philosophicalschools—phenomenology, existential-ism, Hegelianism, liberalism, pragma-tism, and Thomism—at a time whensecular schools prided themselves ona univocal voice in their philosophydepartments. The sometimes imperfecthospitality in our tradition expresses theconviction that a disciplined mind andsystematic thought can help discernimportant things about what is real.

A third characteristic: Our traditionchallenges the belief that facts come in pristine form—no baggage; no as-sumptions, no preconditions, no ends,no language that fills it with meaning.Our culture likes to treat facts as a given,as autonomous, unadorned objectiverealities; but a fact is an abstractionfrom something thicker and deepercontaining implicit ends, whether ornot the researcher, commentator, or

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Bridging the gaps between cultures,bringing news of the currents in asociety to its members are importantactivities. While intellectuals havecome in for a lot of scorn and con-tempt over the course of history, espe-cially in America, they are nowheremore hated and persecuted than intotalitarian regimes. Intellectuals andthe intellectual life seek just that gen-eral level of applied truth and rele-vant meaning that can question thestatus quo and all its operations. De-tailed analyses are by nature too spe-cific to cause trouble. No matter howmany papers Freud published in thescholarly medical journals, he couldnever have changed the map of themodem world but for his masterlyprose and large syntheses of ideas.

In the current organization of workand professional life, narrow special-ization and enormous expenditures oftime are required and rewarded. Alongwith the competitive crowding therehas been an information explosion.Everywhere we see a marked increasein the complexity and specializationof jobs so that the ordinary workload,in both the hours required and theimposed pace of work, is heavier thanbefore. In academia and other profes-sions, we see for the first time in his-tory an affluent educated elite whofollow slave-labor schedules and en-dure increasing stress from competi-tion and overwork. These conditionsare legitimated by a cult of productiv-ity and ambition, and are imposedupon all aspiring candidates, who, in atight labor market, have been fairlydesperate to succeed.

Typically, in academia, requirementsfor publication, teaching, research, andservice are simultaneously increasedand enforced by financially pressuredinstitutions. Only highly specializedresearch published in scholarly refer-eed journals will count toward moreand more exacting standards forpromotion and tenure decisions. The resulting pressure for turning out scholarly publications means that mostintellectual energy is directed towardhighly focused projects, which only asmall group of other scholars can readwith profit.

With the increase of educated per-

sons in larger and larger corporations,professions, and educational institu-tions, we find a proliferation of worldswithin worlds. There is more andmore specialization as size, dispersal,and relocations of educated popula-tions transform social groupings.There are more and more publications,but they are increasingly targeted forprofessional, scholarly, or recreationalreading. Fewer general journals andmagazines exist in which serious intel-lectual ideas can be publicly discussed.Politics as the common serious concernof all public citizens has become dis-credited by rampant corruption, polit-ical scandals, and recent campaignsdesigned for the media. The growthof television has made serious inroadson the written forms of communica-tion. A great deal of general intellectu-al writing used to convey general ideasof importance to a similarly educatedpopulation, who shared common cul-tural concerns despite their differentoccupations, and who had enoughleisure to converse.

Leisure has disappeared from Amer-ican society. Since leisure is the basisof culture and one of the cornerstonesof the intellectual life, we suffer cul-tural deprivation in the midst of mate-rial plenty. Even if there were morecommon forums and publications,would the harassed, overworked massesof educated Americans have time toread and reflect on them? It takes psy-chological energy to think and focusattention; it is tempting to skip thoseexpenditures of energy that are notimmediately necessary for survival—those things that are not “in my field.”Only fairly leisured persons can par-take of the high form of cultural playthat makes up the intellectual life.Our educated classes are working ex-tremely hard at work—and workingequally hard at home.

Family life has changed. Servantshave disappeared, the extended familyis no longer a practical support, andwomen have gone to work and maypursue their own demanding careers.The leisure that Oxford dons onceenjoyed was built upon the backs of various submerged and exploitedpopulations—the servant classes, thetoiling natives of the Empire, andwomen. Women, even educated,

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Getting Our Heads Together

thomas aquinas:

It was necessary for human salvation that there should be a knowledgerevealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason.

From Summa Theologica I, 1.11

This doctrine is wisdom above all human wisdom; not merely in anyone order, but absolutely. For since it is the part of a wise person toarrange and to judge, and since lesser matters should be judged in thelight of some higher principle, one is said to be wise in any one orderwho considers the highest principle in that order: thus in the order ofbuilding, the one who plans the form of the house is called wise andarchitect, in opposition to the inferior laborers who trim the wood andmake ready the stones: “As a wise architect, I have laid the foundation”.

From Summa Theologica I, 1.6

by sidney callahan

Today there exists very littleactivity that can be describedwith the exclusive term

“American Catholic intellectual life.”Educated Catholics have been assimi-lated into the larger culture and nowfind themselves subject to the samegeneral social conditions that mili-tate against all varieties of intellectuallife in this country. Within the Catholiccommunity there are other forces thatfurther impede intellectual dialogue.Our present situation, in my view,represents a decline from the levelof recent previous decades. But merenostalgia will not restore the intellec-tual and spiritual liveliness of a sim-pler time, with its clear-cut verities. IfCatholics are to fashion new creativestrategies, we must first come to termswith current social realities.

When I use the term “intellectuallife,” I mean something broader thannarrowly focused academic scholar-ship, or highly specialized scientificwork, or the current state of educationin colleges and universities. Intellec-tual life arises from the broad-rangingactivity of reading, discussing, andresponding to ideas and argumentsdevoted to the meaning of events, theinterpretation of human experience.Intellectuals, as opposed to purescholars, pure scientists, practicingprofessionals, or social activists, are engaged in reflective cognitivewrestling with contrasting ideas,current controversies, and opposingworld views.

Intellectuals may also be scholars,professionals, artists, or activists, butwhen operating as intellectuals theyare constructing and reconstructingtheir culture’s paradigms or culturalmaps. Within a society, the intellectu-als are those thinkers making themaps and discussing the proper rulesfor making maps, rather than the pe-ople doing the detailed specializeddrawings emerging in the research oflab, library, or the field. Intellectualsare neither purely scholars nor purelyhands-on activists. Rather than en-gage in hand-to-hand combat at thebarricades, or in the courtroom, orin the missions, intellectuals shapethe course of activism and give gen-eral directions to the professions; theyare one step removed from the battle,reflecting on the whys and whereforesof the war.

As the intelligence service ofsociety, intellectuals have to be gen-eralists geared to taking a largerperspective, constantly scanning thetheoretical weather, the changing ter-rain, and the movements of differentbodies of troops. In other words, in-tellectuals have to be able to raisetheir heads from their own narrowlyfocused projects (and from their owncareers) and think critically aboutwhat they see. The writers amongthem then persuasively communicateideas to others in nontechnical lan-guage that everyone can understand,i.e., English. English is the linguafranca of the interdisciplinary intel-lectual life, bridging the jargon of thetwo-and-twenty cultures of the day.

privileged women, have always donethe “shadow work” of family, house-hold, and culture, the maintenancework that made intellectual leisurepossible for an elite group of males.

Among lay Catholics who becameeducated in large numbers after WorldWar II, the sense of vocation or callingonce limited to the religious orderswas taken up with enthusiasm. Manymen did not feel called to be priestsbut were eager to be professors. Agreat deal of idealism was felt bythose laypersons called to intellectualwork: One studies and seeks truth forthe greater glory of God; one writesand teaches and professes to furtherthe Kingdom, out there in the univer-sity and the real world, rather than inthe monastery.

In that first flowering in the fortiesand fifties it would be appropriate tospeak of the American Catholic intel-lectual community as fairly cohesiveand homogeneous. It was a very smallgroup, its liberal wing sometimeslabeled “Commonweal Catholics.” Inthose days, the relatively small numberof educated Catholics who were en-gaged in an intellectual life would allknow one another, read one another’sbooks and articles, and share a com-mon faith and education. Insight intothe spirit of this earlier era can be hadby reading Wilfrid Sheed’s account ofhis parents, Frank and Maisie.

Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward werea force unto themselves, who throughpublishing and frenetic lecturing sin-gle-handedly engendered much of pre-Vatican II intellectual life in CatholicAmerica. They also lived their faith inan exemplary style, as did other influ-ential Catholic writers such as DorothyDay. Other memoirs of those yearsamong Catholic intellectuals can befound in the writings of Raissa Mari-tain, Abigail McCarthy, ChristopherDawson, and Richard Oilman. Promi-nent intellectual converts were receivedinto the Church, and when theybecame Catholics they joined a well-defined faith, clearly demarcated,with its own distinct intellectual com-munity. There were various circlesand centers, and various publicationventures in the East and Midwest,Fordham, Georgetown, Chicago, St.John’s, Notre Dame, Boston. EducatedCatholics gathered in enclaves tostudy and discuss their faith; theywere trying to integrate their faith

with the intellectual currents of theday. Much energy was also spent onmatters of internal church reformand liturgical renewal—an endeavorwhich was confirmed by the callingof Vatican II and its surprisinglydramatic unfolding.

Such gatherings of Catholic intel-lectuals for study and mutual supportwere necessary because in general theintellectual and professional worlds ofthe time were fairly hostile to Catholics.Persecution, as it always does, engen-dered high morale, cohesion, and loy-alty among those who did not fall awayunder the pressure. The forties andfifties were times in academia whendoctrinaire secular atheism inheritedfrom the Enlightenment reigned su-preme. All religion was a remnant ofsuperstition and Catholicism was thevery worst of all. As one secular savantaccurately noted, “anti-Catholicism wasthe anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”

The crudest misunderstandings andantipathies could be encountered in IvyLeague establishment circles, whosemembers were rigid in their own cer-tainties that either Freud, or DavidHume, or science had settled theGod question forever. The ecumenicalmovement was also in its infancy, soCatholics were subjected to suspicion,bias, and subtle pressures from theirProtestant neighbors, as well as fromthe secular world. The prejudice andscorn that Catholics could meet, say inthe Harvard philosophy department,would seem quaint today.

During this period, many educated,married Catholics were also unassimi-lated to the mainstream in their sexualmanners and mores. They were notonly attempting to live new forms of the ancient intellectual vocations(Dominican, Jesuit), but also to prac-tice distinctive spiritual ideals in theirfamily lives. Here again there was anattempt to integrate the influence of theCatholic Worker movement’s stress on

providence and poverty (Franciscan)with the liturgical movement’s revival(Benedictine). Many intellectualCatholics were attempting to live bya radically different sexual ethic, sansartificial birth control, aspiring to idealsof love and sacrifice through havinglarge families. Women were exhortedto live out a particular ideal of thevaliant woman, which could not easilyencompass career aspirations. The banon artificial contraception producedintense pressures among educatedCatholics, caught in contradictoryaspirations—the solitude of the studyversus the active labor of domesticity.

Looking back on that period inAmerican Catholic intellectual life, Ican see that the atmosphere of thecommunity was charged with a greatdeal of sublimated erotic energy. AllanBloom mentions that the sexual re-straints of an earlier generation of stu-dents lent a romantic or erotic edge

to higher education that heightened the life of learning. I found this pointintriguing, because I think there was anerotic intensity informing the atmo-sphere of postwar educated Catholiclife. A heightened existential erotic styleof faith was idealized: it could be foundin Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisitedand Graham Greene novels, and stillcan be seen today in Walker Percy’swritings or John Paul II’s discourses onlove and sex. Catholics were clearly dif-ferent from others in their faith, intheir thinking, and in their chastity,sexual practices and commitments.

When all went well with these first-or second-generation of educated layCatholic intellectuals, things wentvery well indeed. The commitmentand integration of living a vocationto the intellectual life that combinedabstract thought with intense liturgi-cal practice, with erotic energy andintense family commitments—in themidst of social persecutions—producedan esprit de corps and an exciting sense

of bonded community. DorothyDay’s work, along with that of theworker priests and Young ChristianWorkers, had been influential in per-suading Catholic intellectuals thatthey must be committed to social jus-tice and live a simple life devoted tosacrifice and love. Intellectual Catholicsknew who they were, and what theywere about. Their vocation was tofight the good fight, seek truth, andpersevere in social reform efforts in-side and outside the Catholic Church.They could talk and argue with oneanother, but stayed united in order togain support for the struggle with asometimes hostile world. Literature,philosophy, and above all politics wereconsidered fertile fields for combiningreligious commitment and intellectualwork. Passion and ideology were united.

What can be done now? Perhaps atwo-pronged effort could be envisioned.One is a decentered, self-reliant, do-it-yourself, till-your-own-gardens strategy.At the same time, a larger campaignmight be mounted to move Catholicinstitutions toward different goals thatwould address the cultural problems of overload, over-specialization, under-formation, and isolation of so manyeducated Catholics. A combinationof a bottom-up, base-community ap-proach and a top-down, institutionaltactic might make some headway.

I know less about the larger insti-tutional approaches but I can at leastimagine what might be done from whatI have observed of creative efforts atsome Catholic colleges and archdioce-san programs. Catholic colleges mightstart to fight back against the overspe-cialization of academia by startinginterdisciplinary institutes and morepublic programs devoted to topicswhich meet the problems of Catholicsin secular culture. Many programs I have attended—for instance on thefamily, on death and dying, on aging, oncomputer technologies, or the chang-ing church—have brought in Catholicprofessionals from the local communityto meet with the students, faculty, aguest speaker.

Such interdisciplinary intellectualendeavors have often been funded bygrants from outside the institutions,such as the state councils on the hu-manities or corporations. These effortshave also often been the brainchild ofsome creative retired religious sisteron the faculty who no longer has to

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The crying need of educated Catholics is forsustained intellectual grappling with the

challenge of integrating Christianity with theirwork and their worlds of secular thinking.

Continued on Page 6

and thereby ensure a future readership.

Many have noted that the secularliberal establishment is crumbling in its old certainties. What has beencalled liberalism’s “thin theory of thegood” is breaking down. Catholicism,with its avowal of a more communi-tarian social justice ethic and its full-bodied view of human nature, hassomething to offer tired blood andanemic individualism. This may be “the truly Catholic moment” inAmerica. Or perhaps we should saythe time is ripe for many differentCatholic moments, since the intellectu-als in the church, being argumentative,are not speaking with one party line.But the larger culture may be ready tolisten to diverse streams of the Catholictradition in new ways. Our intellectualtask is to work harder at understandinghow the good news we offer relates toother quests for knowledge. All wewant in the end, of course, is to enlistthe hearts and minds of all humanityin a mutual seeking of love, peace, jus-tice, and truth. Americans are bornutopians: The impossible only takesa little longer.

Sidney Callahan held the Paul J. McKeeverChair of Moral Theology, St. John's University,Queens, NY in 2002-2003 and she was a Profes-sor of Psychology at Mercy College from 1980-1997.

Reprinted with permission of the publishers fromCommonweal, 17 November 1989.

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fight for tenure with constant publish-ing to update her curriculum vitae. IfCatholic educational institutions trulywant to encourage the intellectual lifeas a search for integrated truth, theywill have to provide institutional sup-ports and rewards that can competewith the rewards offered by academicgrants for narrow specialization andvalue-free inquiry.

