c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The Roman Catholic colleges and universities are the great jewel of the church in this country. Their physical plants, intellectual activity, loyalty of alumni, able faculty, and dedicated leaders are, in combination, an enormous resource. They are now in deep trouble. Alas, it is their own fault.

In the years since the Second Vatican Council, many priests, nuns, and lay folk have been obsessed with the idea that Catholics must become like everyone else.

Their certainties destabilized by the counciliar changes, they have leaped from fad to fad in desperate attempts to”catch up”_ as they saw it _ with the rest of America. They threw out not only the baby with the bath water but the baby’s mother too.

There was nothing in the reforms of the Council mandating the abandonment of angels and saints, souls in purgatory or stations of the cross, the rosary, crucifixes and churches that looked like they were Catholic, or Gregorian chants.

For Catholic higher education, this often _ though not always _ meant an effort to be”just like”everyone else. Notre Dame, I was told, would soon become a Catholic Princeton. When I suggested that it would be much better to be a Catholic Notre Dame people looked at me like I was crazy.

One of the favorite cliches of the years immediately after the Council was the word”ecumenical.”Parishes stopped being Catholic and became”ecumenical.”Organizations like the Christian Family Movement announced they were”ecumenical.”The president of an admired Catholic woman’s college told the world it was no longer a Catholic college but an”ecumenical”college.

No one seems to have bothered to consult the constituencies of these various institutions about the change. No one asked them for advice and consent to becoming”ecumenical.”Indeed it was never quite clear what”ecumenical”meant, other than not being Catholic.

In the case of the woman’s college, to which generations of”ethnic”parents had sent their daughters, the abandonment of the Catholic label was fatal. Parents wanted a Catholic college for their daughters, not one that was proudly no longer Catholic. The college disappeared.

Many Catholic institutions did their best to become”secular”_ just like everyone else.

Generally, this meant abandoning requirements and rules. No longer did students have to take eight courses in philosophy and theology. No longer did hall rectors at Notre Dame search for beer in the dorms. No longer were almost all of the faculty Catholic. No longer were there no atheists teaching in the theology departments. No longer were there crucifixes in classrooms. No longer were the presidents of colleges automatically priests or nuns.

We are secular now, the faculty proudly proclaimed, there’s no longer anything specifically Catholic about us.

It has never occurred to such faculty members that the only reason young people and their parents choose such schools is that they believe there is something specifically Catholic about them. If the schools really succeeded in selling their secularity they would fold just as the unfortunate Catholic women’s college which turned ecumenical. Ethos, atmosphere, tradition are both recalcitrant and resilient.

No one ever raised the question of whether there might be intellectual concerns and traditions, heritages and fields of research which are either uniquely or predominantly Catholic.

Several years ago I collected the course offering booklets of a dozen or so Catholic higher educational institutions and searched diligently for courses in Catholic poetry, Catholic fiction, Catholic art, Catholic music, Catholic history. I found nothing. As a nun _ a classic”ecumenical”type I fear _ said to me,”We have to teach courses in women’s lit and African American lit and Native American lit; how do you expect us to find time to teach courses in `Catholic lit’?” Right!

So now the Vatican is trying to correct the problem with characteristically heavy-handed juridical tactics.

The bishops must control the Catholic universities, the Vatican says. Presidents must take oaths. Theology professors must be vetted by bishops. The faculty should be predominantly”faithful”Catholics, which assumes administrators can, like Vatican cardinals, read the secrets of the human heart.

These regulations, doubtless well-intentioned, could easily destroy Catholic higher education. Then there will be no schools where there would be a possibility of exploring on the intellectual level the riches of the Catholic heritage.

DEA END GREELEY