Legal Education in the Church

I am grateful for the comments by Father Kalscheur and Amy Uelmen on my recent post "Catholic Legal Education?"  I ended my post by expressing the hope that "the Church" would bring the schools to the test of "the Gospel and the tradition(s) that brought them forth."  I did not restrict my reference to the hierarchy or even the clergy:  This is a responsibility that extends to the Church.  Lay women and men whose vocation in the Church is to teach in the law schools of Catholic universities have duties (and the opportunities for supererogation) that overlap but differ from the responsibilities of clerics and religious in those schools.  I of course express no assessment of Jack DiGioia, least of all of his spiritual grounding.  I do express, now, a sadness that "Jesuit higher education" seems destined to be led by non-Jesuits.  It might be better for the switch, given current possibilities; but something has been lost, something that was very good and was, in my lay opinion, sold short.  With respect exactly to the law schools of Jesuit universities in this country in particular, we have less in terms of an inherited image of success than we do with respect to most of the rest of those universities, of course; and laity have always exercised a critical leadership role in those schools, including such fine schoolas as Boston College Law School and Georgetown Law Center.  But the very ideal of Jesuits as principally serving lay men and women in their lay initiatives and ministries (see the talk of the Superior General of the Society, Father Kolvenbach at Creighton Univ, of 7 Oct 04) demands of lay men and women in Jesuit Catholic law schools that they develop their own initiative and discipline in bringing the schools to the demands of living at the heart of the Church's mission.  That mission, there can be no doubt, demands dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians; indeed, it is the possibility of such dialogue at my own law school, Villanova, that makes it a place whose mission of "inclusiveness" I can heartily support.  Being "equal partners in dialogue" does not entail (or allow) indifference to the 'truth claims' that make authentic dialogue possible and exigent.  I don't so much mourn (the abundant) missed opportunities as I grieve over the (well-attested) self-loathing of Catholics that sometimes leads us to be insufficiently bold in our institutional witness.  Father Kalscheur knows infinitely better than I ever could where the Society and its works are and should be going in service of the Church.  My own experiences (in trying to advise religious orders of which I am not a member about how they  might approach their educational undertakings in the face both of a deeper understanding of the lay vocation in the Church and of the shrinking numbers of religious) have led me to conclude that efforts to have "[fill in the order of your choosing]" education without members of that order taking the principal initiative and providing directions of their own are destined to disappoint.  I hope I am wrong about that; these are complex matters that we have only begun to address here.   Mr DiGioia may well be the very best person for the current job; my fervent prayer of course is that he is such a person.  Whatever the judgment on the latter generic issue, it is plain that lay men and women, in cooperation with the orders or independent of them, but always willing to conform the eventual judgment of the hierarchy, must continue to discern new ways to make the existing and future schools do the Church's work.  This will include bold and wise lay presidents committed to taking new initiatives in the work of the Church, but that is not to say that Jesuit-education with sidelined Jesuit leadership isn't a loss of something.  But more fundamentally, as Father Burtchaell's book The Dying of the Light taught, it is failure to recognize the schools as part of the Church's mission that leads to the schools' increasing irrelevance to the Church.