THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HER UNIVERSITIES - A VIEW FROM HISTORY
Monsignor John Tracy Ellis
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, November 3, 1986
You will be doing the greatest possible benefit to the Catholic cause
all over the world, if you succeed in making the University a middle
station at which clergy and laity can meet, so as to learn to understand
and to yield to each other- and from which, as from a common ground,
they may act in union upon an age, which is running headlong into
infidelity.1
In the 113 years since Newman wrote those words to George Fottrell, an
alumnus of the Catholic University of Ireland, the Catholic Church has
witnessed considerable progress in, so to speak, closing the gap between
the clergy and laity in the academic communities that operate under the
Church's auspices, a progress that has been clearly manifest in the 234
Catholic colleges and universities of the United States. It remains,
however, a prime requisite in 1986 if these institutions are to prosper
and to fulfill their dual responsibility to maintain the highest
academic standards and at the same time preserve their distinctly
Catholic character and tradition. Failure to sustain the former renders
them suspect in the eyes of their American secular counterparts, a
suspicion they can ill afford; failure to sustain the latter calls in
question their fidelity to the truths that nurtured their origins and
that have given warrant for their espousal as valid representatives of
the Church's commitment to the world of learning. Parenthetically, it is
to be hoped that the synod to be held in Rome a year from now on the
role of the laity will lend strength to this clerical-lay Partnership in
a way that will enhance the laity's meaningful participation. For if the
synod should fail to provide for the laity to be heard, that is, for the
clergy to listen and take seriously the responsible lay voice it may,
indeed, do more harm than good in further alienating laymen and
laywomen, and thus deprive the world's Catholic community of their
special talents and skills.
That the reconciliation of these lofty goals in the context of the
Catholic university -and here I mean to include Catholic colleges and
seminaries as well as institutions that bear the name of universities
-has been, is, and will continue to be at times extraordinarily
difficult, giving rise to occasional anguished confrontations, must, I
believe, be taken for granted. True, it is a somber thought, but one
that finds documentation in the Church's history in an unmistakable way.
Never has there been an extended period during those nearly 2,000 years
that has failed to furnish examples of what is meant, that is, a clash
of minds between persons of varying views, each in his and her own way
acting in what they believe to be the Church's best interests, even when
they were diametrically opposed on a given question.
The New Testament affords any number of examples that illustrate the
facts, such as that in the synagogue of Caparnaum when Jesus taught the
doctrine that his followers must eat his flesh and drink his blood. In
describing that scene Saint John remarked, 'After hearing it, many of
his followers said, 'This is intolerable language. How could anyone
accept it?' . After this, many of his disciples left him and stopped
going with him."2 To cite an even more striking instance, when Peter and
Paul met at Antioch and had their dispute over the observance of Jewish
practices of the old law, Paul declared, "I opposed him to his face,
since he was manifestly in the wrong."3 Without intending to lend to
this exchange at Antioch an unwarranted contemporary application, the
account suggests that the conservative stance of Peter was overruled by
the more open and progressive attitude of Paul.
Thus has it been from the apostolic age to our own day, and thus will it
continue in one form or another to the end of time. The situation
partakes of the mystery foreshadowed by Simeon when he told the Mother
of the Babe in his arms, "You see this child: he is destined for the
fall and for the rise of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is
rejected ..."4 Nor did the adult Christ foretell otherwise. "Do you
suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth?", he asked. "No, I tell
you, but rather division. For from now on a household of five will be
divided three against two and two against three ..."5 For those who are
believers these words of the aged prophet and of the Master himself have
an enduring value that helps to explain the periodic conflicts that
arise in Catholic university communities over the interpretation of the
Church's teaching on doctrinal and moral issues.
If these words pose a genuine mystery they yet assist in the sense that
they make more understandable that a final solution will not always be
found in such controversial areas. Each case must be judged on its own
merits with the opposing sides given open and fair hearing and
investigation to enable the conflicting parties, if possible, to arrive
at a settlement that will both respect the Church's teaching and at the
same time give recognition to the individual's rights of expression. No
one in his or her sane mind will maintain that this procedure will be
other than difficult, indeed, on occasion difficult to the point of
anguish; nor will a realist anticipate that the final result will fully
satisfy all the contending parties. A procedure of this kind, however,
is about the best that can be expected when one allows for the
inevitable limitations that attend every endeavor, due to humankind's
all too fallible judgment.
