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R. Scott Appleby urged his colleagues to continue to provide a Catholic alternative to secular institutions.
J. Michael Parker | Today’s Catholic |
By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • At a time when talk about crisis in Catholic higher education is rampant, one of the nation’s leading Catholic scholars says that’s nothing new and urges his colleagues to “stay the course” and continue to provide a Catholic alternative to secular institutions that marginalize religious thought.
R. Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, spoke to several hundred people Nov. 13 at St. Mary’s University as part of its “Catholic Intellectual Tradition” lecture series.
But he challenged them to “keep adjusting course” and be concerned about the Catholic identity of their institutions.
“Continue to adjust course, celebrate diversity and work on non-negotiables that characterize Catholic higher education across that range of diversity,” he counseled.
Appleby said that conversations about what Catholicism means and how it affects each person’s role in the university should be going on continuously at Catholic universities.
Each official of the university, including the chief financial officer, should be able to give a cogent analysis of the basic principles of Catholic social teaching and how it affects decisions they make every day. They should be able to discuss the meaning and content of the term “Catholic intellectual tradition,” and such conversations must continue “not just because they are the right thing to do, but because they are smart marketing,” he declared.
“To survive in the competitive market as a university, you have to be distinct and different. If you can’t articulate for people who give their life savings and their children to this institution what makes it distinct and special, you can close your doors right now,” the scholar and author said.
He referred to philosopher Alasdair McIntyre, who asserted that the distinctive calling of a Catholic university should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering a “less fragmented” concept of what a post-high school education should be.
“From a Catholic point of view, the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it’s not Catholic but because it’s not a university,” Appleby said. A Catholic university, he said, insists on the unity of knowledge.
“If we think correctly, there’s a unity that brings these things together. It’s not facile; it’s not easy to comprehend, but if we believe in a God who orders things, the different disciplines in a way are singing the glory of God. There’s an insistence on striving for coherence and for relationship, with the Trinity as the model.”
But in secular academic circles, he said, the notions that there is an objective moral order embedded in the very fabric of reality and that human beings have been given reason and the skills to discern it are passé.
The culture desperately needs this Catholic view, Appleby said, because the culture is so deeply fragmented, as is reflected in the way young people today understand knowledge.
They receive all kinds of information through cyberspace, “and there’s nobody there with a particular program saying ‘this is crap,’ ‘this is not,’ this is wisdom,’ ‘this is advertising,’” he said.
“Fragmentation of knowledge is a way of life for today’s young adults. There’s not a curriculum or a canon of knowledge with a beginning, a middle and an end. There are bits and bytes and pieces.
Appleby said there is also a suspicion of the “big story,” whether it’s the story of Christianity or American exceptionalism. Many young adults believe that these are myths, these big encompassing stories that really are all about preserving power to the white male European or America.
They also are suspicious that any attempt to bring order and coherence and a goal and a big story can be a veiled attempt to take power, control and be hegemonic.
Appleby said that fragmentation is such that “pluralism is abuzz with bits and pieces of putting together a worldview” and “we have to make it up as we go along. The Catholic university challenges that worldview and claims an underlying meaning, order and coherence,” he said.
He told of addressing a group of young adult Catholics on the need to become better educated about their faith. One listener was uncomfortable with that, thinking that Appleby considered himself better than his young audience because he knew more.
Facetiously, he said he responded, “And the problem is?”
While conceding that many signs of crisis are in the air, Appleby declared that Catholic higher education is not the primary site of most of them; rather, Catholic colleges and universities are being stuck with problems that began elsewhere.
Many students arrive at these institutions illiterate in the Catholic faith, including those who have attended Catholic high schools.
“It’s not that they lack faith so much as a coherent knowledge of it. They have pulled bits and pieces of it from a variety of sources. The sense that Catholicism is a comprehensive way of life with a deep tradition as a lens to view life and whom to marry and how to make decisions, that wasn’t conveyed to them,” Appleby said.
To illustrate that alarms about crises in Catholic higher education are nothing new, he cited former Fordham University sociologist Thomas O’Dea, who claimed in 1960 that “the increasingly democratized higher education system is funneling secular world views into the minds of American youth, posing a profound challenge to the relevance and significant to traditional and institutionalized religion today.”