If other institutions in the Churchwish to further the intellectual life,the world of Catholic adult educationawaits. Individual parishes may nothave the resources to go it alone, butdioceses, seminaries, centers for spiri-tuality, retreat houses, and other insti-tutes and organizations can provideprograms to stimulate the intellectuallife. These would have to be broaderthan courses in Scripture or theology,or studies of the mystics, spirituality,and prayer. The present great revivalof spirituality, complete with institutesand publications devoted to spiritual

practices, presents a model for an in-tellectual revival. Spiritual institutesand retreats teach centering prayerand integration of self. But today’sCatholics also need centered, inte-grated thinking. The crying need ofeducated Catholics is for sustained in-tellectual grappling with the challengeof integrating Christianity with theirwork and their worlds of secular think-ing. Perhaps a national Catholic greatbooks course or a university of the airas in Great Britain could spark such amovement. Perhaps the USCCB, or the Paulists, or the Jesuits, or even theKnights and Daughters might fund aprime-time Bill Moyers-type series ofintellectual Catholic conversations onTV to begin the great revival. A proj-ect looking to intellectual renaissancecould be sponsored in cooperationwith Catholic educational institutionsand Catholic magazines. Every intel-lectual Catholic magazine should beworking to get its networks of readerstogether for more sustained inquiry—

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Getting Our Heads Together

by rosanna f. demarco

At the center of my education as a graduate student at BostonCollege and now as a faculty

member in the Connell School of Nurs-ing is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.I characterize a Catholic intellectual tradition as rigorous scholarship basedin 1) a reflective spirit of inquiry, 2) ethi-cal values, and 3) knowledge developedand shared with my students so they maycontinue a circle of engaged service toothers. My clinical specialty is commu-nity/public health nursing science. Bythe nature of this concentration it is veryeasy for me to contemplate and reflecton persons’ lives in their neighborhoodsand how their living and wellness inter-sects with dreams and realities. It is herewhere I work with women living withHIV and AIDS. Many of the women Ihave come to know live in the inner cityof Boston. They are poor and have hadlives that have empowered and dis-empowered them and their familiescyclically. I have learned that creatingculturally relevant and gender sensitiveprevention education, measuring itsefficacy, and engaging my students inservice through this process is the wayto translate these women’s voices intohealth interventions that are meaningful.My research questions, the conduct ofthe process, and the answers I find arethe ways I can encourage and excitenursing students in class and clinical set-tings to not just care for individuals butto strive for something more profound:the common good. It is precisely thisnotion of the common good that Ibelieve is how learning from a neighbor-hood can help us shape a neighborhoodand our own lives. It is here I hope mystudents lay cornerstones of what I seeas the evolving Catholic IntellectualTraditions to come in nursing science.

Rosanna F. DeMarco is an Associate Professor inthe Connell School of Nursing at Boston College.

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What Is the CatholicIntellectual Tradition?

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God hasplaced in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and lovingGod, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

In both East and West, we may trace a journey which has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truthmore and more deeply. It is a journey which has unfolded—as it must—within the horizon of personal self-conscious-ness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with thequestion of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing. This is why all that is theobject of our knowledge becomes a part of our life. The admonition “Know yourself” was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart fromthe rest of creation as “human beings,” that is as those who “know themselves.”

Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their differentcultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have Icome from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? These are the questions which wefind in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius andLao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies ofEuripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which havetheir common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer givento these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives.

The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, throughthe Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrimway along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6). It is her duty to serve humanity in different ways, but one way in particular imposes a responsibility of a quite special kind: the diakonia service of the truth. This mission on the one hand makes the believing community a partner inhumanity’s shared struggle to arrive at truth; and on the other hand it obliges the believing community to proclaim thecertitudes arrived at, albeit with a sense that every truth attained is but a step towards that fullness of truth which willappear with the final Revelation of God: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part;then I shall understand fully” (1 Cor 13:12).

pope john paul ii, from the encyclical faith and reason (1998)

Continued from Page 5

by robert p. imbelli

The rubric under which thisevening’s presentation isplaced is “Stewards of the

Tradition.” My own contribution willbe to focus our attention upon what I consider to be the very heart and center of the Catholic intellectual (or,as I prefer, “wisdom”) tradition: theLord Jesus Christ himself. My presen-tation will be in three parts. First, I will consider the notion of traditionand defend the claim that Jesus Christis indeed the living center of the tradi-tion. Second, I will suggest that the“crisis” of the Catholic intellectualtradition is, at its most profound, aChristological crisis. Third, I will haz-ard some suggestions regarding thecontext of the Catholic college anduniversity and the challenge of reaf-firming the Christic center. Because of limitations of time, all this will bedone briefly, but, I hope, in a way sug-gestive of further development.

The Christic Center of Tradition

In considering “tradition,” I find ithelpful to distinguish three intercon-nected senses of the word. Prior toVatican II when Catholics spoke of“tradition” they most commonly in-tended the tradita: those things thathad been handed down, whether Scrip-ture, creeds, or catechetical formula-tions. These tradita, often referredto as the “deposit of faith,” were pre-sumed to be the venerable Latin ofthe Triedentine Mass and the texts ofDenzinger.

A second sense of “tradition,” comenewly to the fore since Vatican II, isthat of traditio. Here, tradition indicatesless what has been handed down thanthe very process of handing down, of“traditioning” (as is sometimes said):the ongoing interpretation and reinter-pretation of the past into the present.Here the center of concern is thepresent and the future; and one oftenencounters the language of “accom-modation” and “inculturation.”

But I would suggest a third sense oftradition, less frequently invoked, yetfoundational to the previous legitimate

uses. I refer to this by the Latin desig-nation, Traditus. Here, tradition is theOne who is handed down, Jesus Christhimself as the living heart and centerof Christian tradition. Thus when wespeak of “Stewards of the Tradition,”at its theologically most profound levelwe are speaking of our institutions andourselves as bearers of the multipleriches of the mystery of Christ.

Now this Catholic wisdom tradi-tion, in all three senses, but especiallythe third, comes to privileged expres-sion in the Eucharistic liturgy. Here,the Real Presence of Christ is pro-claimed and enacted. I concur, then,with authors like Ida and Kavanaughand Catherine LaCugna who speak of liturgy as theologia prima, the liv-ing theology which nourishes andsustains our second order reflection.Liturgy is the primary bearer of tra-dition, because here, in sacramentalfullness, Jesus “hands himself over” for the life of the world.

The Crisis of Tradition

With such testimony by distin-guished witnesses, it would seem thatthe tradition’s center is secure. Yet, ifthe Catholic mind or intellectual tradi-tion is in a state of acute crisis today, Iwould suggest that a key dimension ofthat crisis is the loss of a robust Christiccenter. Obviously, here too I can onlysignal some signs of the times pointingto what I discern to be a Christologicalamnesia and neglect in some quartersof contemporary Catholicism.

For a number of years now, I havenoted in theological writings, bothscholarly and popular, what I call a“unitarianism of the Spirit.”As theterm implies, these authors tend tospeak almost uniquely of God in termsof “Holy Spirit,” neglecting the tradi-tional language of “Father” and “Son.”Sometimes this development is fueled

by a misguided ecumenism that seeksnot to cause offense. But its outcome is the invocation of a “generic brands”deity that only exists in an abstractrealm, uninhabited by any living tradi-tion. Have we not unfortunately heardsuch anodyne invocations in facultyconvocations and commencementseven in Catholic colleges?1

Moreover, do not such vague andnondescript generalizations seep alltoo readily into our attempts to artic-ulate the vision and mission of ourinstitutions of higher education? So,to choose an example with which Iam most familiar, one hears repeated,in almost mantra-like fashion, that theaim of education in the Jesuit traditionis “to educate men and women forothers.” Undoubtedly, an admirablesentiment; but one not at all distinc-tive to Jesuit colleges and universities.Indeed, its incantation risks carrying an undertone of smugness regardingother institutions’ purposes.

Now the phrase “men and womenfor others” is culled from an addressby the then-Father General of theSociety of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe. What I find intriguing is that even in officialdigests of his talk one rarely finds thefull expression of Arrupe’s thought onthe matter. Here is the key sentence:“Today our prime educational objec-tive must be to form men and womenfor others; men and women who willnot live for themselves but for Godand his Christ—for the God man wholived and died for all the world...”2

There is a striking Christocentrism toArrupe’s vision that is faithful to theIgnatian tradition and that one sorelymisses in the reductionist and abbrevi-ated versions too often transmitted.

Finally, when pressed to characterizewhat is distinctive about the Catholicvision and the Catholic intellectual tradition, one frequently encounters

appeals to terms such as “sacramentalconsciousness” and “incarnational sen-sibility” (more often than not accom-panied by a well-known line from theJesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,“The world is charged with thegrandeur of God”). Now, I do not dis-pute the validity of these claims, or the beauty of the verse. But I maintainthat unless this widespread appeal isexplicitly founded upon the confessionof the unique Incarnation in JesusChrist, who is thereby the Sacramentof encounter with God, we will lackthe one sure foundation for renewaland transformation, both personaland institutional.

In sum, reading and listening tostatements of vision and mission, Ioften feel as St. Augustine did in hisConfessions. Augustine gratefully bene-fitted from the writings of the Platon-ists he had read, but failed to find therethe one salvific name he longed for:that of Jesus Christ.3 What Ignatiusand Hopkins and Arrupe took forgranted, we must learn to appropriateand articulate anew.

Renewing the Christic Center

Having reviewed some signs ofChristological forgetfulness, let mepass on to signs of promise, hopefulindications of Christological renewal.

I would first point to the theologi-cal work of Frans Jozef van Beeck,S.J., who is a participant in our conference. Father van Beeck is theauthor of a multivolume work onCatholic systematic theology entitledGod Encountered, that, when complete,will be a milestone in AmericanCatholic theology. In a preliminaryprogrammatic essay toward his mag-num opus, van Beeck summed up itsguiding vision of renewal in theologyand pastoral practice in these words:“This renewal, if it is to be authenti-cally Christian, must go back to theoriginal and abiding realization thatChrist is alive and present in the Spirit,a realization found everywhere in theNew Testament and one that remainsthe original source of all Christianfaith and identity experience.”4

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Stewards of the TraditionChrist the Center

Continued on Page 8

Here, tradition is the One who is handed down, Jesus Christ himself as the living heart

and center of Christian tradition.

With regard to the distinctive voca-tion of Catholic colleges and universi-ties, this “abiding realization,” thatthe living Christ is the heart of theCatholic wisdom tradition, mustinspire and direct more than our the-ological offerings and ministerial pro-grams, important as these undoubtedlyare. It also holds implications for mis-sion statements and curriculum deci-sions; for environment and art; forclass size, administrative policies, and,yes, for hiring.5 Passing from a merelynotional apprehension to a real appre-hension of these matters (to use Car-dinal Newman’s categories) will requireimaginative and discerning leadershipand commitment. But so has everyauthentic renewal in the Church.

For Newman, the mind’s passagefrom the notional to the real is medi-ated by the imagination that allows themind to engage and energize the heart.And poetry is a prime vehicle for thisheart-felt enfleshment of the word.Another sign of hope, then, arises fromthe recent study by Peggy Rosenthal,The Poets’ Jesus. Reminiscent of my ear-lier cautions regarding “incarnational-ism without Incarnation,” Rosenthalwrites, “Even for many practicingChristians, the late-twentieth century’sstrong spirituality of incarnational pres-ence was linked only weakly to the naveand person of Jesus.6” But in the lastchapter of her work, entitled “JesusPresent,” she discusses a number ofcontemporary American poets, likeAndrew Hudgins, Scott Cairns, DeniseLevertov, and Vassar Miller. Her analy-sis of their common ground is note-worthy: “They seem, at the end oftwo millennia in which this centralfigure of Christianity [Jesus Christ] hasbeen reshaped and reconfigured, verycomfortable with the orthodox configu-rations yet energized by what theymean for human life at this moment.”7

Indeed, Denise Levertov’s persuasion isparticularly radical: “The miracle ofGod assuming flesh in the Incarna-

tion, and continuing to become the‘bread of life’ in the Eucharist, informsher faith in the very possibility andmeaning of metaphor.”8 Only RealPresence is able to ground and guar-antee real presences.

One final sign of Christological hopebears mentioning. Over the past tenyears, a number of graduate studentsin theology seem to be moving beyondthe shop-worn labels of “liberal” or“conservative” to a new engagementwith the tradition. Often they sensethat they were deprived, through faultyreligious education, of life-giving roots.Hence they undertake an in-depthstudy of the patristic or scholastic tradi-tions for their doctoral dissertations.This is resourcement, return to thesources, not for the sake of nostalgia,but for the sake of authentic aggiorna-mento that is more than mere culturalaccommodation. They are captivatedby Christ, the Traditus; and hencethey diligently search the tradita forsigns of the Beloved to whom wemust bear witness in the present, the“today” of faith.

I quote one young Catholic the-ologian who speaks for many: Let usleave liberal/conservative behind us.And let us leave behind us, too, thatCatholicism which had allowed itsdistinctive colors to bleed into beige.“Let us embrace the spicy, trouble-some, fascinating, and culture-trans-forming person of Jesus Christ andlet him shape our experience and our world.”9

Then, I am convinced, we shall dis-cover anew that ex corde ecclesiae is everex corde Christi.10

Endnotes1 At a rather more elevated theological level, Isuggest that concern about the spread of this“unitarianism of the Spirit” underlies the con-troversial Declaration of the Congregation forthe Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus.

2 Pedro Arrupe, S.J., Justice with Faith Today (St.Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980), 124.

3 St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 7, Chapter 9.4 Frans Jozef van Beeck, Catholic Identity after VaticanII (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984), 55.

5 See Brian Daley, S.J., “Christ and the CatholicUniversity,” America, 169, no. 5 (September 11,1993). Monika Hellwig also offers helpful reflec-tions in her article, “The Catholic IntellectualTradition and the Catholic University,” in Cern-era and Morgan, Examining the Catholic IntellectualTradition, especially 10-18.

6 Peggy Rosenthal, The Poets’ Jesus: Representationsat the End of a Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2000), 153.

7 Rosenthal, The Poets’ Jesus, 166.

8 Rosenthal, The Poets’ Jesus, 165.

9 Robert Barren, “Beyond Beige Catholicism,”Church, 16, no. 2 (Summer 2000), 10.

10 See the profound pastoral-theological reflection of Pope John Paul II Novo MillennioIneunte (Boston: Pauline Books, 2001), especiallyPart 3, “Starting Afresh from Christ.”

Robert P. Imbelli is a priest of the Archdioceseof New York and Associate Professor ofTheology at Boston College.

Reprinted with permission of the author, fromAnthony J. Cernera and Oliver J. Morgan, eds.,Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, vol. 2:Issues and Perspectives (Fairfield: Sacred HeartUniversity Press, 2002).

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The first Christians—drawntogether by their faith in thesignificance of the life, death,

and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth—were members of Jewish communitiesembedded in a Roman political systemand in a linguistic and intellectual cul-ture that was largely Greek in origin. As the Christian “way” moved beyondthese Jewish communities, attractedGentile converts, and spread, a Christ-ian intellectual tradition or, better, aconstellation of traditions developed inthe diverse regions where Christianfaith took root—theologies, philoso-phies, artistic currents, systems of legalthought and political theory, whichwere the product of a continuous dia-logue between faith and cultures. Withthe fragmentation of the Christianchurches, especially in the 15th and

16th centuries, the Catholic intellec-tual tradition in the West developedits own characteristics. Since themedieval period, one of its principalvenues has been the university. Thisdialogue between faith and culturereflects two essential characteristics of the Christian, and especially theCatholic, understanding of humanexperience: that faith necessarily seeksunderstanding, and that all intellectualinquiry leads eventually to questionsof ultimacy that invite faith responses.The Catholic view sees no conflictbetween faith and knowledge; it looksto how they illuminate each other.

Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit University,Boston College assessment and planning report,July 2006.

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What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?

john henry newman:

Truth is the object of Knowl-edge of whatever kind; and when we inquire what is meant by Truth, I suppose it is right to answer thatTruth means facts and their rela-tions, which stand toward eachother pretty much as subjects andpredicates in logic. All that exists, as contemplated by the humanmind, forms one large system orcomplex fact, and this of courseresolves itself into an indefinitenumber of particular facts, which, as being portions of a whole, havecountless relations of every kind,one toward another. Knowledge is the apprehension of these facts,whether in themselves, or in theirmutual positions and bearings.And, as all taken together form oneintegral subject for contemplation, so there are no natural or real lim-its between part and part; one isever running into another; all, asviewed by the mind, are combinedtogether, and possess a correlativecharacter one with another, fromthe internal mysteries of the DivineEssence down to our own sensa-tions and consciousness, from themost solemn appointments of theLord of all down to what may becalled the accident of the hour, fromthe most glorious seraph down to thevilest and most noxious of reptiles.

The Idea of a University, Discourse 3, 2

Then, dearest son, open the eye of thine intellect in the light ofmost holy faith, and behold how much thou art beloved of God.

Letter to Neri Di Landoccio Dei Pagliaresi

catherine of siena:

Stewards of the TraditionContinued from Page 7

by john c. haughey, s.j.

On February 3, Woodstock fellow JohnHaughey, S.J., received the second annualMonika K. Hellwig Award from the Asso-ciation of Catholic Colleges and Universitiesfor “outstanding contributions to Catholicintellectual life.” He delivered the followingremarks to the presidents of Catholic collegesand universities, gathered for that occasion.

