Faith, Reason, and the Catholic University

From time to time, a number of MOJ contributors, including this author, have commented on challenges that institutions of higher education, which identify themselves as Catholic, have faced, are facing, and will likely face in the future.

It was recently brought to my attention by Mr. Dominico Bettinelli that the

Boston

University

student daily, The Daily Free Press, published an article on May 1 about its neighbor on

Commonwealth Avenue

,

Boston

College. [HERE] While the article, entitled “Gay Professors Say BC Lags in Accepting Their Lifestyles,” concentrates on a particular element of the faculty at BC, I realized the essay’s content raises challenges to institutional Catholic identity and soul that other groups of faculty could also present. Who might be in these other groups? They could include a group of law professors who support “abortion rights” and “reproductive autonomy”; or, a group of life sciences professors who promote embryonic stem cell research; or, a group of business school professors who advocate an unregulated business economy; or, a group of education professors who assert that parents have no right to monitor and control the content of the education their children receive in public schools.

The Church has positions and moral teachings on all these issues that are frequently the subject matter of public debate these days. Drawing on The Daily Free Press article about homosexual faculty and the acceptance (or not) of their lifestyles, it is quite possible that any of the faculty members who work at Catholic institutions could promote their “need” to “overcom[e] the school’s deeply rooted religious tradition” as they champion their claims regarding lifestyle or any other matter with which they identify. As one proceeds through this article, the perspectives of 30-year, 17-year, 10-year, and 1-year veterans become revealing about the attitudes of some faculty toward the Catholic mission and identity. What becomes clear after review of this litany is that the institution has labored to maintain its identity—and its soul—in spite of the increasing challenges to them.

While faculty who identify with particular crusades that conflict with the Church’s teachings on vital issues will likely continue laboring and lobbying for their causes, it would be imperative for Catholic institutions of higher education to consider convening a seminar on Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae that could address a coordinated approach to implementing John Paul’s sound and wise principles. After all, it is not only the identity of these institutions that are at stake, it is also their mission to demonstrate to the skeptical world that faith and reason are not only compatible but inextricably linked. Otherwise, the ongoing fragmentation of learning and research that beleaguers the academy of the present age will continue and burgeon. And the souls of those institutions that call themselves Catholic will be in greater peril.    RJA sj