A Roman and Catholic Conference on Higher Education—what is to be taught; what is to be studied; what is to be learned; what is to be done?

On Friday and Saturday of this past week the Congregation for Catholic Education and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace hosted a conference in Rome entitled “The University and the Social Doctrine of the Church—working together towards an authentic and integral humanism.” The participants who attended come from a wide range of academic fields and work around the globe. 

As I was on my way to Saturday’s session, I took along a copy of a news story about the hopes of some Americans to slowly but surely “get back on track” with certain human rights claims that the new Congress must tackle when it convenes in January. I was struck with the realization that most of the claims discussed in the report were for the advancement of the autonomous self rather than the promotion of the interests of every person who bears the image of God. The article failed to acknowledge that the human person is also a member of many communities (family, city, state, nation, and the world) where the relationship between rights and responsibilities—a core element of Catholic social doctrine—was conspicuous by its absence in this report I read.

Two of the claimed “rights” discussed in the report involved some perennial favorites: abortion and medical research (the code name for embryonic stem cell research) to mention but a few. While some human rights advocates stress the need for fortification of these “rights” and programs and strengthening the legal regimes that protect them, I realized all the more how these claims reinforce the demands of the autonomous individual at the expense of the human family and the common good as it is understood within the social teachings of the Church. Ultimately the claims asserted by those interviewed for the article I was reading undermine the dignity of the human person and, therefore, cannot be advanced as authentic human rights. Nonetheless, there are those who are intent on “getting back on track.”

And what is the response of the Catholic university and its intellectual community to all this? The answer is for us committed to Catholic higher education to formulate, but I hasten to add that it would or should be an alternative to the positions of the “human rights advocates” mentioned in the news report I read on the subway ride to conference. Theirs is a world guided by subjectivism rather than by the transcendent moral order taught to us by the one who came to save us. But there is a temptation—sometimes a strong one—to reflect the ego-centric culture that surrounds one’s self. I recall a year ago reading another news report about a demonstration that was taking place at an institution that uses the moniker “Jesuit.” The news reporter covering the event asked one of the students involved with the protest why he would be supporting a cause that conflicted with the teachings of the Catholic Church. The student avoided the question by replying that Jesuits are all about advocacy, and he, the student, was advocating for a cause in which he passionately believed.

All about advocacy! Advocacy for what? As a Jesuit with more than a remote interest in the work of the academy that claims to be Catholic and Jesuit, it strikes me that some odd contentions have been asserted in the past—distant and recent—where “rights” claims have been asserted at the expense of someone else’s human dignity. If indeed the Catholic university is a place to cultivate advocacy, the advocacy proclaimed should be in accord with the social doctrine of the Church and not that of a secular and, sometimes, relativistic culture that may claim to defend “human rights” but, in fact, does otherwise. It is this doctrine of the Church that, in a rigorously intellectual and scientific way, can be studied, taught, and learned so that one day, perhaps even in our lifetimes, it may be more of the rule and less of the exception.    RJA sj