The 220 Catholic higher edu-cation institutions in thiscountry are doing an extraor-

dinary thing. But I wonder whethertheir leaders have thought about thepotential their work has for the futureself-understanding of Roman Catholi-cism itself. These institutions host abewildering number of pluralisms—academic, ethnic, religious, racial, eco-nomic—and do so in a way that hasmade a home for many voices and val-ues and traditions and bodies of knowl-edge. But the hospitality accorded bythese institutions has not been suffi-ciently attentive to their uniquenessor opportunistic about this pluralism. It is not that they have been indifferentto or fallen short of fidelity to theChurch’s teachings, it seems to me. Itis, rather, in not engaging these plu-ralisms. A hospitality that simply makesroom for otherness is not the same as a hospitality that engages and enables it in all its forms to be self-critical.But an engaged hospitality could alsoequip the Catholic faith, the faith thatsponsors your institutions, to learn tobe critical of itself. Roman Catholicismis as credible as a teaching church as it shows itself a learning church.

A hospitality which makes room forthe other, and which houses and cre-dentials the other, and does not engagethat otherness is a deficient host. Adeficient hospitality, which I would calla hospitality of tolerance, shortchangesthe students, the school, and all the cul-tures your personnel come from, butmost of all the Church. A hospitalityof tolerance, in a word, avoids, and isshrewd in doing so. It “lets sleepingdogs lie”; it lets “a thousand flowersbloom”; it lets the whole weight oftaking responsibility for the Catholi-cism of the campus come to rest onthe campus ministry. The fruit of this

avoidance is a campus that loses touchwith its roots in the Catholic intellectualtradition. That tradition, then, becomesa “was” as modernism, postmodernism,and post-postmodernism, and everyhere-today-gone-tomorrow “tradition”becomes the new “is.”

But I want to be even more surgicallyclear about what I am saying. When thedisciplines are engaged by the Catholicintellectual tradition, they have much to teach their interlocutors and muchto learn from that tradition. Disengage-ment impoverishes both the disciplineand the Catholic intellectual tradition.How so? Because a valid body of knowl-edge is intrinsic to the universe of beingand its linkage to the Creator of beingconnects it more easily to further bod-ies of knowledge. An academic disci-pline and this tradition should not seemlike two sumo wrestlers trying to bestone another since they are in a consti-tutive relationship to one another. Fur-ther, one might recall Paul’s claim that“knowledge will pass away” (I Corinthi-ans 13:8) unless faith, hope, and lovegive it a place in eternity.

Engaging otherness is not somethingabstract in my mind. It is the way Jesusof Nazareth operated in his life. Thecomplaint that eventually got him elim-inated was that he didn’t associate withthe right people, with those who werein the know. He evidently preferred tohave table fellowship with the tax col-lectors and the sinners, i.e., with thosewho were marginal to being right, right-eous, one of us! It would be worthnoting that the Gospel often appearsto come out of his conversations withthe otherness of these unrighteous types.He learned from the vulnerable, fromthose who were judged marginal at best.Look at the Beatitudes and ask your-self whether the insights they conveymight have originated in conversationswith those who hungered and thirstedfor justice. “Blessed are the lowly, forthey shall inherit the earth.” Yes, hetaught; but yes, he learned too; thatis the point of having an intellectualtradition that is as much a “will be”as a “used to be.”

But if a Catholic educational institu-tion moves from being a place of hospi-

tality that simply houses pluralisms toone that engages them in their manyforms, the major beneficiary will be theChurch. It has much to learn from theday-to-day praxis of the American net-work of Catholic higher education insti-tutions insofar as they have engagedtheir own plural voices. “Catholic” mustnot settle into being a mark of theChurch. It was meant instead to be achallenge, to send a signal to the wholeworld of the good news of the inclusionof all humanity with its God. We live inhope of a catholicity, an eschatologicalfullness with the Church in all its insti-tutions assisting in midwifing that full-ness in the course of its history.

I am really saying there is a povertyin our doctrine about the meaning ofCatholic. So far we have understood amere sliver of what that doctrine mustbecome and is more likely to becomeif you engage the world’s pluralismslocally. At times our church seems toexhibit a hospitality redolent of thePharisee who invited Jesus to dinnerin order to take the measure of hisorthodoxy. Jesus was a faithful Jewwho learned to become a syncretistbecause of the virtue of hospitalitythat he accorded the seemingly hetero-dox. His orthodoxy became as capa-cious as the heart of his Father.

What difference will it make in thisworld of realpolitik if this opportunityfor the engagement of pluralism is ne-glected? The praxis of the hospitalityof engagement will not develop into adoctrine of catholicity. And withoutsuch a doctrine, the world will not

know the heart of God or the hostthat God commissioned to engage itspluralisms. A campus that aims at beinga place that is merely agreeable, that haslearned a tolerance, that shirks the taskof seeking truth together, has lost anopportunity to show that human unity“belongs to the innermost nature ofthe Church.” (Vatican II)

But, you ask, do we have on ourcampuses the competence necessary toengage the disciplines with a knowledgeof the Catholic intellectual tradition?Yes and no. You may not have savantswho are explicitly knowledgeable aboutthis tradition. But having conductedtwelve workshops this year with facultymembers around the country and lis-tened to the good each is about and thewholes they are trying to birth throughtheir disciplines, it is easy to see God at work in their strivings. Why say this?Because those in each discipline whosequestions are really theirs and whosehunt for answers is open to whereverthe data lead them—these qualify forthe accolade of being hospitable sincethey are engaging otherness from with-in their area of competence and arebeing stretched by it. And since God isthe author of the Catholic intellectualtradition then there isn’t any shark-infested moat to cross for the necessaryengagements to take place. Pope Bene-dict XVI asked this week at the noonblessing on the feast of St. ThomasAquinas, “Why should faith and reasonbe afraid of each other, if they can ex-press themselves better by meeting andengaging one another?” So ask your-self, Is the hospitality on my campussufficiently in evidence that the Churchat large can learn from it? We sorelyneed a development of our doctrine ofcatholicity in order to better host theworld’s pluralisms.

John C. Haughey, S.J., is a Senior Research Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

Reprinted with permission of the author, fromWoodstock Report, March 2007, no. 87.

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When the disciplinesare engaged by

the Catholic intellec-tual tradition, theyhave much to teach

their interlocutors andmuch to learn from

that tradition.

From Tolerance to Engagement in Catholic Higher Education

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by walter ong, s.j.

It is common knowledge that theproblem of pluralism today in-creasingly haunts Catholic institu-

tions of higher education, that is, col-leges and universities founded underspecifically Catholic auspices and nowhaving to redesign themselves in ourpresent educational world. We thinkparticularly of such institutions in theUnited States, where they have existedin far higher proportion than in anyother part of the world. But the prob-lem is worldwide.

In the forefront are such matters asfaculties that include many memberswho are not Catholic, student bodiesequally diversified in their religiouscommitments or lack thereof, ques-tions of academic freedom, and, to capit all, the clear desire of Catholic insti-tutions of higher education to openthemselves to persons and points ofview other than exclusively Catholicwhile maintaining a genuine Catholicidentity. To this should be added anew awareness of the flexibility ofCatholic teachings that many hadearlier said were inflexible.

This awareness of flexibility devel-oped widely over the past hundred yearsor so with the massive growth of know-ledge in all fields, scientific and human-istic, creating new sensitivity to the factthat Jesus lived in a historical world andfounded his church in a describablehistorical context. He thereby neces-sarily designed it for some kind of con-tinuing development through historyin the various and developing culturesacross the world so as for it to realizeits catholicity. Thus “inculturation,” inthe sense of the rooting of the churchin the distinctive features of real valuein a given culture, is a significantly es-tablished and operational term today.

There is no easy answer to prob-lems raised by our necessary pluralism.Solutions have to be worked out as wecome to understand better the CatholicChurch and the forces the Church iscalled on to work with. Many modelshave been proposed for thinking aboutthe Church and, by implication, aboutthe Catholic identity of Catholic uni-versities and colleges. I should like

simply to advance for consideration away of thinking about this identitythat, to the best of my knowledge, hasnot heretofore been made use of. It is not a cure-all, but may be a help.It consists in a more thorough exami-nation of the concept of “catholic”itself and of reflection on a Gospelparable in connection with the Catholicinstitutions of higher learning.

“Catholic” is commonly said tomean “universal,” a term from theLatin universalis. The equation is notquite exact. If “universal” is the ade-quate meaning of “catholic,” why didthe Latin Church, which in its vernac-ular language had the word univer-salis, not use this word but rather bor-rowed from Greek the term katholikosinstead, speaking of the “one, holy,catholic, and apostolic church” (to putit into English) instead of the “one,holy, universal, and apostolic church”?The etymological history of universalisis not in every detail clear, but it cer-tainly involves the concepts of unum,“one,” and vertere, “turn.” It suggestsusing a compass to make a circlearound a central point. It is an inclusiveconcept in the sense that the circleincludes everything within it. But bythe same token it also excludes every-thing outside it. Universalis contains asubtle note of negativity. Katholikos doesnot. It is more unequivocally positive. Itmeans simply “through-the-whole” or“throughout-the-whole”—kata orkath, through or throughout; holos,whole, from the same Indo-Euro-pean root as our English “whole.”

Perhaps katholikos was favored bythe Latin (as well as by the Greek)church because it resonated so wellwith Jesus’ parable in Mt. 13:33(echoed in Lk. 13:21): “The reign ofGod is like yeast which a woman tookand kneaded into three measures offlour. Eventually the whole mass ofdough began to rise.” Yeast is a plant, afungus, something that grows with noparticular limits to its borders. If themass of dough is added to, the yeastgrows into the added portion. Under-stood as catholic in terms of this para-ble, the Kingdom or the Church is alimitless, growing reality, destined ulti-mately to be present everywhere and toaffect everything, though by no means

to convert everything into itself. Yeastacts on dough, but it does not convertall the dough into yeast, nor is it ableto do so.

Living yeast corresponds to whatthe Catholic Church has really been,for the Catholic Church has in factnever been at all definitively “univer-sal” in the sense that it has actually in-cluded all parts of the human race oreven anywhere near the greater part of the human race. But if it has neverbeen by any means “universal” in sucha sense, it is certainly “catholic” in thesense that it has always been in oneplace or another growing, spreadinginto new dough, in accord with theparable of the yeast. Of recent years, ithas become more widespread than everbefore, geographically and culturally. Itis, in fact, more through-the-whole ofhumanity across the face of the globetoday than in any earlier age of history.The variety of the faces representingthe Church at the Second VaticanCouncil made this evident. No longeris it possible to say, as Hilaire Belloconce did, “The Church is Europe,Europe is the Church.” This is inclu-sivist-exclusivist universalism with a vengeance, a statement that, itappears to me, is de facto un-Christ-ian, although I am sure not with anyconscious intent.

Many of Jesus’ parables—just as,quite commonly, other parables—aremultiple in signification. There arecomplex meanings implied here in thisone, although the commentaries thatI have examined often develop anyimplications of the parable at best onlyminimally. In his Models of the Church,Avery Dulles gives it more attentionthan most commentators, classing itbriefly with other “botanical models”of the Church that show, for example,the Church’s “capacity of rapid expan-sion,” as this parable surely does. Forhis purposes, he had no occasion forpushing analysis of the parable of theyeast further.

But here I am concerned with push-ing it further for an admittedly special-ized reason—because of the particularvalue the parable seems to have inbringing out the usefulness of the con-cept of “catholic,” more exhaustively

understood, in treating problems ofpluralism in Catholic institutions ofhigher education today. The applicantsthat suggest themselves here do notapply perfectly—Father Dulles notes,quite appositely, that parables all haveobvious applicational limits—but thisparticular parable can apparently giveus some better conceptual hold oncertain elements in the problems ofpluralism that we face in Catholic insti-tutions of higher education. Admit-tedly, in emerging only now, this fullerrelevance of the parable shows itselfbelatedly, but certain relevancies inJesus’ saying can make themselvesknown only in ages later than Jesus’own age. The word of God has ferti-lity for the future as well as for thetime in which it is first uttered.

The parable of the yeast can showmore than the Church’s capacity fornatural expansion. Yeast not only grows quickly but also nourishes itselfon the dough in which it grows. Thissuggests that the Church should buildinto itself the cultures or mixtures ofcultures in which it finds itself. ACatholic higher educational institu-tion should build into its traditionwhat those who happen not to beCatholic have to offer that fits its tradition and what it might otherwisenot know at all. The Church does nothave from the start everything it willlater become, any more than theyeast does, other than the Church’sown principle of life, which is no lessthan Jesus Christ himself, who lived as a visible human being in a cultureor mixture of cultures quite other thanany in the world today and whoseMystical Body, the Church, must be in-culturated now in today’s world and inthe world of the future, nourished ontoday’s and tomorrow’s kinds of food.

If, however, yeast nourishes itself on the dough in which it is placed, itdoes not do so in such a way as tospoil the dough—not from the Humanpoint of view, certainly. It makes thedough more usable, more nourishing.It not only grows in what it feeds on,but it also improves what it feeds onand makes it possible for others to feedon it as well as on itself, the yeast. TheCatholic Church is not out to confrontand destroy the cultures it is set in or

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due to encounter, but to interpenetratethese cultures, and not only on its ownterms, but interactively. Yeast grows indifferent sorts of dough—white, wholewheat, rye, and so on, not convertingone sort of these doughs into any of theothers. Moreover, any dough with yeastgrowing in it can be added to a com-pletely different batch of dough, andthe yeast will act on the new batch inaccord with the way the new batch isconstituted (white dough, whole wheat,rye, whatever): The Church transplantedfrom any given culture to a new culturecan live in a way that fits that particularnew culture without losing its ownidentity, just as in doing its work ofleavening, yeast does not sacrifice itsown identity but remains growing yeast.

In every case, in accordance withJesus’ parable, the dough gains valuefrom the yeast (the Kingdom, theCatholic Church) and, at the sametime, the yeast (the Kingdom, theCatholic Church) gains. It nourishesitself on the dough, comes to a real-ization of new potentialities (whichinclude a better understanding ofitself), and in all cases, at least we canhope, both yeast and dough work forthe good of human beings.

What are some of the ways in whichthe parable of the yeast might help in conceiving of religious pluralism inCatholic institutions of higher educa-tion today? We can consider here onlya few sample applications.

1) The faith and academic subjects.In a Catholic college or university, theyeast—the Kingdom in the sense of theCatholic faith—is constantly beingbrought into contact with new materi-als. These in-clude materials in philoso-phy, the other humanities, the sciencesand all the rest of developing humanknowledge, as well as in its own specialways, theology itself.

Here, there is no question of indoc-trinating disciplines that are themselvesseparate from the faith, but of interact-ing with them as each requires—in pat-terns that have to be worked out overtime, as the interacting takes place. The ferment of the yeast, the King-dom in the sense of the Church and the Church’s faith, will work in differentways, not all of which are by any meanspredictable now. At times it may haveno immediate grounds for interactingat all. At times, new grounds will arise:Modern high technology has made

ecology a new massive Catholic theo-logical and practical pastoral problem,as it hardly was before.

From its beginning, Catholic teach-ing has learned by contact with whatis not itself and even what is opposedto itself. For example, St. Augustineand many others learned from paganrhetoric, the most pervasive of allbranches of learning in the West as well as in the Middle East over cen-turies. St. Thomas Aquinas learnedfrom the pagan Aristotle—and metmassive resistance for his use of thispagan author, who, moreover, wasmediated to the Latin West throughMuslims, Arabs, and others. In our own day, Catholic teaching has learnedfrom certain kinds of existentialism and especially from personalist phi-losophy. One of personalism’s mostardent proponents was Jewish, Mar-tin Buber, whose book I and Thou is acardinal personalist text. Personalismhas had its effects on Catholic teaching—notably in the writings and talks ofPope John Paul II. The yeast of theKingdom has been expanding throughvast new batches of dough over the cen-turies and will continue to do so evenmore radically in our computer and in-formation age and in other ages to come.

