"The Perfect Storm"

Here is an essay by my colleague Cathy Kaveny, from the current issue of America.  It's called "The Perfect Storm" and it's about the "Vagina Monologues"-on-Catholic-campuses debate.  She contrasts "two currents that have dominated the climate of the church in the United States for the poast 30 years or so.  The older of these calls for greater openness to the culture; the more recent affirms the importance of preserving a distinctive Catholic identity over against the culture.  God willing, however, the storm also may have uncovered something new:  the emergence of a third current, which locates Catholic identity not primarily in what separates us from the culture, but in the distinctive way in which we critically but constructively engage it."

In Kaveny's view, the "current of identity" is "self-defeating", because "the strategy of its representative thinkers to preserve distinctive Catholic character may actually involve abandoning it -- abandoning the universal concern, scope and appear characteristic of Catholic thought and life in order to pursue a purity from all taint of sin that is characteristic of some Protestant sects."  She contends that a new current, "the current of engagement", "should insist that constructive, critical engagement with the culture is ultimately more consistent with a Catholic vision of reality than uncritical embrace of it on the one hand, or moralistic rejection of it on the other."

She concludes with this:

The path suggested by the current of engagement is more demanding than those associated with either the current of openness or the current of identity. It takes faculty members who are educated in the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition and committed to passing it on to the next generation. It takes students who are willing to do the hard intellectual and existential work of bringing their faith into conversation with other aspects of their lives. Most important, it takes Catholic colleges and universities that are dedicated to facilitating constructive and critical engagement with the culture, rather than assimilation on the one hand, or isolation on the other.

A few thoughts:  First, I think Kaveny is entirely correct to remind readers that the purpose of an authentically Catholic university is not to serve as a museum or preserving jar for a pure, untainted, separate Catholic culture or community.  And, she is right to urge all engaged to put "charity" -- as in, Deus caritas est -- at the heart of the "what is a Catholic university and what is it for?" debate.

Next, I have to believe that Kaveny would agree that those prominent and articulate faculty members (and others) at Notre Dame urged Fr. Jenkins not to cast "academic freedom" as a license for productions that many non-prudish, perfectly engaged, totally-accepting-of-fallenness Catholics reasonably regard as low-brow, pornographic agit-prop, cannot fairly be regarded as standing in, or defending, a "current of identity" as she describes it.  (Consider, for example, the open letters by John Cavadini, Fr. John Coughlin, and Fr. Bill Miscamble, or the earlier comments provided by John O'Callaghan, Brad Gregory, Paolo Carozza, Nicole Garnett, Gary Anderson, or David Solomon).  In fact, it seems to me that, when one reflects carefully on the way the arguments played out at Notre Dame (as oppposed, perhaps, to some quarters of the blogosphere), the claim of those who had reservations about the Monologues was not that we ought to move with a "moralistic" "current of identity" toward a "purity from all taint of sin that is characteristic of some Protestant sects", but was instead that meaningful "engagement" -- precisely what Kaveny (correctly) calls for -- is not possible absent a commitment to distinctive Catholic identity and sound formation and education in the faith.  That is, the focus on identity is not in the service of moralism, or sectarian separation, but is precisely on the conditions for meaningful engagement.  What's more, when one reflects carefully on the way the arguments played out at Notre Dame, it seems that another "current" was flowing powerfully, namely, a current not so much of aggiornamento-style "openness" to the world, but a current of indifference, or even opposition, to the basic project of a Catholic university as Kaveny describes it.

Third, I can endorse whole-heartedly Kaveny's final paragraph.  The best "path" for a Catholic university takes "faculty members who are educated in the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition and committed to passing it on to the next generation" and faculty and students who are "willing to do the hard intellectual and existential work of bringing their faith into conversation with other aspects of their lives."  Of course, the $64,000 question is, how many such faculty and students does it take, and what are Catholic universities going to do to train, attract, and retain them?

UPDATE:  re-reading Paolo Carozza's piece, I'm struck by the extent to which it calls for precisely the kind of engagement -- engagement that proceeds, as I have suggested it must -- from a coherent and rooted position with reality and the world.  This is worth quoting in full:

[W]hat is the place of Notre Dame's Catholic identity in this insistence on the freedom of our reason to reach always onward? The intellectual and moral tradition in which we are situated provides a sustained, complex and deep grappling with the mystery of human life and the universe around us, but one that is mostly ignored, and sometimes systematically excluded, from the intellectual life of most elite universities today. Notre Dame can't be a great and Catholic university without a pervasive and serious attempt to propose this tradition as an explanatory hypothesis for understanding the things that we study and teach and for ordering the way we ought to live as a community. To be very clear: in the context of study, teaching and research the Christian tradition is a proposal, not a shield from inquiry or an obstacle to knowledge, but an invitation to verify something, to test it through sincere criticism (in the original, literal sense of "separating" or "evaluating") and thus to arrive at a more mature appropriation of its value. It is an understanding of Catholic character reflective of a dynamic life, not of formal and sterile doctrine. The scholarly temperament in its encounter with tradition is an opening up of reason, not a closure of discussion.