COMMENTARY: Butt out of Catholic higher education

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ American Catholic higher education is one of the most remarkable achievements of the church in any country […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ American Catholic higher education is one of the most remarkable achievements of the church in any country at any time in its history. We owe a seldom acknowledged debt to the great religious orders of men and women who brought this system into being, thereby making possible Catholic passage from immigrant status to mature participation in national life.


Its leaders are currently engaged in a conversation about what makes a Catholic institution Catholic. An even more sensitive issue is whether bishops should control who can teach theology by claiming the right to issue mandates; in effect, licenses to theologians.

Naturally, most Catholics expect Catholic colleges to support Catholic principles and offer theology courses that reflect and deepen a student’s understanding of the faith. It is, of course, one thing to do that in the context of a first-class education and quite another to achieve it through the authoritarian proselytizing that saturates the curriculum in some fundamentalist institutions.

Almost all Catholic colleges and universities have worked hard to provide a solid education to those who attend them. They have gained recognition for their academic excellence through their practical commitment to the ideals of scholarship and teaching so that those to whom they grant degrees are well-prepared for graduate schools or careers.

The latter, I suggest, is the proper goal for Catholic higher education. This pursuit of competence in the disciplines is, in and of itself, a spiritual, religious and profoundly Catholic achievement. To send a person more fully developed into the world is to commission someone made whole by the demands of his or her educational experience.

How, a famous question goes, can a person be born again? One way is to enter the river of a school that knows what it is doing and to emerge a changed and more complete human being.

Whenever and however that happens, a religious conversion occurs, by whatever name we call it.

Excellence is expected in the theology department at any Catholic school if it is to be true to the highest values of the academic calling. A bishop does not have to tell scholars what they already know and strive for in the pursuit of excellence.


Instead of being suspicious and potentially intrusive in this professional area, our bishops should applaud and defend Catholic higher education for vindicating the ideals of the faith while at the same time meeting the highest standards of education. That is a story larger and more significant than the discussions about whether bishops should become involved in approving and, in effect, licensing scholars.

It is also a story of faithful religious educators who understand that their primary obligation is to deliver competence while competing in the vast market of the world on its own terms. They have risked everything, enduring and overcoming prejudice not by preaching but by a proficiency that makes so many of them a part of, rather than apart from, the nation’s complex educational enterprise.

Put crucifixes in classrooms? By all means, just as schools should foster the faith through chaplains and provision of the sacramental life of Catholicism. But these symbols mock the institution and the faith if the school is second-rate academically and thereby fails to be Catholic in the richest understanding of its meaning.

Educators who advertise their Catholicity but fail at their calling resemble lawyers or businessmen who wear their faith conspicuously on their sleeves but fail their clients or investors by their ineptitude in representing their interests.

As the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said,”The outfielder may be Catholic but being a Catholic outfielder does not help him catch the fly balls.” Despite all the words about the bishop’s right to commission theologians, that argument is secondary at best to the root demand of the world and one of the oldest traditions of Catholicism: Competence comes first and is of itself subtly but profoundly religious.

If Catholic schools lack competence, they fail the faith they profess. They may hang crucifixes in every hallway but, if they do not know what they are doing, they are not truly Catholic at all.


Most bishops know that they lack the personal expertise to make faculty recommendations in any field. And that humble admission on their part is also subtly but profoundly religious. Such a profession by bishops of their own limitations would in and of itself encourage Catholic schools to do better.

That, rather than licensing theologians, is what bishops are supposed to do anyway.

IR END KENNEDY RNS

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