2) The relationship of the faith and thefaculty, Catholic and other. With regardto the faculty as individual persons, wecould hope that the action of the faith,seen as Catholic in the sense we havebeen employing here, would growwithin the lives of individual facultymembers, in whatever way and at what-ever rate the individual finds herself orhimself adapted to such growth. Pre-sumably, having aligned herself or him-self with an openly Catholic university,a person who is not Catholic is will-ing to live somehow in contact with theyeast of faith. But this does not of itselfmean commitment to letting the faithpermeate and transform her or hiswhole life, as it would, or should, the life of a professed Catholic. In cases ofindividual non-Catholics, the action ofthe yeast might mean ultimately suchtotal commitment. Whether it does ornot is an entirely personal matter underdivine grace. Catholic institutions ofhigher learning have had hundreds andmore utterly loyal faculty members ofother faiths or of no faith at all whohave lived comfortably and happilyin the Catholic context for most or all of their academic careers, not feel-ing imposed on. The Catholic faithwants to be interactive where interac-

tion is feasible and called for, notwhere it is unwelcome.

3) The relationship of the faith and thestudents. Today, the college or univer-sity is no longer felt, as it used to be several generations ago, in Catholicor other religious circles or in secularcircles, as an institution functioning in loco parentum, as set up so as to act inthe place of the students’ parents in rela-tion to the students themselves (manyof whom today are in fact adults, mar-ried with children and, even occasion-ally, grandchildren). The Catholiccollege or university retains many re-sponsibilities to its students, some ofthem even enlarged responsibilities,religious and moral as well as intellec-tual, although they are framed ratherdifferently now. Catholic colleges andCatholic theology, incorporating andcommenting on the Church’s teaching,and courses on the teachings of otherreligions, are to be available in Catholicuniversities and colleges. In core curric-ula, a certain number of such courseswill be required normally of all students,if only to avoid ignorance of the mas-sive religious dimensions of human lifethroughout history. Students not pro-fessing the Catholic faith need not electspecifically Catholic theology courses.

4) Cosmology. If the Catholic faith is viewed as yeast, as something de-signed to grow through human con-sciousness under grace into moreand more of God’s creation, Catholicinstitutions of higher education aredesperately in need of every sort ofknowledge available to fulfill theirCatholic mission. One of the points atwhich this need, and the question ofpluralism at present haunting Catholiceducation, can be examined fruitfullyregards cosmology. “In the begin-ning...God created the heavens and theearth” (Gen. 1:1). Catholic teaching isineradicably involved with cosmology,with study of the universe that God has created, for everything that exists,save for God himself, is the creation of God, something of his. Today, weknow inestimably more about whatthis creation was than the humanauthors of Genesis or any of theircontemporaries could know. Thedough in which the yeast of theKingdom is planted is an immeasur-ably greater mass of immeasurablygreater age than we used to think.Does this knowledge that we now have show practically in Catholic life—that is, in such things as our pastoral,

homiletic, and devotional life?

When we think of God as creator of the world or universe, at least in our pastoral (including liturgical),homiletic, and devotional life, it ap-pears that we are still most likely tothink of the world pretty much inarchaic terms. What we see around us is accommodated directly to theordinary human senses and imagina-tion, that is, the visible earth andwhat surrounds it, the sun and moonand planets and stars as they appear to the unaided eye, a world full ofbeauty and wonder, but constitutingnot one billionth of what everyonenow knows the universe that Godcreated really is (though we do notknow all of it perfectly, for our knowl-edge is still growing). It is a universesome 14 billion years old, with bil-lions of galaxies each containing billions of stars more or less the size of our sun, a universe that has had to undergo massive evolution to reachthe point where the existence of hu-man beings was even possible. It tookbillions of years for God’s material cre-ation to organize itself and in placescool down enough for DNA to exist so that life could be possible, for DNAfurnishes building blocks of livingorganisms. Humanity is not DNA, butwithout DNA there could be no hu-man life, involving nonmaterial humanconsciousness. Although responsiblecalculations still vary somewhat, human-ity, ourselves, homo sapiens, is quitepossibly some 350,000 years old. Sincethe appearance of homo sapiens andthe consciousness with which humanityis endowed, God’s creation has maturedpainstakingly but with growing acceler-ation through the invention of writing,print, computers, and the changes inthought processes and thought man-agement that these technologies of theword have involved. The changes haveresulted in our vast humanistic studies,enriched today immeasurably beyondsuch studies in earlier ages.

God’s creation has matured in ourvast information culture with its con-comitant interpretation culture, inwhich the interrelationships of every-thing—intellectual, sociological, politi-cal, scientific, philosophical, religious,psychological, and so on without end—are investigated, if not always success-fully, certainly with an intricate sophis-tication and depth impossible in earliergenerations. When we think of God’screation in the ordinary context of faith,

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by alan wolfe

Non-Catholics routinely find inCatholicism something miss-ing in their own religious or

intellectual traditions. For those un-happy with the direction the modernworld has taken, especially in the yearssince the cultural revolution of the1960s, Catholicism stands as a mightyalternative. As Peter Berger wrote in1967, “Catholicism, for reasons intrin-sic to its tradition, has tried hardestin maintaining a staunchly resistantstance in the face of secularization andpluralism, and indeed has tried downto our own century to engage in vig-orous counterattacks designed to re-establish something like Christendomat least within limited territories.” Or,as the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, aMethodist, puts it more recently (andmore succinctly), “Catholics, more thanany other people, must resist the pre-sumption of modernity.” Reading com-ments like these, I am reminded of thework of a first-rate journalist namedAlan Ehrenhalt, whose book, The LostCity, evokes Chicago-style Catholicismof the 1950s, with its emphasis on hier-archy and obedience, as a preferablemoral system to the anarchy that fol-lowed in its wake. Catholicism, forthese writers, plays the role of the roadnot taken, the secret history of thetwentieth century which, if only weknew better, we would have lived out.

That road is not my road. (Indeed, Ithink there is something extraordinar-ily presumptuous of non-Catholicsasking Catholics to forgo the benefits ofmodernity that they themselves enjoy.)There were indeed antimodernist ten-dencies in both the official teachersof the Catholic Church and in theway ordinary Catholics led their lives.I have no interest in revisiting them.Berger and Hauerwas may see in theCatholic intellectual tradition a princi-pled intellectual opposition to contem-porary relativism and hedonism; I ammore likely to see a church that wasfar too soft on anti-Semitism (espe-cially, I have to add, when it counted),took a certain pride in banning greatbooks, and produced a Syllabus of

Errors and attacks on liberalism that bet on the wrong horses as faras the future was concerned. Had those aspects of Catholicism perpetu-ated themselves unchanged into thestart of the twenty-first century, Amer-ica’s Catholic colleges and universitieswould continue to be on the defen-sive, for the burden of proof wouldbe on them to demonstrate theirproper place in a liberal and plural-istic democracy.

Fortunately, however, the Catholictradition is better than that. It fur-nished a John Courtney Murray. Itkept alive an important strain of nat-ural law teaching. It experiencedVatican II. And it produced a genera-tion of highly educated middle-classsuburban professionals anxious to givetheir children the best education auniversity can provide. It would be dif-ficult for anyone except for the mostintransigent of conservatives to believethat the Church, at least in the UnitedStates, is not better off because oftheir existence.

Let me, then, turn directly toaspects of the Catholic tradition thathave a more positive role to play, notonly in higher education, but in Ameri-can public life more generally. Cer-tainly the most important of them isthe natural law tradition. I will notaddress here—or, for that matter, any-where—the question of whether Godis the origin of our natural rightsand duties, for I have little taste forphilosophical and theological analysis.

The important point to make isthat a natural law tradition leaves onepredisposed to believe that there arecertain truths in the world thatremain true irrespective of whetherthe laws and conventions of any par-ticular society adhere to them. At itsworst, belief in natural law can lead toideological rigidity and inflexible inhu-manity. But at its best, respect for natu-ral law gives one the self-confidence thatmakes possible the passion and curios-ity that fuels intellectual inquiry.

No one could have predicted,thirty or so years ago, that such self-confidence would ever be necessary in American higher education. At the height of the cold war, American universities produced those called byDavid Halberstam “the best and thebrightest,” and humility was not ex-actly one of their personality traits.But in remarkably short time, theculture of American academia shiftedfrom the hubristic arrogance ofthose who believed that they couldbend a foreign country to their will

to those currently ensconced in theuniversity who doubt the possibilityof will, truth, morality, beauty, orany other category that strikes themas ready for deconstruction. At atime when the only thing we canknow is that we cannot know any-thing, the claims of natural law sug-gest to us not that the world isunknowable, but that we have simplystopped, for whatever reason, tryingto know it.

Natural law, in short, inoculates usagainst postmodernism. Some of youmay know an article I wrote a year ortwo ago recounting my visits to col-leges and universities shaped by thetradition of American evangelical Prot-estantism. There I recall my surprise atdiscovering how strong intellectuallymany of these institutions had become.But I also expressed astonishment tolearn that Stanley Fish is something ofa hero to those who teach in the Eng-lish Department at Wheaton Collegeor that postmodern philosophy is allthe rage at the Fuller Theological Sem-inary. While there are no doubt excep-tions of which I am unaware, I have yetto come across quite that much enthu-siasm for postmodernism at the Catholiccolleges and universities with which Iam familiar. The postmodern evangeli-cals with whom I talk believe that onecan be skeptical of all truths while main-taining the truth of God’s existence.Catholics are more likely to hold thatthe truth of God’s existence must meanthe truth of man’s reason, art’s beauty,or universal morality. No wonder, then,that at Boston College one will neverhear cries of “Hey Hey Ho Ho, WesternCiv’s Gotta Go.” Take away all thosedead white males, and you have prettymuch eliminated the Catholic tradi-tion from the face of the earth. I havenothing but respect for those Catholiccolleges and universities that continuedto defend the humanities through theentire, but now seemingly past, age ofsuspicion against them.

Two other side-effects of Catholi-cism’s sympathy for natural law are alsoworth noting because, once again, bothof them came as a surprise—at least tome. The first of these is the sympathythat emerged on America’s Catholiccolleges and universities for liberalism.By this I do not mean the everyday useof the word liberalism that refers to theDemocratic Party and its support forsocial reform, although it remains truethat most Catholics, and most Catholicacademics, remain liberal in that sense.The more important affinity in this caseis the one between Catholic respect fornatural law and liberal conceptions offundamental human rights. It was, many

Catholic Intellectual Traditionin the Public Square

At a time when the only thing we can know is that we cannot know anything, the claims of natural law suggest to us

not that the world is unknowable, but thatwe have simply stopped, for whatever

reason, trying to know it.

of you will recall, John CourtneyMurray who pointed out that the greatenlightenment thinkers who wrote theDeclaration of Independence and theBill of Rights, Protestant and deistthough they may have been, werenonetheless articulating natural lawprinciples in asserting freedom ofspeech, press, and religion. It is worthkeeping his point in mind when weponder why evangelical Protestant lit-erary theorists love Stanley Fish. Forif there is one theme that runs through-out all of Fish’s writings—or, for thatmatter, those of his former colleagueStanley Hauerwas—it is a deep hatredof liberalism. How ironic, then, thatof the three intellectual traditions Ihave been discussing—Catholicism,evangelical Protestantism, and post-modernism—the only one that findssomething of value in liberalism is theone whose Pope made such a deter-mined nineteenth century attack upon it.

It is certainly not an obligation of defenders of Catholic education as it used to be to consider the situa-tion facing non-Catholics. But just as Catholic colleges and universities have become enriched throughout con-tact with the non-Catholic world, non-Catholics have benefited from theircontact with the Catholic world. Iknow that I have. What upsets me themost about the views of writers likeBurtchaell and Neuhaus is their lackof recognition that a Catholic educa-tion can be as valuable for those out-side the tradition as those inside. Ifyou have something that you believemakes sense, you ought to want to shareit. If you restrict it, you cheapen it.

Of course it is true that shared thingschange by being shared. Catholicsshould not treat their educationalinstitutions the way some evangeli-cal Protestants treat their joy in Jesus—here it is, take it whether you want it or not, question your own faith butdon’t ask me to question mine. If thatis what a Catholic education is meantto be, Catholic educators would bebetter off staying in their own aca-demic subculture. Nor should Catholiccolleges and universities simply copythe institutions of mainstream America.As David Riesman and ChristopherJencks wisely wrote in 1968, “Theimportant question…is not whethera few Catholic universities provecapable of competing with Harvardor Berkeley on the latter’s terms, butwhether Catholicism can provide an

ideology and/or personnel for develop-ing alter-natives to the Harvard-Berke-ley model of excellence.” I believethat the passage of time since theywrote these words has answered theirquestion. Catholic colleges and uni-versities that emphasize the Westerntradition, pay serious attention to theneeds of undergraduates, have the con-fidence not to make enemies of liberal-ism and science, and appreciate thehuman side of human beings havedeveloped precisely such an alterna-tive. That is why I teach at one of them.

To be sure, Boston College, likeother Catholic institutions, is not whatit was when it was all male, nearly allIrish, and overwhelmingly Catholic inthe composition of its faculty. Thereare, I admit, too few priests on campuseven for my comfort. But it remainsrecognizably Catholic, perhaps morerecognizably Catholic for those whoare not Catholic than for those whoare. If that sounds like a paradox, per-haps my appreciation for the Catholicintellectual tradition has taught methe importance of paradoxical thinking.

Alan Wolfe is a professor of Political Science andthe Director of the Boisi Center for Religion inAmerican Public Life at Boston College.

Reprinted with permission of the author fromthe Summer 2002 issue of Current Issues, thepublication of the Association of CatholicColleges and Universities.

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do we effectively advert to this creationthat has as part of itself depth psychology,robots, space shuttles, trips to the moon?

There have been some beginningsin relating the faith to the known full-ness of God’s creation. One thinks ofPierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose workwas pioneering and remains invaluable,but who is now no longer entirely up-to-date. Ecology has become a theologi-cal issue, as we become increasinglyaware of human beings’ growing re-sponsibility for God’s creation aroundus. Anthropic thinking has made usconsider how the universe we knowfrom science appears somehow consti-tuted from the beginning—the “bigbang” that many postulate—to buildup a world able to sustain humanity.But most of this work and other re-lated work has not affected our devo-tional, liturgical, homiletic, and pas-toral way of life, where the archaicvisions of creation seem to linger.Paul tells us (Rom. 1:20) that we learnof God’s grandeur from “the things He has made.” But now that we havefound out so much more about whatthese things really are, in our actual living of the faith we have yet to learnfrom them. We need to bring presentknowledge of the actual universe tobear on such things as our thinking of God’s creative act, of the life and life expectancy of the Church, of escha-tological time, of the Incarnation andthe Second Coming, and so much else.

The yeast that is the Kingdom has a great deal to engage itself with here.

And on what terrain more promisingthan that of Catholic institutions ofhigher education? The urgency thatthey be continued and strengthenedis greater than ever before.

Moreover, this undertaking toengage the faith in God’s real worldwould seem to demand pluralism. Wecannot expect to draw from purelyCatholic sources the knowledge weneed for this vast enterprise. If theCatholic faith, the yeast, is to pene-trate all of God’s creation, we need thecollaboration of all the knowledgeablepeople we can relate to. In a universesome 14 billion years old, the Church isvery, very young. We need to look backto the real perspectives of the past tosee how young we really are. Our workof understanding the relationship ofthe faith to the world is possibly themajor devotional and pastoral andhomiletic task of the years ahead, aswell as a major task in other areas oftheology. Fortunately, our faith isfuture-oriented. We have never feltcalled to get back to the Garden ofEden but to look to the future comingof Christ. The Catholic intellectual lifethat lies ahead is one we can welcome.

Walter Ong, S.J. (1912-2003) was a Professor ofHumanities at Saint Louis University for 30 years,and a Fellow of the American Academy of Artsand Sciences.

Reprinted with permission of the publishers fromthe April 7, 1990 issue of America.

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Yeast: A ParableContinued from Page 11

by t. frank kennedy, s.j.

In 1982 after doctoral studies inmusic history at the University ofCalifornia, I began teaching at a

Jesuit college. In preparing my classes I quickly realized something that I hadnever noticed as a grad student. Onecould teach the history of western civi-lization through the history of western,sacred music, if one wanted to do so. Isuppose that this was the first time Iconfronted part of the breadth of whatwe refer to as the “Catholic IntellectualTradition.” The first thought that Igleaned from this insight was somethingabout this wideness that encompasses

the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Thevery breadth of the tradition led me toconsider the relativity of in-sights com-ing from a myriad of intellectual pur-suits and sources that inform and formus. These sources all speak about humanidentity, and are often held in tensionin the same way that the world andsociety are experienced in tension—a creative tension, dialogic in nature,always respecting the person, that finallysays there are many truths that holdsway over us in our human complexi-ties, and we are far from completelyplumbing the depths of these mysteri-ous truths. For instance, as a musicolo-gist, I have often asked myself, Why is itthat at times of great spiritual renewal

in the Church, the artistic expressionsof that faith attempting to renew itselfare often at a lesser level of beauty orcomplexity than other times? Shouldn’tit be the opposite? How and why is itnecessary for us to respect our con-sciences, but also respect the voice ofthe community attentive to the prompt-ings of the Holy Spirit? These tensionsthat we experience are the wonders ofour faith—the signs yet again in ourtimes that the Spirit is alive as our faithseeks Wisdom.