The Catholic Church's association with universities is a centuries-old
phenomenon, marked by repeated sharp conflicts that often entailed
prolonged and impassioned controversies between faculties and the local
bishop, as well as occasioning disputes that involved the pope when the
contending parties appealed to his jurisdiction. This is not the place
to attempt a summary of those conflicts that beset not only the Catholic
universities of the Middle Ages but those of the modern era as well. Let
the University of Paris in the lifetime of Saint Thomas Aquinas
illustrate the point. When, for example, the newly founded mendicant
friars appeared on the scene they met immediate and fierce opposition
from such diocesan priest professors such as William of Saint-Amour,
Gerard d'Abbeville et al., who were determined to keep the friars out of
teaching posts in the university. It was only through an appeal to the
pope that the friars overcame the opposition of the diocesan clergy and
the Bishop of Parish.
Nor were the academic feuds at Paris in those years confined to rivalry
between the diocesan clergy and the religious orders. A decade later
trouble arose because of ideological differences pertaining to the
espousal by Aquinas and his followers of certain teachings of Averroes
who, in turn, had leaned heavily on Aristotle. To the traditionalists
this was a betrayal of Saint Augustine's scholasticism which had been
their principal source of inspiration. Here Thomas Aquinas paid the
penalty of having introduced a new approach and occasioned a dispute
that ultimately led to a condemnation of 13 Averroist theses. Thereupon
the university was thrown into such turmoil that in 1272 there ensued a
suspension of all lectures and other academic activities for a period of
several months. Similar happenings could be cited for other Catholic
universities of the medieval and modern periods, but this brief sketch
of events at Paris in the mid-thirteenth century will, I hope, be
sufficient to indicate the nature and lengthy history of the problem.
It is a truism that each succeeding age has its predominant ideology or
ideologies, and that men and women are influenced for or against the
contemporary currents of thought that swirl around them. For example,
Catholics in an academic context inevitably think quite differently if
their society accepts the supernatural as a prime element in their lives
-as was the case in the time of Thomas Aquinas or if they find
themselves members of a society that expressly excludes religion from
the public domain, leaving that aspect of life entirely to the private
domain with each individual free to settle matters according to his or
her conscience. Thus when Catholics in the early days of the American
Republic took the first feeble steps to inaugurate a system of education
on their own, their approach was conspicuously at variance with that to
which Aquinas would have been accustomed in that so-called age of faith.
This fundamental fact can be exemplified by noting the emphasis in an
early prospectus published by what was destined to become Georgetown
University, the first Catholic college of the United States. Here is the
way in which the founders of that school in 1798 envisioned as its
leading motivation and purpose:
Persuaded that irreligion and immorality in a youth, portend the most
fatal evils to subsequent periods of life, and threaten even to disturb
the peace, and corrupt the manners of society at large: the directors of
this Institution openly profess that they have nothing so much at heart
as to implant virtue and destroy in their pupils the seeds of vice-Happy
in the attainment of this sublime object, they would consider their
success in this alone, as an ample reward for their incessant endeavors7
One need not remark that today Father Timothy Healy, his Jesuit
confreres, and their lay associates would hardly express Georgetown's
goals in those terms. Yet, mutatis mutandis, that was the prevailing
ideology that brought into being Mount Saint Mary's College in
Emmitsburg (1808), Notre Dame (1842), and other Catholic institutions of
higher learning throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In this regard, however, the Catholic institutions were not especially
unique, for up to and beyond the Civil War most of their non-Catholic
counterparts operated under much the same auspices. Student conduct was
closely supervised in all American colleges where the principal in loco
parentis was enforced. Thus among the regulations governing student life
at Notre Dame there was a rule in 1868 that read:
No book, periodical or newspaper shall be introduced into the College,
without being previously examined and approved by the Director of
Studies. Objectionable books found in the possession of Students, will
be withheld from them until their departure from the University.8
In an atmosphere of paternalism and an authoritarian spirit of this kind
it was not surprising that the issue of academic freedom as we know it
today scarcely existed either in Catholic circles or in most academic
communities out- side the Church. Among the latter it first appeared in
the guise of religious freedom for professors who in the generation
after the Civil War espoused Charles Darwin's highly controversial
theories of evolution.
