The University of St. Thomas is a CATHOLIC Law School -- Not a Conservative One

In a posting a couple of places below, Michael Perry refers to a story on National Public Radio about "conservative" Christian law schools, which in a side-bar on the web page previously had listed the University of St. Thomas as among them. (Interestingly, that side-bar quoted the St. Thomas web site in expressing the school's "mission [as] inspired by Catholic social thought, the Catholic Church's historical commitment to advancing social justice, particularly helping those who are most in need of our assistance," a message which doesn't exactly ring in stereotypically conservative tones).

After the inaccuracy of this categorization was brought to its attention, NPR has removed the side-bar on UST from its web page and will be reading the following message from UST Dean Tom Mengler on the air: "St. Thomas is a Catholic law school, and we take our religious identity seriously, but there is nothing 'conservative' about it. The vast majority of our faculty and student body are left-of-center politically, and our faculty includes individuals who are openly gay, who support abortion rights, who oppose the death penalty, and who have worked on behalf of other 'liberal' causes. Far from being politically conservative, St. Thomas is striving to prove that a law school can take religion seriously without ascribing to any political agenda."

One of my colleagues, Charles Reid, put this whole controversy about categories into wonderful perspective: "We need to remember that we are very much in the culture changing business. We are a Christian Catholic law school situated in a highly secular environment. News media, like NPR, will always try to translate the Christian message into a secular framework –- red state vs. blue state, left vs. right, and so forth. Our purpose in being is to challenge these categories. The message of Catholic social thought is clear -– it is to protect the most vulnerable among us (innocent life from conception to natural death); it is to protect human dignity in a wide variety of contexts (in prisons, in immigration centers, and so forth). It is to welcome the stranger and tend to the needs of the poor. It is to be a witness against violence (just-war thought for instance, and the effort to restrain state violence). These are signs of contradiction to the secular media. They will wish to pigeon-hole us. In responding to the secular media, we should not lose sight of who we are; we should not buy into conventional categories; we should be, in short, a sign of contradiction."

And it is that to which we aspire: to be a contradiction to the secular world. We seek to build a diverse academic and faith-based community that transcends secular and political boundaries, thereby allowing unusual cooperative projects and dynamic conversations to emerge.

Transitioning from the ill-founded attempt at political categorization of our institution to the question of what makes such an institution authentically Catholic, let me offer a few personal thoughts as well, in partial response to earlier questions raised on this site (and directed toward Richard Meyers and me) about the legitimacy of a mandatory course that would include Catholic thought. At present, Jurisprudence is a required upper-level course at the University of St. Thomas. While the course surveys the broad range of jurisprudential thought, it definitely does include study of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which typically is sadly in similar courses at most law schools. The faculty presently is considering addition of a foundations course to the first-year curriculum, focusing on integration of faith and values into professional life. Catholic intellectual concepts and social thought presumably would be given significant, but again not exclusive, attention in such a course.

Greg Kalscheur put it very well when he said that Catholic law schools should "be places where the Catholic intellectual tradition is alive and at home -- not imposed on anyone, but present, vital, articulate, and thoroughly involved in the academic conversation that is at the heart of the life of the university." Less eloquently, I simply tell new students who ask me about it that we are always Catholic, but not only Catholic. By that I mean that whenever philosophical foundations or values are addressed, the Catholic perspective will be present, even as other perspectives are also included.

Greg Sisk