Catholic law schools:more thoughts

I very much appreciate the comments of Amy and Father Araujo. My earlier thoughts very much reflect my current situation--where I have been blessed to be in a position with my colleagues here at Ave Maria to help build a Catholic law school from scratch. I certainly admit that others are in very different situations and that some of the things we do here are not realistic options.

I agree with almost everything Amy said. I don't think there is one model for Catholic law schools. I think that Father Araujo is correct, though, that we should think about an essence that might help us to identify when it would be appropriate to consider a school to be Catholic. For example, I know of one law school affiliated with a Catholic university that a few years ago had only one Catholic on its faculty. That school might do a lot of wonderful things. It might express a deeply rooted sense of tolerance and create space for the religious expression of its diverse student body. Yet, I don't know how a school like that could conceivably claim to be Catholic. How could that school give institutional expression to having a Catholic community, and to satisfying the other characteristics Amy quoted from Ex Corde.

A student should be able to encounter a Catholic community and to observe the witness of many Catholic scholars who are trying to integrate faith and reason. I don't know how this can be said to exist if the school has only one Catholic on its faculty or only a very few. A school with only one Catholic on its faculty might be doing much good, but it is hard to imagine that we should think of it as Catholic. As I mentioned before, Princeton is not a Catholic institution simply because Robby George is on the Politics faculty there. The Catholic label must say something about an institutional embodiment of the characteristics noted in Ex Corde, even if that embodiment might be given different expressions in different times and places.

Richard