Evolution was a subject that remained all but a terra incognita among
Catholics until the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. It then
came to the surface when a proposal was made by Bishop John J. Keane,
first Rector of the Catholic University of America, backed by Archbishop
John Ireland of Saint Paul, to engage the English biologist and
evolutionist, Saint George Mivart, a convert to Catholicism, for the new
university scheduled to open in Washington in November, 1889. Opposition
to Mivart was raised by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York, who
had the support of Archbishop Patrick J. Ryan of Philadelphia and as a
consequence Mivart's appointment was set aside. A few years later when
Father John A. Zahm, C.S.C., of Notre Dame published his book, Evolution
and Dogma, in 1896, he incurred censure for his Darwinian sympathies by
the Congregation of the Index, whereupon Zahm quietly accepted Rome's
decision, and as one biographer stated, "Thereafter he published nothing
more on science or on the relations of science and religio."9 And John
Zahm was only one in a series of losses to Catholic scholarship that was
to characterize the years immediately ahead, a period bedeviled by the
so-called heresy of Americanism and the graver crisis known as
Modernism. While Zahm took his departure from academic pursuits in a
humble and submissive way, it was not without a somewhat significant
observation in a private letter to his brother, Albert, also a
scientist, in which he said:
With possibly one or two exceptions among the younger priests, not one
at N.D. has the faintest conception of the wants of a university, and
the demands of the age in which we live.10
Unfortunately, that state of mind persisted in Catholic academic ranks
long thereafter, and among the clergy, who then dominated these
institutions, it was by no means confined to the Holy Cross community at
Notre Dame.
It is not that Catholics of that time had no source from which to learn
the true character of a university, for nigh to a half century before
these happenings involving Mivart and Zahm, a description of what
constituted a university worthy of the name had been published when
Newman's article entitled, "What is a University?" appeared in 1854. His
answer to the question posed in his title is as valid today as it was
nearly 140 years ago. He answered the question in these words:
It is a place ... in which the intellect may safely range and speculate,
sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the
tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and
discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and
error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with
knowledge...11
In my judgment, it would be difficult for the most sophisticated
educational theorist of the 1980's to improve on that definition.
In all that pertains to the tangled skein of relations between
ecclesiastical authority and the Church's academic communities the
historical record clearly reveals periods of relative quiet which are,
in turn, succeeded by the renewal of high tension and sharp conflict.
The latter have normally been induced by the rise of new concepts, such
as those represented by Americanism and Modernism at the turn of the
present century, by theological developments that begot Pius XII's
warning encyclical, Humani generis in August 1950, and by Vatican
Council II from the interpretation of which emerged contrary schools of
thought, the effects of which are still with us. In other words, this
relationship displays an ebb and flow strongly influenced by new
currents of thought championed or opposed by strong personalities on
both sides, most of whom have been motivated by what they thought were
the best interests of the Church.
If the result has been strained tempers, occasional angry encounters,
and at times almost exhaustive combat that must be expected and
patiently borne. It is a situation that has been exemplified in the
ecumenical councils of the Church where the statement of the
distinguished historian of the councils, the late Monsignor Hubert
Jedin, can be equally applied to the Catholic universities. The
assistance of the Holy Spirit, said Jedin, guarantees the decisions of a
council to be free from error, but, he added, it
does not dispense with the most strenuous efforts to arrive at the
truth; on the contrary, it presupposes and demands such efforts. Truth
is reached in any community by means of an exchange of opinions, by
arguments for and against, that is, by means of an intellectual struggle
... the toll paid by human nature in the councils is the price which the
visible Church has to pay for being in the midst of the human race.12
In certain instances the conflict will have touched only a very few and
will have ere long died away as was the case with Americanism. At other
times the strong and decisive action of ecclesiastical authority will
have broken the opposition and brought about its demise as was true of
Modernism. Still other cases have resulted in temporary losses to
scholarship when progressive and creative minds such as those of Yves
Congar, Jean Danielou, and John Courtney Murray- to name only three of
several dozen who suffered punishment in the wake of Humani generis
-were fully vindicated some years later by Vatican Council II in which
they, and others of their mind, played influential and honorable roles.
It is, then, a mixed picture that admits of no fixed formula or pattern
of development, no more than it suggests the possibility of a ready-
made solution. On the contrary, history's testimony supports the thesis
that there is no precise line of action that will always apply or
succeed. In one form or another the problem will be with us until the
end of time, and that because of the built-in tension that has ever, and
will ever, obtain between the teaching of the Church and that of the
world.
