c. 1999 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Turning aside fears they would increase tensions between the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and its theologians, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops voted Wednesday (Nov. 17) to approve a plan to tighten their control over the nation’s 230 Catholic colleges and universities, including requiring theologians to receive permission from a bishop to teach.

By a solid 223-31 vote, with one abstention, the bishops approved a set of norms, or rules, aimed at implementing Pope John Paul II’s principles for maintaining the Catholic identity of the church’s colleges and universities that were issued in 1990.

The plan, hotly and sometimes bitterly debated within academic and church circles _ and once rejected by the Vatican as not firm enough _ must still go back to Rome for approval.

Crucial to maintaining Catholic identity, the document says, is that Catholic colleges and universities must retain”fidelity to the Christian message in conformity with the magesterium (teaching) of the church.””It is not a perfect document, but it is a good and workable document,”said Bishop John Leibrecht of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., chairman of the committee that drafted the plan.

But Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee warned the document came at a bad time in U.S. church history when relations between many of the church’s theologians and the hierarchy _ especially the Vatican _ were at an all-time low.”It (the document) will be a pastoral disaster for the church in America,”said Weakland, the only bishop to speak against the statement’s adoption during an hourlong debate that brought some two dozen prelates to the microphone.

The statement was adopted on the third day of the four-day fall meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and its social policy arm, the U.S. Catholic Conference.

While the statement covers a broad range of issues in an effort not to let Catholic colleges go the way of such institutions as Harvard, Yale and Princeton _ all founded as church schools but now thoroughly secular _ the heart of the controversy within the church is the rules’ requirement that theologians receive a”mandatum”from their local bishop in order to teach doctrine at a Catholic school.

The statement says the mandatum should be given in writing and the reasons for denying or removing it should also be in writing.

Academics, especially theologians, have expressed the fear during the years of debate on the issue that the mandatum will be used to punish dissent or squelch academic freedom.”The mandatum is fundamentally an acknowledgment by church authority that a Catholic professor of a theological discipline teaches within the full communion of the Catholic Church,”says the statement,”Excorde Ecclesiae: An Application to the United States.” The statement says that Catholic professors of the theological disciplines _ such as biblical studies or systematic theology _”have a … duty to be faithful to the church’s magesterium (teaching) as the authoritative interpreter of sacred Scripture and sacred tradition.” But most of those speaking to the statement dismissed or minimized the fears of Catholic college presidents and theologians.”I believe it has addressed the concerns raised by some bishops and presidents of Catholic colleges and made notable and appropriate improvements in response to their concerns,”Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York said in a message sent to the conference. O’Connor, who recently underwent brain tumor surgery and last Sunday fell at the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, is not attending the meeting.

Cardinal Anthony Bevilaqua of Philadelphia said the document presents”the most benign definition possible”of the mandatum _ essentially a license or certificate to teach _ and that definition should”remove any fears of its implementation.”He said the granting of a mandatum would not”involve a long, intrusive investigation”of a theologian’s view or”a detailed”probe of a theologian’s views of contemporary controversies.

In addition to the question of theologians, the new rules require the university presidents and a majority of each school’s board to be Catholic and that the schools should,”to the extent possible,”recruit and appoint Catholics as professors”so that … those committed to the witness of the faith will constitute a majority of the faculty.”Priests and deacons working in campus ministry with students must also have the local bishop’s permission.

A major issue in drafting the statement, according to Leibrecht and Bevilaqua, was concern that the statement could cast the church schools in such a sectarian light that they would be denied federal grants and other aid.

But both prelates said those concerns had been met and no college president should fear any loss of federal aid.

DEA END RNS