T. Frank Kennedy S.J., is The Peter Canisius Chair,Director of the Jesuit Institute, and Chairperson ofthe Music Department at Boston College.

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What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?

ties—and not in a few isolated courses-—to reflect critically and, if at all pos-sible, in a multidisciplinary way on theirexperiences in service and in other cul-tures. We cannot permit ourselves orthem the mistake of thinking that“out there you do, in here we think.”Here we think about what is donethere. We must lead them into criti-cal thinking about their experience.And we should do all in our power tomake certain that engagement in serv-ice for social justice is not limited to afew students or simply to those whochoose to involve themselves. Indeed,those who do not choose it are mostoften precisely those who need it most.

Why is it so important? There are many reasons, but let me offer one that matters especially to a the-ologian. It has to do with what, withall due respect to Saint Anselm andSaint Thomas Aquinas, is the onlyeffective proof for the existence of God that I know. There are manyproofs for an “Unmoved Mover” or an “Uncaused Cause,” but that hasnothing to do with the God who isleast wrongly understood as pure andperfect self-gift. The proof of which I am thinking is found in Dostoevsky’sThe Brothers Karamozov. Fairly early inthe novel, Dostoevsky presents uswith a series of conversations withFather Zosima, the wise and holymonk whose words continue to echoin the book long after he has died.The last of these conversations iswith “a woman without faith.” Anobviously distraught woman approach-es Zosima to request his assistance witha problem that she says is destroyingher. We quickly find out that she isin good health, prosperous, and seem-ingly untroubled in any obvious way.But she insists that something horrible

has happened to her and that herwhole life is being drained of meaningand purpose. She goes so far as to tell the monk that if he cannot helpher, she thinks she will kill herself.She explains that, at some point—shedoesn’t know how, for there was nogreat crisis—she ceased to believe inGod. It happened bit by bit, and sheherself was shocked to realize thatshe no longer believed. Now every-thing is colorless, tasteless, to her.Everything has become ashes. She says,quoting Pushkin, nothing is real savethe weeds that grow on her grave.Zosima tells her that what she is expe-riencing is the worst thing that canhappen to a human being, and thathe thinks he can help her. She mustgo home and every day, without fail,in the most concrete and practicalway possible, she must love the peoplearound her. If she does that, Zosimasays, then bit by bit she will cometo the point at which she cannot butbelieve in God. “This way,” he says,“has been tried; this way is certain.”

The whole of the novel is a com-mentary on this scene, a huge debateabout Zosima’s tried and certain way. Ithink that Dostoevsky is right: the onlyworkable proof for the existence ofGod is an experience, and that experi-ence arises out of daily concrete andpractical love for those around us.

After all, long ago, we were told by the author of the First Letter ofJohn that anyone claiming to loveGod, whom he cannot see, while notloving the brother or sister whom hedoes see is a liar (I John 4:20). Not aliar in the sense of one who deliber-ately and knowingly tells an untruth,but rather one who speaks falselybecause he doesn’t know what he’stalking about. He cannot know whatthe word “God” means because God is agape, pure and perfect self-givinglove. If that is the least wrong way tothink about God, then one cannotknow who God is—and thereforethat God is—if one never knowsagapic love. After all, to compareabsolute Mystery to self-giving loveisn’t very helpful if one has no cluewhat self-giving love is. Comparing

by michael himes

On one of the many occasionswhen he was asked why hehad become a Catholic,

Chesterton replied that he becameCatholic because Catholicism is a com-munity with a deep and rich sense of tradition. And, he said, belonging to a community with such a sense of tradition is extremely importantbecause only then can one be freedfrom the most degrading of all formsof servitude—of being merely a childof one’s time. That is, I think, im-mensely wise. Being part of a tradi-tion means that you do not have tospeak with North Americans alone;you can speak with South Americansand Africans and Europeans and Asiansand Australians. It also means that youare not confined to speaking only withlate twentieth-century people; you canconverse with Plato and Emily Dickin-son and Mozart and Teresa of Avila.You can speak with Dante and MadameCurie, with Newton and Euclid andJane Austen. You can talk with all sortsof people who are not of your own ageand clime. You are freed from beingmerely a child of your time and place.In the Catholic tradition, we call thisthe communion of saints. That com-munion or conversation has been go-ing on for a very long time—and youand I are invited to participate in it.

One of the richest elements in theCatholic intellectual tradition is itsnotion of the communion of saints,and within the Jesuit educational tradi-tion one of the richest elements is theinsistence on engaging in a transtem-poral as well as a transspatial conversa-tion. Our students desperately needsuch traditions so that they are notlimited to their own contemporariesfor companionship. This is a very im-portant issue for those of us who teachin those traditions to consider: How dowe introduce people into a living tradi-tion, whether within the sciences orthe humanities (and, I hope, both)?

I am inclined to think that one ofthe wisest principles of education that Ihave ever come across is what WilliamJames used to tell his students at Har-

vard at the beginning of this century.He called it “the pragmatic principle.”As James summed it up, the pragmaticprinciple is “if it’s true, it makes a dif-ference; if it makes no difference, it’snot true.” Every term I urge my stu-dents to make that the measuring rodof everything I say, they say, or we readtogether in the courses I teach. If, forexample, you can’t possibly imaginewhat difference it makes that God istriune; that is, it makes no differenceto anyone, anywhere, anywhen (asJames liked to put it), then effectivelyit is not true. One has to be able to seeor, at least, to imagine, what differenceany statement makes in order to declare

that statement true. This pragmaticprinciple, I suggest, is bred into Amer-icans. we get it with our mother’s milk.And therefore it must be taken withgreat seriousness in the Catholic intel-lectual tradition as that tradition islived out in this country. Thus, wecannot allow the formation of futureintellectuals (and whom else are weteaching?) within the Catholic tradi-tion to remain simply theoretical. Forwhat we say to be seen as true, ourstudents must see the concrete differ-ence that our statements make. Theymust test out what we teach them.What we say to them about the valueand dignity of human life must be ex-perienced by them as making a differ-ence in fact to someone, somewhere,somewhen. And it is certainly notenough for us to say, “Oh, well, there is the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and thereare various summer service projects inwhich the students can go off and doall sorts of swell things for others.” Wecannot allow that divorce between thelecture hall and their concrete expe-rience. When students return to ourcampuses, they must find opportuni-

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Direct engagement in social justice and service to others is crucial to our students

and to our task as their teachers.

Living ConversationsHigher Education in a Catholic Context

alasdair macintyre

What should be the distinc-tive calling of the Ameri-can Catholic university

or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterpartsby recovering both for them and foritself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond highschool should be, by identifying whathas gone badly wrong with even thebest of secular universities. From aCatholic point of view, the contempo-rary secular university is not at faultbecause it is not Catholic. It is at faultinsofar as it is not a university.

Yet the major Catholic universitiesseem unlikely to accept this calling, ifonly because their administrative lead-ers are for the most part hell-bent onimitating their prestigious secularcounterparts, which already imitate oneanother. So we find Notre Dame glanc-ing nervously at Duke, only to catchDuke in the act of glancing nervouslyat Princeton. What is it that makes thisattitude so corrupting? What has gonewrong with the secular university?

Begin with some well-known andprosaic truths. Since the nineteenthcentury, the number of disciplinesstudied in American universities andcolleges has steadily multiplied. Tophilosophy there were added psychol-ogy and political economy, soon to betransformed into economics, to which

were later added political science andsociology and anthropology. To mathe-matics and physics were added chem-istry and biology. And within each ofthese particular disciplines, subdisci-plines and later sub-subdisciplinesmultiplied. So it has been too with the study of Greek and Latin lan-guages and literature to which wereadded first English, then French, German, and Italian, then Russian,Chinese, Arabic, Farsi and....So too ithas been with the multiplication ofhistorical studies, American, Euro-pean, Asian, African, ancient, medieval,modern, political, social, economic....And in all these areas there is a grow-ing array of subdisciplines and sub-subdisciplines, not to speak of theintroduction of creative writing, oftheater arts, and...and...and....

The history of this multiplicationof disciplines is, of course, also ahistory of increasing specializationby scholars, and of the transforma-tion of university or college teachersinto professionalized, narrowly focusedresearchers who also happen to teach;specialists whose professional successand standing depend in large parton the degree of their identificationwith some particular subdiscipline or subsubdiscipline. Each part ofthe curriculum is someone’s responsi-bility, but no one has a responsibil-ity for making the connectionsbetween the parts. To whom shouldthis matter?

B O S T O N C O L L E G E | C 2 1 R E S O U R C E S | S P R I N G 2007 15

The End of EducationThe Fragmentation of the American University

the Unknown to the unknown isn’tvery helpful. One must have the con-crete experience of agape to under-stand who God is and, more impor-tantly, to experience that God is. And if belief in the existence of God—which is, among other things, affir-mation of purpose, and meaning inlife—is central to ones existence as afully human being (and I cannot imag-ine how the question whether there ispurpose and meaning in life is not),and if education is not merely voca-tional training but the development of a fully human being, and further, if thetried and certain way to belief in Godis concrete and practical love of others,then direct engagement in social justiceand service to others is crucial to ourstudents and to our task as their teach-ers. Not just an important auxiliary—crucial. We cannot introduce othersinto the Catholic intellectual traditionwithout it.

Michael Himes is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and Professor of Theology atBoston College.

Reprinted with permission of the author fromthe Fall 1995 issue of Conversations on JesuitHigher Education.

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It should matter to anyone whothinks it important what conception of human nature and the human condi-tion students have arrived at by thetime they enter the adult workplace andtherefore to any Catholic. For each ofthe academic disciplines teaches us some-thing significant about some aspect ofhuman nature and the human condi-tion. Physics tells us which particlesand forces compose the body as a mate-rial object, while chemistry and bio-chemistry examine it as the site of vari-ous exchanges and reactions. What thefunctioning structures of complex livingorganisms, such as ourselves, are andhow they have evolved we learn frombiology, while sociology, anthropology,economics, and history make humanbeings intelligible in and through theirchanging cultural and social relation-ships. Philosophy—together with thehistory of inquiry—shows us how andwhy we are able to move toward a moreand more adequate understanding ofourselves and our environments, fromtime to time transcending the limita-tions of previous modes of understand-ing. That human beings are also in keypart what they imagine themselves tobe, and how, without works of imagina-tion, human life is diminished, we canonly learn from literary and other aes-thetic studies. Yet, when we have learnedwhat all these different types of disci-plines have to teach—and the catalogueis far from complete—we confront ques-tions that have so far gone unasked, justbecause they are not questions answer-able from within any one discipline.

Ours is a culture in which there isthe sharpest of contrasts between therigor and integrity with which issues ofdetail are discussed within each special-ized discipline and the self-indulgentshoddiness of so much of public debateon large and general issues of great im-port (compare Lawrence Summers oneconomics with Lawrence Summerson gender issues, Cardinal Schönbornon theology with Cardinal Schönbornon evolution). One reason for this con-trast is the absence of a large educatedpublic, a public with shared standards ofargument and inquiry and some sharedconception of the central questions thatwe need to address. Such a public

Continued on Page 16

by fred lawrence

At its best, Rome (taken symbol-ically) epitomized the visionof the Catholic Intellectual

Tradition by its reception of bothJerusalem (seat of Abrahamic reli-gion) and Athens (seat of philosophyand science). This creative receptiv-ity entails living out of the tensionbetween reason and faith with intel-lectual honesty. This is exemplifiedin Thomas Aquinas’ respect forheretics and adversaries because theyhelp us to discover truth we have

not yet understood; and in IgnatiusLoyola’s insistence “that every goodChristian ought to be more willingto give a good interpretation to thestatement of another than to con-demn it as false.”

Alongside the two greatest workson education—Plato’s Republic andRousseau’s Emile—stands Augustine’sDe Doctrina Christiana, which warnsthat the Bible is not a book of scienceand encourages Christians to learn allthey can about nature in order tounderstand it. Further, the medieval

distinction between nature and super-nature, between reason and faith,issued an invitation to reason to claimits proper field of inquiry, to workout its own methods, to operate onthe basis of autonomous principles. It was no accident that universitiesbegan in a Catholic context, becauseLove bestows the fullness of life onhuman intelligence.

Fred Lawrence is an Associate Professor ofTheology at Boston College.

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What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?

16 B O S T O N C O L L E G E | C 2 1 R E S O U R C E S | S P R I N G 2007

would be a good deal less willing toallow issues that need to be debated tobe defined by those who are so wed-ded in advance to their own particularpartisan answers that they have neverfound out what the questions are.And it would be unwilling to toleratethe straitjacketing of debate, so char-acteristic of television, within two-tofive-minute periods, during whicheach participant interrupts and talksdown the others.

The adoption of such a curriculumwould serve both universities and thewider society well. But it would be ofparticular significance for a Catholicuniversity and for the Catholic com-munity. Newman argued that it istheology that is the integrative andunifying discipline needed by any uni-versity, secular, Protestant, or Catholic.And it is in the light afforded by theCatholic faith and more especially byCatholic doctrines concerning humannature and the human condition thattheologians have a unique contributionto make in addressing the questionsthat ought to be central to an other-wise secular curriculum. It is not justthat Catholic theology has its own dis-tinctive answers to those questions,but that we can learn from it a way ofaddressing those questions, not just astheoretical inquiries, but as questionswith practical import for our lives, askedby those who are open to God’s self-revelation. Theology can become aneducation in how to ask such questions.

On this point, it may be said thattheology departments are unlikely toachieve this goal, if only because theycommonly suffer from the same ills of specialization and fragmentation asother departments. Yet of course thedegree to which this is so varies agreat deal from university to univer-sity. It is also true that everything oralmost everything that must be taughtin a reformed curriculum is alreadytaught somewhere in most universities,yet not at present in a way that allows

students to bring together the variousthings that they learn, so that they canunderstand what is at stake in answer-ing the key questions. We do possess theintellectual resources to bring about thekind of change I propose. What we lack,in Catholic and in secular universities,is the will to change, and that absenceof will is a symptom of a quite unwar-ranted complacency concerning ourpresent state and our present direction.

“What then about specialized train-ing for research?” someone will ask.Ours, they may say, is a knowledge-based economy and we cannot do with-out specialized researchers. The typeof curriculum that I am proposing mayteach students to ask questions in adisciplined way, something that is cer-tainly a valuable preliminary to instruc-tion in genuine research techniques,but it does not begin to supply the ap-prenticeship that researchers at thecutting edge need. Indeed it does not.It is liberal education, not job training.But the lesson is to get rid of the con-fusions generated by our predecessors’admiration for the German researchuniversity and to supply both a liberaleducation in the arts and sciences and,for those who aspire to it, a profes-sional, specialized training in researchin the natural or the human sciences.The curriculum I am proposing, in-cluding theology, could perhaps betaught in three well-structured andstrenuous years. A fourth year wouldthereby become available for researchor professional training. We do nothave to sacrifice training in researchin order to provide our students with aliberal education, just as we do not haveto fragment and deform so much ofour students’ education, as we do now.

Alasdair A. McIntyre is the Rev. John A. O’BrienSenior Research Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Notre Dame.

Reprinted with permission of the publisherfrom Commonweal, October 20, 2006.

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The End of Education

America, the national Catholicweekly magazine, has been pub-lished since 1909 by Jesuits in theUnited States for thinking Catholicsand those who want to know whatCatholics are thinking. America isonline at www.americamagazine.org.Subscribe via the Web site or call 1-800-627-9533.

Established in 1924, Commonwealis an independent journal of opinionedited by lay Catholics. It has a spe-cial interest in religion (Catholic andotherwise), politics, war and peaceissues, and culture. Along with arti-cles on current events, it regularlyreviews books, plays, films, and tele-vision. It is published 22 times peryear. Its goal is “to bring a distinc-tively Catholic perspective to bear on the issues of the day.” A trialsubscription is $25. To subscribe, visit www.commonwealmagazine.org.