Allowing for these facts, and keeping in mind the magisterium's right
and duty to safeguard the depositum fidei, the situation calls for the
highest degree of prudence, balance, and caution. Yet it does not follow
that the Church is best served by an immediate stop to all discussion
with each statement from ecclesiastical authority. To adopt that
attitude would be equivalent to stifling all research and thus render
Catholic universities devoid of their life blood. In that connection I
would call attention to the article of Gerald Fogarty in America of
October 11, 1986, where an account of the case of Henry Poels who taught
Old Testament at the Catholic University of America from 1904 to 1910 is
highly instructive. In that instance a grave injustice was done to a
devoted priest-professor, an instance which at the same time illustrates
the enormously complicated character of these theological disputes.
Admittedly, no recourse to past events can resolve contemporary
problems; but they can offer signals, so to speak, of what to avoid lest
one repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us. And here, it
seems to me, we can all learn from certain respected and tested voices
from the past concerning the spirit in which these delicate questions
involving the policy of Catholic universities should be conducted.
Permit me to quote two such witnesses whose names, I believe, bear
witness to their fundamental loyalty to the Church's authority, even if
on occasion they may have been in advance of their time and thus
incurred censure by opponents of their views. In the course of his
famous Dublin lectures of 1852 which the learned world knows as The Idea
of a University, Newman stated:
I say, then, that it is a matter of primary importance in the
cultivation of those sciences, in which truth is discoverable by the
human intellect, that the investigator should be free, independent,
unshackled in his movements; that he should be allowed and enabled,
without impediment, to fix his mind intently, nay, exclusively, on his
special object, without the risk of being distracted every other minute
in the process and progress of his inquiry, by charges of
temerariousness, or by warnings against extravagance or scandal.13
A half century later John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Peoria, spoke in
a similar vein in the Church of the Gesu at Rome on the topic,
"Education and the Future of Religion, when he declared:
To forbid man to think along whatever line, is to place oneself in
opposition to the deepest and most invincible tendency of the civilized
world. Were it possible to compel obedience from Catholics in matters of
this kind, the result would be a hardening and sinking of our whole
religious life. We should more and more drift away from the vital
movements of the age, and find ourselves at last immured in a spiritual
ghetto, where no man can breathe pure air, or be joyful of strong of
free.14
These were strong words, to be sure, yet uttered by two churchmen who
though perhaps in advance of their contemporaries, as I remarked above,
were men whose subsequent careers proved beyond doubt their fundamental
loyalty to the Church.
Does that infer that there is then no limit to dissent within the
Church? It does not. To be valid, dissent must bear with it a strong
measure of modesty, humility, and basic loyalty, as well as an implicit
recognition that the dissenter in the end may be proven to have been
wrong. I have never found the point better expressed than by Henri de
Lubac in his volume of a generation ago, The Splendour of the Church.
Thinking in terms of what he called 'the man of the Church', he put it
this way:
Certainly, as long as the order is not final he will not abandon the
responsibilities with which he has been invested by his office or
circumstances. He will, if it should be necessary, do all that he can to
enlighten authority; that is something which is not merely a right, but
also a duty, the discharge of which will sometimes oblige him to
heroism. But the last word does not rest with him. The Church, which is
his home, is a 'house of obedience15'.
It was in that sense that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin addressed the
General of the Jesuits when charges had been lodged against his
orthodoxy, "It is on this important point of formal loyalty and
obedience," he wrote:
"that I am particularly anxious -it is in fact my real reason for
writing this letter- to assure you that, in spite of any apparent
evidence to the contrary, I am resolved to remain a 'child of
obedience'."16
I confess that testimony of a similar kind from Thomas Merton to Abbot
James Fox of Gethsemani, of Newman to his ordinary, William B.
