Bravo, Mark

I appreciated very much Mark's post about Jesuit legal education, and John Breen's critique of it.  Mark nails it:

But we must not delude ourselves with reassuring platitudes about different paths and different missions. There must be some ground minimum of engagement with Catholicism present before a school can call itself "Catholic." It is simply not enough to talk about "justice," or "diversity" or being a "man for others" unless some meaningful flesh is put on those bones.

Now, note what Mark is not saying -- e.g., that an authentically Catholic law school must take an embattled and defensive stance, or adopt a narrow and sectarian focus, or never host speakers with certain objectionable views, etc.  All he is requesting, it seems to me, is that we put "flesh . . . on the bones" for which those who draft the promotional literature for Catholic law schools (and universities) too often settle.  There is, as I understand him, plenty of room for diversity even among "fleshed out" Catholic identities (St. Thomas is not Ave Maria, for example, but both are engaging in important and valuable ways with the project of building a distinctively and meaningfully Catholic law school).