Conversations on Jesuit Higher Educa-tion is published by the National Semi-nar on Jesuit Higher Education, whichis jointly sponsored by the Jesuit Con-ference Board and the Board of theAssociation of Jesuit Colleges and Uni-versities. The magazine appears twice ayear, in fall and spring. Principal distri-bution is to faculty, administrators, andstaff of the twenty-eight Jesuit collegesand universities and two theologates inthe United States. It is available in elec-tronic form through the MarquetteUniversity Library Web site.

Current Issues is the semiannualjournal of the Association of CatholicColleges and Universities. The pur-pose of the association is to promoteCatholic higher education by sup-porting the member institutions,especially with reference to their

Catholic mission and character, andto serve as The Voice of CatholicHigher Education in the UnitedStates. To sign up for a subscriptionor receive an individual copy, contactthe ACCU office at (202) 457-0650or email Michael Galligan-Stierleat mgs@accunet.org.

Origins is a publication of theCatholic News Service and the U.S.Conference of Catholic Bishops. Itpublishes texts from the Vatican, thePope, bishops, Congress, Senate,Supreme Court, and church leadersaround the world. To subscribe, visit www.originsonline.com.

The Tablet is the British Catholicweekly newsmagazine, established in1840. Readers can be confident thatThe Tablet will be a paper of pro-gressive, but responsible Catholicthinking, a place where orthodoxy isat home but ideas are welcome. Tosubscribe, visit www.thetablet.co.uk/

Woodstock Report is a quarterlypublication of The WoodstockTheological Center, an independentnonprofit institute established by the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) atGeorgetown University in 1974.The mission of the WoodstockTheological Center is to engage intheological and ethical reflection ontopics of social, economic, business,scientific, cultural, religious, andpolitical importance. If you wouldlike to be placed on the mailing listfor the Woodstock Report, pleasee-mail your name and postal addressto woodstock@georgetown.edu.

ContributingPublications

Continued from Page 15

Learn all about the new C21 book series at:www.bc.edu/church21

B O S T O N C O L L E G E | C 2 1 R E S O U R C E S | S P R I N G 2007 17

Gospel, give practical expression to be-ing Good Academic Samaritans? Whatcan American Catholic universities doto mitigate the chronic discrepanciesin the quality of higher education thatmar the universal Church? For the Vat-ican, the unevenness of the resourcesavailable to Church-sponsored insti-tutions in the one Body remains amatter of the gravest concern.

In a joint statement recently issuedby the Congregation for Catholic Edu-cation and the International Federa-tion of Catholic Universities, the HolySee called for an increased exchangeof educational resources by institutionsof the first world with those from dev-eloping regions: “In the light of themission of the university to serve, thiseducational divide can be an oppor-tunity and an avenue where this man-date for service can be realized.”7 Theglobal educational gap in Catholic insti-tutions, evident sometimes even amonguniversities sponsored by the same reli-gious institute, can be overcome onlyby heightened cooperative efforts.

In the United States, there is enor-mous pressure for universities to berecognized as first-class institutions,ranked according to criteria which allotno points for initiatives on behalf ofeducational solidarity. Given this situa-tion, what imaginative and courageoussteps can be taken to create partner-ships with institutions in the emergingnations? In those countries, especiallyin Africa, the need for Catholic highereducation has never been more evident.In truth, Church-related colleges anduniversities are key to these countries’future integral human, economic, andcultural development.

Certainly no silver-bullet solu-tions are available. Nonetheless, atrue mark of a university’s catholic-ity is the extent to which it takes toheart the need to tithe its own aca-demic and financial resources so asto help build up systems of Catholichigher education in the localchurches of developing countries.Collaboration is a concrete expres-sion of educational solidarity andecclesial communion.

Such cooperation should become adistinguishing trait of all Catholic col-leges and universities in the UnitedStates. What they must bring to othersis an educational vision inspired by acourageous and unwavering fidelity tothe principles and practices proposedby Ex Corde Ecclesiae. To begin thelaborious task of closing the educa-tional divide, the Holy See calls foreffective solidarity, an exchange ofacademic gifts and resources, betweenwealthy and successful institutions andthose still on the road to development.

Endnotes1 Cf. Congregation for Catholic Education andthe International Federation of Catholic Univer-sities, Globalization and Catholic Higher Education:Working Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press,2004), Part One, II, 13.

2 Cf. Philip G. Altbach, “Globalization and theUniversity: Myths and Realities in an UnequalWorld,” Seminarium 42:3-4 (2002), 811-813.

3 Cf. Congregation for Catholic Education andthe International Federation of Catholic Univer-sities, Globalization and Catholic Higher Education:Working Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press,2004), Part One, II, 13-14.

4 John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academyof Social Sciences (27 April 2001), 4: L’OsservatoreRomano, English edition, 18 (2 May 2001), 7.

5 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 15.

6 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 30.

7 Congregation for Catholic Education and theInternational Federation of Catholic Universities,Globalization and Catholic Higher Education: Work-ing Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2004),19. See the major publications of the conference,held from 2-6 December 2002 in Rome, in thespecial volume dedicated to this theme in theCongregation for Catholic Education’s journal,Seminarium, 42:3-4 (2002).

Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, is theSecretary of Catholic Education (for Seminariesand Institutes of Study) of the Holy See.

This excerpt is from an address given at BostonCollege on September 11, 2006. Reprintedwith permission of the author.

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by + j. michael miller, csb

W hen they are true to themission expected of them,Catholic universities pro-

pose a particular vision that animatestheir intellectual life and engages theirscholars in a common project. Such avision is all embracing, since it entails adistinctively Catholic way of apprehend-ing reality that inspires a university’steaching, scholarship, and service. ACatholic university lives from, breathes,and seeks to transmit—through itscurriculum, research, and professors—a Weltanschauung grounded in agreat tradition.

This means more than a presenta-tion of the Catholic intellectual tradi-tion in the university’s curriculum andlip service to that tradition in the fac-ulty’s scholarly activities. A Catholicvision can be relished, deepened, andcommunicated only by giving it morethan equal time in a marketplace ofcompeting opinions. One could expectas much—though this does not, admit-tedly, always occur—from a universityfaithful to the liberal tradition of open-ness to all points of view. For its part, aCatholic university is the responsiblebearer of a vision and tradition that canenrich the wider academic and socialcommunities, which look to it to bedistinctive.

During the latter half of the twenti-eth century, the rise of a new spirit ofinternational cooperation promotedthe internationalization of higher edu-cation. As the need to establish world-wide contacts and a global perspectivebecame increasingly apparent, studentand faculty exchanges, research col-laboration, foreign language, and areastudy programs expanded rapidly.1

The first steps of overcoming a deep-rooted American academic isolationism—always out of step with a Churchthat treasures universality—have alreadybeen taken in many universities. Thisis good news. But a fresh challengestill lies ahead. How can Catholic col-leges and universities in the UnitedStates practically foster not just aca-demic inter- nationalization but a cul-

ture of global educational solidarity?

The current situation is complex.On the one hand, globalization enablesfaculty and students to work and studyanywhere and, through technology, tobring some measure of equal access toinformation by all institutions. On theother hand, in many ways the processof globalization also reinforces existingeducational inequality.2 The, universi-ties that are reaping the lions share ofthe benefits of an information-basedeconomy are those from developedcountries. They have the resources toinvest in costly information networksand, through their centers of research,to create new knowledge, over whichthey enjoy a near monopoly.

The other universities, includingmost of those in developing countries,although they benefit from this com-munications revolution, remain con-sumers of the new technology.3 Inmany ways, then, the process of glob-alization is serving to widen the gapbetween “have” and “have not” aca-demic institutions. This process hasbecome an instrument for “a newversion of colonialism.”4

The Catholic university, with itsvision founded on the Gospel, offers away to close the gap. Take, for exam-ple, the parable of the Good Samaritan(cf. Lk 10:25-37) and apply it to theCatholic Academy in the United States.This parable leaves no doubt, writesPope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est,that “anyone who needs me, and whomI can help, is my neighbor. The con-cept of ‘neighbor’ is now universal-ized, yet it remains concrete.”5 Con-cern for our neighbor—and here everyCatholic university should think specif-ically of its academic neighbors—“tran-scends the confines of national commu-nities and has increasingly broadenedits horizon to the whole world.”6

While the Holy Father refrains fromdrawing any concrete implications forthe world of higher education, he opensthe door for us to ask: Where is myneighbor university? How do educa-tional institutions at the service of thewhole Church and committed to the

The Holy See and the Challenges of Catholic Higher Education in the United States

by stephen pope

Tuition, room, and board formany Catholic universitiesruns on average between

$40,000 and $45,000 per year. Thecost of tuition continues to rise fasterthan both income and inflation. Addtransportation, books, fees, and othermiscellaneous expenses, and the totalcost of a four-year bachelor’s degreeoften tops the $180,000 mark at themost prestigious schools. About 60percent of students at all private four-year institutions receive some formof financial aid, and about half of allstudents are forced to borrow to meetexpenses. The steep debt incurredover the course of four years typicallyrequires many times that number ofyears of repayment. Given this expense,many fear that in the years to comeonly the most affluent may be ableto afford a Catholic college education.

This cost should be placed in thecontext of the growing income inequal-ity between the rich and poor in oursociety. On June 19, 1996, the UnitedStates Census Bureau reported thatsince 1968 the average income ofhouseholds in the bottom 20 percentof earners rose a mere 0.8 percent(from $7,702 to $7,762), while the aver-age income of the top 20 percent ofearners rose a staggering 44 percent(from $73,754 to $105,945). The eco-nomic value of a college degree con-tinues to rise as the widening incomegap between those with and those with-out a degree demonstrates. College,more than ever, is a long-term financialinvestment that, on average, pays sub-stantial economic dividends. But therising cost of this education, coupledwith the economic benefits that ityields, raises questions about the rela-tion of Catholic universities to the poorand less affluent.

Add to this combination of the es-calating costs of education and therising income inequality in our societythe danger of increasingly isolatingcollege students from the poor andmaking them less sensitive to poorpeople’s proper worth and rightfulclaims. Catholic higher educationshould not become simply one morefamiliar route for the recycling of the

upper middle class, in essence no dif-ferent from other private universities.Catholic universities cannot simply beplaces where well-to-do students receivea good education in order to assumetheir place in the next generation of corporate and professional elites.How does education of the relativelyaffluent (and sometimes the absolutelyrich) relate to concern for those onthe other end of the social and eco-nomic spectrum?

Two theologians, Jon Sobrino andJohn Henry Newman, have somethingto say about the inevitable tensions un-derlying this question. According to

Jon Sobrino of San Salvador’s CentralAmerican University, compassion musthave the central place in the life of theCatholic university. College studentsand universities themselves must learnto embrace the “preferential optionfor the poor.” Sobrino argues that ifthe Catholic university is to exist ina world of massive suffering and notfunction simply as an “ivory tower,”it must be committed to the poor.Far from paternalistic philanthropy,the preferential option entails solidar-ity—identifying with the poor, beingconverted by them, and participatingin movements for their empowerment.If the Catholic university does not act-ively side with the poor in appropriateways, it will tacitly side with the statusquo and reinforce present structuresof injustice, oppression, and exclusion.

The university is a place where stu-dents and faculty search for the truth,make discoveries, and communicatefindings and insights to the wider

world. Sobrino believes that speakingthe truth is the best remedy for socialinjustice. Above all, knowledge mustbe put at the service of the poor. Onlyin this way is the Catholic university’strue catholicity affirmed—that is, itsopenness to the worth of all people andnot just the economic elite.

The Catholic university cannottherefore be understood in Sobrino’sanalysis as the scene of “value-free,”politically neutral intellectual activity.It should be conceived Christocentri-cally—in light of the Cross and as anexpression of Jesus’ uncompromisinglove for the poor. Sobrino poses to the

Catholic university the question: “Whatcan we do to take the crucified peopledown from their crosses?” Whereasknowledge has all too frequently beenused to support oppression, it oughtnow to be put at the service of thepoor and for the eradication of theirsuffering. Not only theology and phi-losophy, but also political science,sociology, and other disciplines canbe taught in a way that gives central-ity to the needs of the poor.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to Sobrino’s position is found in JohnHenry Newman’s The Idea of a Uni-versity. In his fifth discourse, Newmanexamined the question of the utilityvalue of a college education (somethinga lot of undergraduates wonder aboutduring final exams week). Human beingsnaturally desire to know and the prin-cipal virtue of the university lies inits service of this need rather than anyother. In contrast to even the mostlearned and intellectually demanding

training in the professions and busi-ness, liberal education in the true senseof the term is not intended to servewhat is beyond itself. This is not to saythat it is a good thing for college grad-uates to be driving cabs or bartending,only that the most important feature ofcollege is how it expands the mind, notthe wallet. It is both true and good thathigher education and knowledge alsoprovide career opportunities and finan-cial advantages, but these benefits arenot the primary objectives of education.

But what about compassion? New-man regarded knowledge as valuablein itself whether or not its discoveryis either justified directly by utility or,by implication, motivated by compas-sion. “Knowledge is one thing, virtueis another; good sense is not con-science, refinement is not humility, nor is largess and justness of viewfaith. Liberal education makes notthe Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.” By “gentleman,” New-man meant not a polite person with re-fined sensibilities, but rather one whohas a “philosophic habit of mind” and“a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste,a candid, equitable, dispassionatemind, a noble and courteous bearingin the conduct of life...the connaturalqualities of a large knowledge.” This“enlargement of mind” continues tobe a powerful antidote to bigotry,apathy, and social myopia.

Though a creature of his time, New-man provides a helpful corrective tothe danger of an exclusive focus on whatSobrino sees as central, compassion.Insisting that the search for knowledgebe motivated primarily by compas-sion amounts to a drastic eliminationof one of the most fundamental fea-tures of what makes us human. Theuniversity ought to be a place wherestudents come to greater understandingof things, worth knowing for their ownsakes, a place where the love of learningis not supplanted by other objectives,however legitimate in themselves, andwhere knowledge is not instrumen-talized to other values.

Yet, upholding the intrinsic value ofthe “enlargement of mind” need not beat odds with acknowledging the placeof compassion in the life of an educated

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A Vocation for Catholic Higher Education?

Institutions of higher education that areat once true universities and genuinely

Catholic must be characterized in termsof both an “enlargement of heart” and

an “enlargement of mind.”

Catholic. Catholic higher educationincludes not only intellectual develop-ment, but also the further cultivationof those traits that are characteristi-cally Catholic and Christian, includinglove of God and love of neighbor. Ifthis is true, then we need to recognizethat the well-spoken and prosperousprofessional who makes substantialfinancial contributions to universitydevelopment funds but is utterly in-different to the suffering of the poorshould not be taken as a model gradu-ate of a Catholic university. Catholicuniversities have certainly generatedthose who fit this image, but we oughtto recognize this for what it is—a uni-versity’s success in financial and socialterms but not an exemplar of its coreideals. Sobrino is fundamentally cor-rect on this score. The credibility ofthe Catholic university lies neither inits endowment, nor in its graduationrate, nor in the power and status ofits alumni, but in whether its gradu-ates are genuinely concerned about“taking the crucified people downfrom their crosses.”

Most people will agree that tograduate from a Catholic universityand somehow not to have signifi-cantly enhanced one’s ability to thinkmore deeply about the world, one’snature, and one’s identity is to have“missed the point” of college. Weshould regard compassion in an anal-ogous way, recognizing that to grad-uate from a Catholic college without a more developed awareness of theneeds of the poor and one’s ownsocial responsibility to them is alsoreally to have “missed the point.”Institutions of higher education thatare at once true universities andgenuinely Catholic must be charac-terized in terms of both an “enlarge-ment of heart” and an “enlargement of mind.”

Stephen Pope is a Professor of Theology atBoston College.

Reprinted with permission of the author fromthe March 28, 1997 issue of Commonweal.

—

by mary ann glendon

If you are like most Americans, andlike me before I got interested inthe Universal Declaration, you

probably do not stay up nights thinkingabout the United Nations and its vari-ous pronouncements. So let me beginwith a little background on the Univer-sal Declaration, and why it seemed tome to be worth studying. During WorldWar II, the idea began to percolate thatthere should be some kind of interna-tional bill of rights—a common standardto which all nations could aspire—andby which they could measure their ownand each other’s progress.