Ullathorne, O.S.B., Bishop of Birmingham, of John Courtney Murray to his
superiors in the 1950's, and more recently of Leonardo Boff, O.F.M., the
Brazilian theologian, have impressed on me the importance of this
principle. It is an impression that has taken on a deeper and abiding
meaning when I reflect on the sad cases of Felicite de Lamennais, of
Johann Ignaz Dollinger, of Alfred Loisy et al. These were all men of
singular intellectual gifts, scholars whose life stories have enlivened
and enriched the Church's history. In that regard, most of those
mentioned here measured up - if a few did not-to the Master's caution
when speaking of the final judgment that awaits each one of us when he
told his disciples:
When a man has had a great deal given him, a great deal will be demanded
of him; when a man has a great deal given him on trust, even more will
be expected of him.17
In all that pertains to the relationship of ecclesiastical authority vs.
academic freedom, and this is especially true in the American context,
there inevitably arises the question of admittance or denial of due
process. If it is given great emphasis in American institutions of
higher learning, they by no means invented the concept. The central idea
behind due process has an ancient line- age, aspects of which appear in
the New Testament. During the course of the trial of Jesus, Nicodemus
interposed and asked his fellow Pharisees, "But surely the Law does not
allow us to pass judgment on a man without giving him a hearing and
discovering what he is about?"18 And years later when Saint Paul was
held prisoner at Caesarea, Festus, the governor, explaining the
background of Paul's case to the visiting King Agrippa remarked
concerning Paul's opponents.
I told them that Romans are not in the habit of surrendering any man
until the accused confronts his accusers and is given an opportunity to
defend himself against the charge.19
Infringement of that principle has at times cost the Church dearly and
injured her reputation for fair dealing. The nearly twenty centuries of
Christian history have witnessed no diminishment in this regard; indeed,
it has gained in strength and force as the concept of human rights has
moved to center stage in the aftermath of World War II during which
these rights were so outrageously violated. In the light of this fact,
to say nothing of her own teaching on the dignity of the human person in
Vatican Council II, the Church has reason to be especially vigilant on
this score. That was uppermost in the mind, of John Courtney Murray when
he maintained the year after the council:
What comes to the fore today is the need that the corrective or punitive
function of authority should be performed under regard for what is
called in the common-law tradition, 'due process' The demand for due
process of law is an exigency of Christian dignity and freedom. It is to
be satisfied as exactly in the Church as in civil society (one might
indeed say, more exactly).20
Whether in explicit terms or by implication the concept of due process
has found a place in the mounting literature on the Catholic
universities in our time. It is inherent in the defense of academic
freedom propounded by the Land-of-Lakes statement of July, 1967, as it
has been in the more recent documents issued by the International
Federation of Catholic Universities. One might wish that it would have
found expression in statements emanating from the Congregation for
Catholic Education, such as the proposed schema for the world's Catholic
universities that the congregation circulated in April, 1985. That
document, as is well known has met with strong criticism from 100 or
more presidents of the Church's colleges and universities in this
country, while at the same time winning support from other Catholics in
the academic community.
Given present circumstances, it is difficult to see how recurring
clashes between these two schools of thought can be avoided if the idea
of due process and kindred matters do not win some consideration in the
thinking of Roman curia officials. True, it will not be easy to work out
a compromise, but to employ a cliché, where there is a will there is a
way. Any genuine compromise normally means that each side has yielded
something of its ideal to its opposite. Considering what is at stake,
certainly no right-minded Catholic will maintain that the effort is not
eminently worthwhile. Perhaps a quiet acceptance of a status questionis
that is less than ideal in the view of both sides may be the ultimate
outcome. If so, they would have a precedent in the situation that
obtained for nigh to two centuries during which Rome was not happy with
the American constitutional principle of separation of Church and State.
Yet they forbore from insisting that American Catholics should work for
a change in that regard, until finally in December, 1965, the
Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican Council II put an end to the
awkward and often embarrassing situation for, it is to be hoped, all
time to come.
Let me now turn to an aspect of Catholic higher education that, in my
opinion, should remain a paramount concern of every one of the 234
Catholic colleges and universities of this country with their more than
half million students, as well as of the 319 seminaries with the
enrollment of 10,000 candidates for the priesthood. I refer to the
perennial need to emphasize a deter- mined effort to achieve excellence
as a prime goal of every institution of higher learning worthy of the
name. More than thirty years ago, I raised this issue and encountered
considerable opposition, although the response was in the main
distinctly positive. I raise it here again, for allowing that in this
regard there has been marked improvement since the 1950's, I still
believe that we American Catholics are far from where we ought to be on
the scale of superior achievement in the humanities and liberal arts,
areas wherein it may rightly be expected that we should make a
conspicuous showing in view of the tradition which is our alleged
heritage and to which we so often give rhetorical expression without the
accompaniment of solid scholarly production to prove we take seriously
what we affirm.