The resulting disenchanted realism left little room for traditional supernaturalism, he quoted O’Dea as saying. “The practical disappearance of a supernatural worldview marks the end of an epic and heralds a form of religious crisis unique in the history of Western man,” the sociologist concluded.
“That was in 1960,” Appleby said. “Crisis talk is practically built into being religious; it’s nothing new,” Appleby said, adding it’s also built into higher education.
He urged Catholic university administrators and scholars to “stay the course” and not lose hope, although concerns about the loss of Catholic identity and about the secularization of Catholic higher education are real and most Catholic scholars are concerned about Catholic identity.
But Appleby said Catholic “prophets of doom identify many culprits — mostly liberal Catholics — when citing studies showing that only one-third to one-half of young adult Catholics are sufficiently informed about their faith and about authoritative teachings of the church.”
He said these people set themselves up as watchdogs of orthodoxy for other Catholic institutions. Appleby cited one article that accused Jesuit colleges as actively suppressing true Catholic beliefs and thought.
His audience laughed at the erroneous inclusion of Notre Dame, which is operated by the Congregation of the Holy Cross, on the critics’ list of erring Jesuit universities. That prompted Appleby to quip, “That sound you hear is Father Sorin turning over in his grave.” He referred to Holy Cross Father Edward Sorin, who founded Notre Dame University in 1842.
Appleby indicated that most Catholic academicians are concerned about the erosion of Catholic identity, whatever their disagreements about its exact nature, causes and appropriate action to take against it.
“What I find troubling in the approach of some colleagues, who take potshots at the rest of us and call themselves orthodox Roman Catholics, is not the nature of their concern or even their analysis of the situation in Catholic higher education. It’s their portrayal of the teaching of the church as inert, solid, rigid, a veritable deposit of faith as we used to call the self-revelation of the living God.
“Catholics invoked the term when we were heavily into nervously imitating the empiricism of the sciences, which seemed to threaten belief, so we fought fire with fire. The implicit assumption seemed to be that the object of our faith and the content of it had to be demonstrated or proven in much the way that a fossil record demonstrates the theories of the evolutionists or the creationists.”
Less imaginative ultra orthodox Catholics “not only reduce faith to simple formulas, but they presume to pronounce on the orthodoxy of other Catholic institutions,” Appleby said, adding, “This will simply not do.”
Appleby said it’s to the credit of the American bishops that they have not sided with efforts to narrow Catholic higher education to one model.
“We Catholics are not fundamentalists; that is, we do not selectively retrieve certain teachings and hold them up as once and for all the final definitive version of the faith.
“Our faith is never frozen; it’s always a living tradition, always in interaction.”
To understand tradition is to understand ambiguity. Tradition is multivalent. It’s Jesuit and Marianist, Franciscan and Dominican, male and female religious orders, Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Peter and the apostles, saints and martyrs — all kinds of controversy. It’s an ongoing argument about the nature of the good.
“You can get quite confused if you’re looking for a linear equation that will sum it all up in a very easy form that just bleeds the life out. Sometimes an ultra-traditionalist approach ends up killing the spirit of the tradition.”
Diversity is the great strength of Catholic higher education. The full range of types of Catholic colleges and universities goes from small two year colleges to major research universities, those founded by religious congregations and dioceses, from religiously conservative ones to self proclaimed liberal ones, from rural schools to commuter schools, from regional colleges to national powerhouse universities.
“The impact of Catholics of the United States on the laws, culture, politics, economic development and pursuit of justice in this nation and around the world is great and becoming greater. Catholic institutions have a rich tradition of wisdom to contribute to this culture.
Society is yearning for and giving an audience to what Catholic institutions have to offer as a tradition in America.
Although they represent a small percentage of the nation’s institutions of higher education and educate a small percentage of Catholics, the 220 Catholic colleges and universities together produce thousands of graduates annually who are among the yeast, light and salt of American and global society.
They have made and are making an impact in the world, from presidential campaigns to relief and development operations, from global networks to fight poverty to religious peacebuilding.
“The country desperately needs that diversity that Catholicism in its own internal diversity is providing to the nation as an alternative to a secularist project that in some ways is itself exhausted,” Appleby said.
“We’re not there yet by any means, but Catholic universities are heading in the right direction,” he said.
“They are collectively providing an alternative way of knowledge, a set of ethical considerations and alternatives in business, art, politics and culture to mainstream secular universities,” said Appleby.”