One of the first suggestions camefrom Pope Pius XII, who called in aJune 1941 radio address for an interna-tional bill recognizing the rights thatflowed from the dignity of the person.1Another came from the British writerH.G. Wells in a little pamphlet subti-tled “What Are We Fighting For?”2 Butin practical terms, the most consequen-tial support came from several LatinAmerican countries, who comprisedtwenty-one of the original fifty-fivemember nations of the UN when itwas founded in 1945.

It was largely due to the insistenceof the Latin Americans, joined by othersmall nations, that the UN establisheda Human Rights Commission, com-posed of members from eighteen dif-ferent countries. It was chaired byEleanor Roosevelt, who was just thenmaking a new life for herself after thedeath of her husband.

When the Human Rights Com-mission set to work in early 1947, itsfirst major task was to draft a “bill ofrights” to which persons of all nationsand cultures could subscribe. But thatassignment rested upon a couple ofproblematic assumptions: no onereally knew whether there were anysuch common principles, or what theymight be. So UNESCO asked agroup of philosophers—some wellknown in the West, like Jacques Mari-tain, and others from Confucian,Hindu, and Muslim countries—toexamine the question. These philoso-

phers sent a questionnaire to stillmore leading thinkers all over theworld, from Mahatma Gandhi to Teil-hard de Chardin, and in due coursethey reported that, somewhat to theirsurprise, they had found that therewere a few common standards ofdecency that were widely shared, thoughnot always formulated in the languageof rights. Their conclusion was thatthis practical consensus was enoughto enable the project to go forward.

The judgment of the philosopherswas borne out by the experience of thedelegates on the Human Rights Com-mission. This group, too, was highlydiverse, but they had few disagreementsover the content of the Declaration.Their disputes were chiefly political,and chiefly involved the Soviet Unionand the United States hurling accusa-tions of hypocrisy against each other.

On December 10, 1948, the docu-ment was adopted by the UN GeneralAssembly as a “common standard ofachievement.” There were no dissent-ing votes, although the Soviet bloc,Saudi Arabia, and South Africa recordedabstentions. The Declaration quicklybecame the principal inspiration of thepostwar international human rightsmovement; the model for the majorityof rights instruments in the world—over ninety in all—and it serves todayas the single most important referencepoint for discussions of human rightsin international settings.

But the more the human rightsidea caught on, the fiercer became the contests over the meanings of theprovisions of the Declaration. So, afterreturning from the Beijing Women’sConference, I decided to read up a biton the original understanding of theDeclaration. I expected to just go to thelibrary and check out a book or two.But to my surprise, there were no his-tories of the framing at that time, apartfrom three doctoral theses, all doneat European universities. So I began toread the primary sources myself.

It did not take long to realize thatthe framers of the UDHR (UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights), like

legal drafters everywhere, had done agood deal of copying. They drew manyprovisions from existing constitutionsand rights instruments that the staff ofthe UN Human Rights Division hadcollected from all over the world. Theyrelied most heavily of all on two draftproposals for international bills thatwere themselves based on extensivecross-national research. One of theseproposals was prepared under the aus-pices of the American Law Institute,and the other was a Latin Americandocument that became the 1948 BogotáDeclaration of the Rights and Dutiesof Man.

The final draft produced by Mrs.Roosevelt’s commission was a synthesisdrawn from many sources—and thusa document that differed in many waysfrom our familiar Anglo-American rightsinstruments—most noticeably in itsinclusion of social and economic rights,and in its express acknowledgmentthat rights are subject to duties andlimitations. It also differed from social-ist charters, notably with its strongemphasis on political and civil liberties.

Several features of the Declarationset it apart from both Anglo-Americanand Soviet bloc documents. Considerthe following: its pervasive emphasis onthe “inherent dignity” and “worth ofthe human person”; the affirmation thatthe human person is “endowed withreason and conscience”; the right toform trade unions; the worker’s right tojust remuneration for himself and hisfamily; the recognition of the family asthe “natural and fundamental group unitof society,” entitled as such to “protec-tion by society and the state”; the priorright of parents to choose the educa-tion of their children; and a provisionthat motherhood and childhood areentitled to “special care and assistance.”3

Where did those ideas comefrom? The immediate source was the twentieth-century constitutionsof many Latin American and continen-tal European countries. But where didthe Latin Americans and continentalEuropeans get them? The proximateanswer to that question is: mainlyfrom the programs of political parties,

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Catholic Influences on the Human Rights Project

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Catholic Influences on the Human Rights Project

parties of a type that did not exist inthe United States, Britain, or theSoviet bloc, namely, Christian Demo-cratic and Christian Social parties.

But where did the politicians gettheir ideas about the family, work, civilsociety, and the dignity of the person?The answer to that is: mainly fromthe social encyclicals Rerum Novarum(1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).And where did the Church get them?The short answer is that those encycli-cals were part of the process throughwhich the Church had begun to reflecton the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century revolutions, socialism, and thelabor question in the light of Scripture,tradition, and her own experience asan “expert in humanity.”4

The most articulate advocate of thiswhole complex of ideas on the HumanRights Commission was a LebaneseArab of the Orthodox faith, CharlesMalik. In reading the old UN tran-scripts, was struck by Malik’s frequentuse of terms like the “intermediateassociations” of civil society, and byhis emphatic preference for the term“person” rather than “individual.”When I had the opportunity to meetCharles Malik’s son, Dr. Habib Malik,I asked Dr. Malik if he knew wherehis father had acquired that vocabu-lary. The answer was: from the heavilyunderlined copies of Rerum Novarumand Quadragesimo Anno which Malikkept among the books he most fre-quently consulted. Charles Malikthus seems to have been one of thefirst of an impressive line of non-Catholic intellectuals who found atreasure-trove of ideas in Catholicsocial teaching.

The most zealous promoters ofsocial and economic rights, contrary to what is now widely supposed, werenot the Soviet bloc representatives,but delegates from the Latin Ameri-can countries. Except for the Mexicandelegates, most of these people wereinspired not by Marx and Engelsbuy by Leo XIII and Pius XI. Theirfocus was not on the exploitation ofman by man, but on the dignity ofworkers and the preferential optionfor the poor.

I think I have said enough to show

that the contributions of Catholicsocial thought to the Universal Decla-ration were far from insignificant. Butto avoid any misunderstanding, let meemphasize again that this was just oneof many sources of influence on thatimpressively multicultural document.

Now I would like to turn to aconsideration of some of the ways inwhich that influence was reciprocated.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNIVERSAL

HUMAN RIGHTS IDEA ON CATHOLICISM

Here the trail is harder to follow,but I believe it begins in Paris in 1948when the Human Rights Commission-ers were trying to round up supportfrom as many nations as possible forthe final vote on the Declaration inthe UN General Assembly. A key fig-ure in that lobbying process was theFrench member of the Commission,René Cassin. Cassin was a distinguishedFrench lawyer who described himselfas a secular Jew. He had lost twenty-nine relatives in concentration camps,and was later to win the Nobel PeacePrize for his human rights activities.There is an intriguing sentence inCassin’s memoirs where he says thatin the fall of 1948 he was aided on sev-eral occasions by the “discreet personalencouragements” of the Papal Nuncioin Paris.5 That Nuncio was none otherthan Angelo Roncalli, the future PopeJohn XXIII.

Roncalli’s subsequent actions sug-gest that events in the UN that fallmust have made a great impression onhim. It also seems clear that he musthave agreed with Maritain and otherCatholic thinkers that there was valuein discussing certain human goods asrights, even though the biblical tradi-tion uses the language of obligation.In Pacem in Terris, John XXIII refer-red to the Universal Declaration byname and called it “an act of the high-est importance.”6

Many Catholics were surprised, andsome were even shocked, at the extentto which the documents of Vatican II,and John XXIII’s encyclicals Pacem inTerris and Mater et Magistra, seemedto reflect a shift from natural law tohuman rights.”7 Some writers regardthis shift as mainly rhetorical, an effort

on the part of the Church to make herteachings intelligible to “all men andwomen of good will.”8

But I believe it was more than that.I would say it was also part of theChurch’s shift from nature to history,as well as her increasing openness tolearning from other traditions. TheChurch has always taught, with St.Paul, that our knowledge of truth inthis life is imperfect; that “now we seeonly as in a mirror dimly.” But she hasnot always been so forceful as JohnPaul II was in Centesimus Annus whenhe insisted that Christian believers areobliged to remain open to discover“every fragment of truth...in the lifeexperience and in the culture of indi-viduals and nations.”9 A hallmark ofthe thought of John Paul II has beenhis sense of being in partnership withall of humanity in a shared quest fora better apprehension of truth.

With hindsight, we can see thatVatican II only marked the beginningof the Church’s appropriation of mod-ern rights discourse.10 As one of theyounger Council Fathers, Bishop KarolWojtyla from Krakow shared JohnXXIII’s appreciation of the postwarhuman rights project. John Paul IIrepeatedly praised the Universal Dec-laration of Human Rights, calling it“one of the highest expressions of thehuman conscience of our time” and“a real milestone on the path of themoral progress of humanity.”11

Needless to say, the Church’s adop-tion of rights language entailed theneed to be very clear about the factthat she does not always use that ter-minology in the same way it is used insecular circles. Those who think theChurch should never have gone downthat road at all often fail to notice twoimportant facts about the Church’s useof rights language. First, the rights tra-dition into which the Church hastapped is the biblically informed, con-tinental, dignitarian tradition whichshe herself had already done so muchto shape. “The Catholic doctrine ofhuman rights,” Avery Dulles pointsout, “is not based on Locke, an empiri-cism, or individualism. It has a moreancient and distinguished pedigree.”12

Second, the Church did not even

uncritically adopt the dignitarianvision. In Gaudium et Spes, the Coun-cil Fathers say that the movement torespect human rights “must be im-bued with the spirit of the Gospeland be protected from all appearanceof mistaken autonomy. We are tempt-ed to consider our personal rights asfully protected only when we are freefrom every norm of divine law; butfollowing this road leads to the de-struction rather than to the mainte-nance of the dignity of the humanperson.”13 In the same vein, JohnXXIII noted in Pacem in Terris thateverything the Church says abouthuman rights is conditioned by theirfoundation in the dignity that attachesto the person made in the image andlikeness of God, and everything is ori-ented to the end of the common good.And when John Paul II sent his goodwishes to the UN on the occasion ofthe fiftieth anniversary of the Declara-tion in 1998, he challenged the assem-bly with these words: “Inspired by theexample of all those who have takenthe risk of freedom, can we not re-commit ourselves also to taking therisk of solidarity—and thus the risk of peace?”14

Some of the most striking interac-tions between Catholic social thoughtand human rights have occurred in thefield of international advocacy. Withover 300,000 educational, health care,and relief agencies serving mainly theworld’s poorest inhabitants, the Churchhas become an outspoken advocateof social justice in international set-tings. But it is a hard sell. Challeng-ing passages like this one from the1997 World Day of Peace messagedo not sit particularly well withaffluent nations and first-worldinterest groups:

Living out [the] demanding com-mitment [to solidarity] requires a total reversal of the alleged values which make people seek only theirown good: power, pleasure, the un-scrupulous accumulation of wealth ....A society of genuine solidarity can be built only if the well-off, in helping the poor, do not stop at giving from what they do not need. Those livingin poverty can wait no longer. They need help now, and so have a rightto receive immediately what they

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Hannah Arendt has warned that “Theideal subject of totalitarian rule is notthe convinced Nazi or the convincedCommunist, but people for whom thedistinction between fact and fiction...and the distinction between true andfalse...no longer exist.”15

At a time when much of the post-modern secular academy seems to havegiven up on reason and the search fortruth, it is heartening to read the spir-ited defense of reason in the encyclicalFides et Ratio. The “reason” that theChurch defends is not the calculatingreason of Hobbes, in the service ofthe passions, nor is it narrow scientificrationalism. It is the dynamic, recur-rent, and potentially self-correctingprocess of experiencing, understanding,and judging that has animated her besttheologians from Thomas Aquinas toBernard Lonergan.

Endnotes

1 Avery Dulles, “Human Rights: The UnitedNations and Papal Teaching” (Laurence J. McGin-ley Lecture, Fordham University, November 18,1998), 4.

2 H.G. Wells, The Rights of Man, or What AreWe Fighting For? (Middlesex: Penguin, 1940).

3 UDHR, Preamble and Articles 1, 16, 22, 25, & 26.

4 Populorum Progressio, 13.

5 René Cassin, “Vatican II et la Protection de laPersonne,” 13 Journal des Communautés 17 (1966).

6 Pacem in Terris, 143.

7 E.g., Michael Villey, Le Droit et les Droits del’Homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1983).

8 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

9 Centesimus Annus, 46.

10 See Giorgio Filibeck, “Human Rights in theTeachings of John Paul II: Bases and Principles,”46 Al Abhath: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Sci-ences, American University of Beirut (1998); HumanRights in the Teaching of the Church: From JohnXXIII to John Paul II (Vatican City: LibreriaEditrice Vaticana, 1994).

11 Address to the United Nations, Oct. 2, 1979, 7;Address to the United Nations, Oct. 5, 1995, 2.

12 Dulles, “Human Rights,” 12.

13 Gaudium et Spes, 41.

14 John Paul II, World Day of Peace Message1998, 2.

15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(New York: Meridian, 1958), 374.

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned HandProfessor of Law at Harvard University.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher,from James L. Heft, S.M., ed., BelievingScholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals (FordhamUniversity Press, 2005).

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need [emphasis supplied].

At first glance, words like “a right toreceive what one needs” sound uncom-fortably like simplistic, secular socialadvocacy. But the Church’s use of rightslanguage in this context cannot be e-quated with crude mandates for state-run social engineering programs. Forone thing, the Church has always re-frained from proposing specific models:her gift to political science has been,rather, the principle of subsidiarity—which is steadily attracting interest inthe secular world.

Moreover, the Church teaches soli-darity not as a policy, but as a Virtue—avirtue which inclines us to overcomesources of division within ourselves andwithin society. Like any other virtue,solidarity requires constant practice; itis inseparable from personal reform.

The Church’s advocacy for the pref-erential option for the poor has ledher to become a staunch defender ofthe Universal Declaration as an inte-grated whole. While most nations takea selective approach to human rights,the Holy See consistently lifts up theoriginal vision of the Declaration—avision in which political and civil rightsare indispensable for social and eco-nomic justice, and vice versa. At a timewhen affluent nations seem increasing-ly to be washing their hands of poorcountries and peoples, it is often theHoly See, and only the Holy See, thatkeeps striving to bring together thetwo halves of the divided soul of thehuman rights project—its resoundingaffirmation of freedom and its insis-tence on one human family for whichall bear a common responsibility.

As for the future, I believe thedialogue between Catholicism andthe human rights tradition will con-tinue, and that it will be beneficial toboth. One may even imagine that theresources of the Catholic traditionmay be helpful in resolving severalthorny dilemmas that have bedeviledthe human rights project from its out-set, especially the dilemmas arisingfrom challenges to its universality andits truth claims. A fuller exposition ofthat point would require another lec-ture, but let me briefly sketch some waysin which Catholic thinkers might behelpful with regard to these problems.

Take for example the dilemma ofhow there can be universal rights in

view of the diversity among cultureswhich has recently resurfaced with a vengeance. A number of Asian andIslamic leaders (unlike the Asian andIslamic representatives on the originalHuman Rights Commission) take theposition that all rights are culturallyrelative. They claim that so-called uni-versal rights are really just instrumentsof Western cultural imperialism.

The long Catholic experience inthe dialectic between the core teach-ings of the faith and the various cul-tural settings in which the faith hasbeen received helps us to see that to accept universal principles does not mean accepting that they must bebrought to life in the same way every-where. The experience of Catholicism,with the enculturation of its basicteachings, shows that universality neednot entail homogeneity. In fact, thewhole Church has been enriched bythe variety of ways in which the faithhas been expressed around the world.

The framers of the Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights had similarexpectations for the relatively short listof rights that they deemed fundamen-tal. Their writings reveal that theycontemplated a legitimate pluralism informs of freedom, a variety of means of protecting basic rights, and differentways of resolving the tensions amongrights, provided that no rights werecompletely subordinated to others. AsJacques Maritain put it, there can bemany different kinds of music playedon the Declaration’s thirty strings.