Obviously, the attainment of academic excellence is often dependent on
material resources as well as on gifted minds professionally trained in
their respective disciplines. Up to a generation or two ago we could
plead our lack of financial strength, but that is long since gone. As I
have frequently phrased it, the United States is teeming with Catholic
millionaires, a fact borne out a decade ago in the findings of Andrew
Greeley on average family income of non-Spanish speaking white Catholics
who were second only to the Jews and ahead of the Episcopalians and
Presbyterians.21 Today it is a truism to state that Catholics have
become a prominent element in the mainstream of the national society.
That fact has, I presume, something to do with the presence of five
Catholic universities among the 100 with the highest endowments in the
country, the five led by Notre Dame (No. 22) with over $300,000,000,
with Loyola of Chicago, Georgetown, Saint Louis, and Santa Clara
following in that order.22
The situation, however, is related to a far more basic matter than the
presence or absence of financial resources, important as that aspect
surely is. Parenthetically, my own alma mater, The Catholic University
of America, has suffered grievously in that regard with an endowment of
c. $25,000,000, far excelled by a number of select secondary schools in
New England and elsewhere. Were I to be asked what has been the
principal deterrent to Catholic institutions achieving distinction on a
scale commensurate with their number and with the more than 52,000,000
Catholics who constitute roughly twenty-two percent of the population of
the Republic, I would unhesitatingly say it has been due to a pervasive
lack of love of learning for learning's sake. To be sure, it is a
national characteristic regardless of people's religious affiliation.
Were that not so the late Richard Hofstadter could not have published
his large volume entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.23 In
that regard, alas, Catholics have been 110% American! Catholics have,
indeed, made their mark in politics, the professions, and in the world
of business and finance; but when one turns to the things of the mind,
the picture is much less impressive.
It is no recent phenomenon since it has characterized American Catholic
'life almost from the beginning. Thus in the year of the nation's first
centennial, 1876, the leading Catholic church historian of that day,
John Gilmary Shea, who by current terminology would be described as
triumphalistic and defensive, went so far as to declare, "In literature,
science and the arts, we have made little mark and are behind even the
modest position of the country at large".24 In the same centennial year,
John Lancaster Spalding maintained that external developments had
"crowded out things of the mind" among Catholics, and with a forward
glance toward the coming century, he remarked:
We must prepare ourselves to enter more fully into the public life of
the country; to throw the light of Catholic thought upon each new phase
of opinion or belief as it rises ... All this and much else we have to
do, if our God-given mission is to be fulfilled.25
No single Catholic did more to promote that high ideal; yet at his death
forty years later he would have been the first to admit the meager
results of his life- time campaign in behalf of intellectual excellence
among his co-religionists
It is not that Catholic Americans have not been periodically reminded of
this leading deficiency in their religious community, and here no one
has been more insistent and more eloquent than Professor David J.
O'Brien of the College of whose stirring essay in Commonweal of June 6,
1986, is one of the most persuasive in furthering that cause.26 What
evidence, you may well ask, have you for your lament in this regard? I
would answer, first, let due recognition be given to the not
inconsiderable number of Catholic men and women whose scholarly
endeavors have brought honor to them and to their universities of the
1980's that far exceeds that of their predecessors of a generation ago.
I believe, however, that these same men and women might well agree that
when the 272 winners of Guggenheim fellowships in 1986 numbered only two
from Catholic institutions, namely, The Catholic University of America
and Seton Hall University; that among the 123 Mellon Fellows in the
humanities granted that year by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation, only three went to Catholic institutions; and that only
thirteen out of 262 fellowships granted by the National Endowment for
the Humanities -to name only three of the principal benefactors of those
majoring in the humanities and the liberal arts-Catholics can hardly
maintain that we have come anywhere near to attaining the kind of rank
so notably achieved by our co-religionists in politics, the professions,
and the business community. I readily concede that these data do not
offer complete and final proof of Catholic deficiency in this respect,
but they do, it seems to me, supply sufficient evidence to prompt a
serious probing as to why 553 Catholic institutions of higher learning
have made so relatively slight an impact in the nation's academic
community.