It seems unfortunate that that plu-ralist understanding has been almostcompletely forgotten, even by friendsof the human rights project. For themore that Western groups promote atop-down, homogenizing vision ofhuman rights, the more credibilitythey add to the charge of Westerncultural imperialism.

Another dilemma for the humanrights project is the challenge of his-toricism and relativism. If there are no common truths to which all menand women can appeal, then thereare no human rights, and there is littlehope that reason and choice can prevailover force and accident in the realm of human affairs. It is one thing toacknowledge that the human mindcan glimpse truth only as through a glass darkly, and quite another todeny the existence of truth altogether.

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by george coyne, s.j.

W ill the universe ever end?Can we rely on it to con-tinue on and on? The

most recent measurements of the velo-cities of recession of very distant objectsin the universe, supernovae, whichcan serve as standard “light beacons”at distances of about 10 to 12 billionlight years from us, indicate that theuniverse is not only still expandingbut that it is accelerating in its ex-pansion and will, unless we discovera braking mechanism, expand for-ever—an empirically infinite universe.

Several important issues need to beexplained here. To measure such largedistances, we must use probes that areso distant that we cannot experimentupon them. We can only observe themand, in fact, we are limited very muchby what we can observe. An astronomeris like the poor old fellow who, whilemaking his way home in the dark anda bit tipsy, loses his watch. While he issearching for it under a lamppost, agallant policeman comes along andinquires about his activity. He explainsthat he is looking for his watch. “Well,”says the cop, “did you lose it here?”“Oh no,” says he, “but it’s so dark allaround that this is the only place withlight enough that I could possibly findit.” As you will see, to measure the ageof the universe, astronomers must clev-erly, and hopefully more soberly thanthe gentleman searching for his watch,probe where there is light and eventhen, since light travels with a finitevelocity, we are seeing the universeonly as it was, not as it is. “Light bea-cons” are celestial objects that have thesame intrinsic brightness wherever theyare in the universe and can, therefore,serve as distance indicators.

Do a simple experiment. Measurethe brightness of the lamp sitting onyour desk. Now go to the next room,four times farther away from the lamp,and measure its brightness. It will beone-sixteenth as bright (diminished bythe inverse square of the distance).Now reverse the experiment. You knowthe intrinsic brightness of the lamp, ascosmologists do that of supernovae, andyou know how bright it appeals to you

from the next room, as cosmologistsdo by measuring the apparent bright-ness of supernovae.You can, therefore,deduce the distance.

So, if we measure the distance andbrightness of objects at increasinglylarger distances in the universe, we canestablish the curve of expansion of theuniverse and thereby deduce its age. Letme explain. What we are measuring ishow fast all objects, outside our sun-centered system, are moving away fromone another at various epochs in the

history of the universe. At one time,not long after the Big Bang, all of theseobjects were “together.” So we can ex-trapolate backwards to the time whenthey began to separate and, thereby,measure the age of the universe, 13.7billion years.

This is a simple calculation like thefollowing analogous one. Suppose I runa marathon at a constant rate of 4 milesper hour. You are standing at the 20-mile marker with clock in hand. It iseasy for you, knowing my rate and thatyou are at 20 miles from the beginning,to calculate when I began.

Using this simple calculation, in1929 Edwin Hubble discovered theobservational relationship that bears hisname, “the Hubble Law,” and made thefirst calculation of the age of the uni-verse from its expansion. He found for24 galaxies that their velocities of re-cession were directly proportional totheir distances. He later extended themeasurements to more galaxies at largerdistances. A modern version of thesepioneering observations confirms theHubble Law but with much greateraccuracy. In the entire history of obser-vational astronomy this is a remarkablecorrelation. It holds true for all extra-galactic objects: galaxies of all types,

clusters of galaxies of all types, quasars,and supernovae. It is so universally truethat we intuitively surmise that it is say-ing something fundamental about theuniverse itself. And it is. It is telling usthat the universe is expanding uniform-ly. But there is even more to the story.

There are several kinds of super-novae. Astronomers have found thatthe type about which I am speakingcan serve as a light beacon despite itsvery strange and unstable energysource. These supernovae are binary

stars in which a white dwarf, a deadstar whose mass is very compact sothat it has a very large gravity field,sucks matter from its companion giantstar. It becomes suddenly millions oftimes brighter by starting a thermonu-clear furnace in its atmosphere fromthe matter accumulated. This is obvi-ously a very unstable event and lasts for only hundreds of days (the starsinvolved are about 10 billion years old).Nonetheless, we have found that themaximum brightness that it attains canbe an excellent light beacon and in-dicator of distance as I have explainedabove. By measuring these distancesand the velocity of these supernovae,we find that the universe is accelerat-ing in its expansion. This result causesa great deal of head scratching amongcosmologists because it defies the lawof gravity. Matter in the universe shouldbe constantly drawing the universe inand braking its expansion. What ispushing the universe out, so to speak,against the force of gravity so that it isaccelerating? Despite such problemsas this, we now know that, since it isaccelerating, the universe will expandforever and eventually reach the tem-perature of absolute zero so that every-thing in the universe will be dead.There will be no energy. The uni-verse will in this sense be dead but

expanding infinitely.

To appreciate the current age of theuniverse and its temporal infinitude, wemust compare it to the times at whichother events, such as the appearance oflife, have occurred. To do this, I suggestthat the actual age of the universe, 13.7billion years, for which we have no sen-sation, be reduced in our imaginationto one Earth year, one rotation of theEarth about the sun. The followingcalendar results:

We see that the dinosaurs, althoughhaving the good fortune to have beenborn on Christmas Day, only lived forfive days. It took 60 percent of the ageof the universe for the first life to ap-pear on the Earth, but once the Earthwas formed, it took only 21 days orabout 6 percent of the age of the uni-verse for life to appear, but then it tookabout 3 months for the first humans.However, the last day of the year pro-vides startling news. Jesus Christ wasborn only two seconds before the endof the year and Galileo one second.We now have some idea of where wehumans stand with respect to the ageof the universe.

In the course of the aging of theuniverse, the human person has cometo be through the process of physical,chemical, and biological evolution. Asto the evolutionary process, I offer thefollowing brief considerations.

Why did it take 60 percent of theage of the universe for life to begin?

I January: The Big Bang7 February: The Milky Way is born14 August: The Earth is born4 September: First life on the Earth15 December: The Cambrian explosion25 December: The dinosaurs appear30 December: Extinction of the dinosaurs31 December

19.00.00: First human ancestors23.58.00: First humans23.59.30: Age of Agriculture23.59.47: The pyramids23.59.58: Jesus Christ is born23.59.59: Galileo is born24.00.00: Today

The universe is not God and it cannot exist independently of God.

God is working with the universe.

Infinite Wonder of the DivineHow Creationist Notions of Intelligent Design Diminish God

used to prohibit a given moral evilunless that prohibition can be shownto be something that the law is capableof addressing prudently. John Court-ney Murray, following St. ThomasAquinas, argued that human law mustbe framed with a view to the level ofvirtue that it is actually possible toexpect from the people required tocomply with the law. Accordingly,Murray suggested a series of ques-tions that the legislator must con-sider in assessing the prudence of aproposed law: Will the prohibitionbe obeyed, at least by most people?Is it enforceable against the disobe-dient? Is it prudent to enforce thisban, given the possibility of harm-ful effects in other areas of sociallife? Is the instrumentality of a coer-cive law a good means for the eradi-cation of the targeted social evil?And since a law that usually fails isnot a good means, what are the lessonsof experience with this sort of legalprohibition? If legislation is to beproperly crafted—from a moralpoint of view and with the goal ofpromoting the common good of soci-ety—“these are the questions that

jurisprudence must answer.”

In light of all these considerations,society should not expect a great dealof moral improvement from legal pro-hibitions. Instead, the limited effec-tiveness of legal coercion compellingobedience through fear of punishmentas a vehicle toward genuine moralreform means that the legal prohi-bitions must be used with caution in a free society. As Murray explained:

[A] human society is inhumanly ruledwhen it is ruled only, or mostly, by fear. Good laws are obeyed by the generality because they are good laws; they merit and receive the con-sent of the community, as valid legalexpressions of the community’s own convictions as to what is just or un-just, good or evil. In the absence of this consent, law either withers away or becomes tyrannical.

Accordingly, for the law truly toserve the common good, some levelof consensus as to the goodness ofthe law is essential. And, in the face ofwidespread moral disagreement on an

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by gregory a. kalscheur

As John Courtney Murray rec-ognized in 1960, the Americanmind “has never been clear

about the relation between morals andlaw.” Murray’s critical contribution toour current need for more nuancedthinking lies in his efforts to bring clar-ity to our understanding of that essen-tial relationship. He explained that ourconfusion about the relation betweenlaw and morality often stems from ourfailure to understand that legal prohibi-tions are not capable of dealing withevery sort of moral evil.

Invoking traditional rules ofjurisprudence, Murray explained thatthe lawmaker must engage in a “sub-tle discipline, at once a science and anart, that mediates between the imper-atives of the moral order and the com-mands or prohibitions of the civil law.”The “subtle discipline” of jurispru-dence reminds us that there is a dif-ference between sin and crime.

Morality (which governs all of hu-man conduct) and law (which gov-

erns the public order of society) arenot coextensive in their functions.Legal prohibitions can have only alimited effect on shaping moral char-acter. Accordingly, Murray arguedthat people can “be coerced only to a minimal amount of moral action.”Indeed, “the moral aspirations of thelaw are minimal.”

If society wishes to elevate and main-tain moral standards above the minimallevel required for the healthy func-tioning of the social order, it must lookto institutions other than the law. Thestate and law, therefore, have a neces-sary—but a necessarily limited—roleto play in society’s work of establishingand maintaining the common good.

Murray insisted that law and moral-ity are essentially related, but necessar-ily differentiated. Because the coerciveforce of the state ultimately lies behindthe law, the law must not moralizeexcessively. If it does so, “it tends todefeat even its own modest aims, bybringing itself into contempt.”

The law, therefore, should not be

that they fondly hope for the durabil-ity of certain gaps in our scientificknowledge of evolution, so that theycan fill them with God. This is theexact opposite of what human intelli-gence is all about. We should be seek-ing for the fullness of God in creation.We should not need God, we shouldaccept him when he comes to us.

But the personal God I have de-scribed is also God, creator of theuniverse. It is unfortunate that,especially in America, creationism hascome to mean some fundamentalistic,literal, scientific interpretation ofGenesis. Judaic-Christian faith isradically creationist, but in a totallydifferent sense. It is rooted in a beliefthat everything depends upon God, or better, all is a gift from God. Theuniverse is not God and it cannotexist independently of God. Neitherpantheism nor naturalism is true.God is working with the universe.The universe has a certain vitality ofits own like a child does. It has theability to respond to words of endear-ment and encouragement. You disci-

pline a child but you try to preserveand enrich the individual character ofthe child and its own passion for life.A parent must allow the child to growinto adulthood, to come to make itsown choices, to go on its own way inlife. Words that give life are richerthan mere commands or information.In such wise ways does God dealwith the universe—the infinite, ever-expanding universe. That is why, itseems to me, that the IntelligentDesign Movement, a largely Americanphenomenon, diminishes God, makeshim a designer rather than a lover.

George Coyne, S.J., served for many years asthe Director of the Vatican Observatory.

Reprinted with permission from The Tablet,December 10, 2005.

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How did we humans come to be inthis evolving universe? It is quite clearthat we do not know everything aboutthis process. But it would be scientifi-cally absurd to deny that the humanbrain is a result of a chemical com-plexification in an evolving universe.After the universe became rich in cer-tain basic chemicals through the birthand death of stars, those chemicals gottogether in successive steps to makeever more complex molecules. Finally,in some extraordinary chemical process,the human brain came to be the mostcomplicated machine that we know.

Did all of this happen by chanceor by necessity in this evolving uni-verse? Was it destined to happen?The first thing to be said is that theproblem is not formulated correctly.It is not just a question of chance ornecessity because, first of all, it isboth. Furthermore, there is a thirdelement here that is very important. It is what I call “fertility.” What thismeans is that the universe is so prolificin offering the opportunity for thesuccess of both chance and necessary

processes that such character of theuniverse must be included in the dis-cussion. The universe is 13.7 billionyears old, it contains about 100 tril-lion galaxies, each of which contains100 billion stars of an immense vari-ety. Thus, it is the combination ofchance and necessary processes in afertile universe that best explains theuniverse as seen by science. When wecombine these three elements—chance,necessity, and the fertility of the uni-verse—we see clearly that evolution, as many hold, is not simply a random,blind process. It has a direction andan intrinsic destiny. By intrinsic, Imean that science need not, and infact cannot methodologically, invoke a designer as those arguing for intelli-gent design attempt to do.

How are we to interpret this scien-tific picture of life’s origins in terms ofreligious belief? Do we need God toexplain this? Very succinctly, my answeris no. In fact, to need God would be avery denial of God. God is not the re-sponse to a need. One gets the impres-sion from certain religious believers

American Catholics and the State

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reflected his deep concern to promotegenuine dialogue at the heart of com-mon life in a pluralistic society—a gen-uine dialogue often sadly lacking incontemporary public life. If the publicdiscourse leading to the enactment of alaw fails to include genuine attempts tohelp people understand why the moralvision underlying the law promotes thecommon good, a disjunction will con-tinue to exist between law and morality.

As a result, the style of public dis-course about law is crucial. A proposedlaw’s moral rationale must be commu-nicated in ways that people can acceptand understand. One’s partners in dia-logue must be treated with respect. Inorder to promote greater clarity in thepublic conscience, the Church mustengage Catholic public officials andAmerican society more generally in agenuine conversation about how bestto promote the common good. Forthat conversation to be effective, theparticipants cannot be locked in posi-tions of immovable dogmatic certi-tude. Instead, the conversation mustgo forward in a spirit of shared pursuitof the truth, fostering a genuine dia-logue of mutual listening and speaking,

where all sides are willing to learn aswell as teach.

What does it mean to be an Ameri-can Catholic in public life in today’spluralistic, democratic society? Itmeans one is called to moral integrityand undivided conscience; to be a per-son striving to base his or her politicalviews “on his or her particular under-standing of the human person and thecommon good.” It is to be a personengaged in the “subtle discipline” oftrying to build a social, political, andlegal order that reflects the imperativesof the moral order, without confusinglaw and morality. And in the midst ofpluralism and deep moral disagree-ment, it is to be a member of a churchwilling to engage in the nuanced re-flection and genuine dialogue that areessential if we are to form hearts andminds committed to a culture of life.

Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J., is an AssistantProfessor at the Boston College Law School.

Reprinted with permission of the author fromAmerica, August 2, 2004.

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issue, the public conscience may needto be clarified through nonlegal educa-tive efforts in an atmosphere of rea-soned dialogue and factual argumentbefore the law can effectively promotethe common good. In the absence of abasic moral consensus, any attempt tochange the law will be unenforceable,ineffective, and resented as undulyrestrictive of freedom.

Murray’s thought helps us to recog-nize that efforts to translate moralprinciples directly into legal prohibi-tions may sometimes damage thecommon good. An official who fullyaccepts the Church’s teaching on abor-tion as a grave moral evil still mustmake a judgment in conscience as tohow the law can most effectively dealwith that particular evil within thewider context of concern for thecommon good. What sort of political-legal response will actually reducethe number of abortions in the UnitedStates in the face of current constitu-tional and social realities?

In evaluating whether or not a pub-lic official’s policy positions are consis-tent with a desire to protect life, we

need to pursue an inquiry that consid-ers abortion within the context of awider range of legal-political questions.Other areas of the law can and mustcontribute to nurturing the virtuesnecessary to supporting a culture of life.

What sort of a society are webecoming through the entire range oflegal policies we advocate and enact?Who are we becoming as a societywhen we regularly invoke the deathpenalty? What sort of a society do webecome if we overzealously restrictcivil liberties in response to terrorism,or if our immigration law and bordercontrol policies undervalue the dignityof the lives of immigrants? Have welistened to the voices of women whohave felt compelled to make the choicefor abortion, and are we working toestablish a set of social policies thatmight provide women with the supportneeded to make the decision to carrytheir babies to term? In short, are weworking to build a legal system that as a whole supports and promotes thevirtues necessary to protect humandignity and sustain a culture of life?

John Courtney Murray’s work

the church in the 21st century centerboston collegeheffernan house 110 college roadchestnut hill, massachusetts02467

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