Closely related to the achievement of academic excellence and
distinction is the imperative of scholarly integrity. No exercise or
activity in the academic world that makes unreal pretensions on the part
of institutions or individuals can add any abiding honor to reputation
or good name. The recent rash of colleges calling themselves
universities without the qualifications for such, sails dangerously
close to that defect. Fortunately, with the exception of several
Catholic institutions involved in serious athletic scandals, the
Church's universities in this country have in good measure been free of
the mounting instances of fraud that have tainted the good name of some
American universities. It was a point forcefully made by Jaroslav
Pelikan in his splendid essay of 1983. He there spoke of the confidence
that scholars must have in one another, and of the confidence that
others are entitled to repose in them and in the integrity of their
work. " Therefore, it is almost impossible", he said, "to exaggerate the
damage that can result from a breach of trust ... it can tarnish the
entire cause of objective investigation and undermine the credibility of
research ... "27
For the foreseeable future the task of the Catholic universities of the
United States and of the world will be an exacting and trying
experience. Granted the obstacles that lie ahead, they are not
insuperable and can be overcome by a dedication to the ideals that
brought these universities into existence in the first instance. Those
ideals were spelled out by Pope Paul VI in November, 1972, when he
received the delegates of the International Federation of Catholic
Universities and spoke in words that have lost none of their value in
the intervening years. On that occasion, the pontiff declared:
The specific testimony expected of a Catholic university ... is to show
concretely that intelligence is never diminished, but is on the contrary
stimulated and strengthened by that inner source of deep understanding
which is the Word of God, and by the hierarchy of values derived from it
... In its unique way, the Catholic university contributes to
manifesting the superiority of the spirit, which can never, under pain
of being lost, agree to put itself at the service of anything other than
the search for truth.28
Monsignor John Tracy Ellis
Professorial Lecturer in Church History
The Catholic University of America
Newman to Fottrell, The Oratory, December 10, 1873. Charles Stephen
Dessain and Thomas Cornall, S.J. (Eds.), The Letters and Diaries of John
Henry Newman. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1974. XXVI, 394.
John, 5:59-66.
Galatians, 2:11-12.
Luke, 12:51-52
Luke, 12:51-52
For a detailed account, see James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas
Aquinas. His Life, Thought, and Work. Garden City: Doubleday & Company,
Inc. 1974. pp. 263-292.
Archives of Georgetown University, #62-9, College of Georgetown
(Potomack) in the State of Maryland, United States of America, p. 1.
Twenty-fourth Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the
University of Notre Dame, Indiana, for the Academic Year 1867-68. Notre
Dame: Ave Maria Power Press Print, 1868, p. 17.
Thomas E O'Connor, "John A. Zahm, C.S.C., Scientist and Americanist",
The Americas 7 (April, 1951), 445.
Zahm to Zahm, n.p., December 12, 1897, Ralph E. Weber, Notre Dame's John
Zahm: American Catholic Apologist and Educator. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1961. p. 105.
Hubert Jedin, Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church. An Historical
Outline. New York: Herder and Herder. 1960. pp. 234-235.
Hubert Jedin, Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church. An Historical
Outline. New York: Herder and Herder. 1960. pp. 234-235.
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans, Green
and Company, 1923. New impression. p.
John Lancaster Spalding, Religion, Agnosticism and Education. Chicago:
A. G. McClure Company. 1902. p. 175.
Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Splendour of the Church. New York: Sheed and
Ward. 1956, pp. 194-195.
Teilhard de Chardin to Johannes Janssens, S.J., Cape Town, October 12,
1951. Letters from a Traveller. New York: Harper & Row. 1962. p. 43.
Luke, 12:48.
John, 7:51-52.
Acts, 25:16-17.
John Courtney Murray, "Freedom, Authority, Community", America, 115
(December 3, 1966), 740.
Andrew M. Greeley, Ethnicity, Denomination, and Inequality. Beverly
Hills: Sage Publications, Inc. 1976. pp. 27, 71.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, XXXIII (September 17,1986), 34. The
endowment figures published here were as of June 30, 1985.
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. 1963.
John Gilary Shea, "The Catholic Church in the United States, 1776-1876",
American Catholic Quarterly Review I (January, 1876), 163-164.
John Lancaster Spalding, "The Catholic Church in the United States,
1776-1876, "Catholic World", XXIII (July 1876), 451.
David J. O'Brien, "The Summons to Responsibility", Commonweal, CXIII
(June 6, 1986), 332-337.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Scholarship and Its Survival. Questions on the Idea of
Graduate Education. Princeton: The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. 1983. pp. 60-61.
Pope Paul VI, "New Tasks for Catholic Universities", The Pope Speaks, 17
(1973), 356.
