As many but by no means all readers of this blog know, in 1680 a man called John Baptiste de la Salle began to serve poor French children by providing the education no one else was even close to offering. La Salle's efforts didn't immediately win much support from the Church in France. But, in time, La Salle's initiative was institutionalized by the Church and granted the "permission" of the Crown, and it comes down to us as the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, more commonly known as the Christian Brothers, the largest order in the Catholic Church dedicated to education. La Salle himself was canonized in 1900, and fifty years later Pius XII named him Patron of All Teachers of Youth. The unique vow La Salle's Brothers take, even today, is this: "service to the poor through education."
The Christian Brothers' contribution to Catholic education in the U.S. over the last century and a half has been stunning. Today, however, the Brothers are facing extinction in this country, following the line already traced by so many other non-clerical orders. More immediately, the Brothers' efforts to serve the poor through education are foundering on the costs of running schools no longer indirectly subsidized by Brothers' working for free. (The disappearance of vocations to the Brothers has meant paying lay people, who do not take vows of poverty, salaries). Today's Brothers, along with their Partners in the La Sallian educational ministry, are struggling to find ways to provide Christian education to the poor.
In aid of finding such ways, the west coast province of the Brothers recently sponsored a colloquium on "school choice." The aim was to stimulate constructive discussion of new ways to allow the La Sallians to do their work of serving the poor through education. The colloquium made it possible for leading contributors to issues touching schools, family, children, and religion to talk together about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. I was privileged to join in the colloquium, which was organized and beautifully executed by Tom Brady and Jack Coons. Among the contibutors to the dialogue were Rosemary Salomone, Jesse Choper, Goodwin Liu, Charles Glenn,Terry Moe, Howard Fuller, Jim Blew, Paul Dimond, Joe Viteritti, Steve Sugarman, Michael Guerra, Frank Kemerer, and Jack Coons.
One can hope that the colloquium's work will lead the Brothers and their Partners to undertake new efforts to teach not just the children in their classrooms, but, differently, all those who control the political conditions under which the Brothers and all other educators of the young operate. "School choice" is a divisive issue in American politics, but the following text of the Second Vatican Council (in its declaration Gravissimum educationis) seems to me, in light of the deliberations of the recent colloquium, grossly under-appreciated by American Catholics: "Parents, who have a primary and inalienable duty and right to the education of their children, should enjoy the fullest liberty in their choice of school. The public authority, therefore, whose duty it is to protect and defend the liberty of citizens, is bound according to the principles of distributive justice to ensure that public subsidies to schools are so allocated that parents are truly free to select their schools for children in accordance with their conscience." The Brothers embody commitment to these principles, and their witness is as profound as their service has been effective. But the Brothers and their Partners need help if they are to continue doing their work of service to the poor through education. And many others, too, of course, need systemic change if they are to continue their work of educating children whom the current system leaves under-served. The current educational monopoly blocks family and other efforts to see that children obtain the education that is indicated by their parents' conscience.
Today, only the rich (or otherwise lucky) can choose schools "in accordance with their conscience." Today, the Brothers and others are increasingly stymied in their efforts to serve those whom local property-tax revenues leave under-served. Distributive justice is nowhere to be seen in the land of education, and dramatially few Catholic voices are heard to say that education, too, must be justly distributed.
I'll soon post a draft of my paper from the recent colloquium. I would be most grateful if it would stimulate discussion of what, exactly, Catholics and others who want to see distributive justice done in education can do, now and in the coming seasons, to bring about change in the prevailing discourse and policy. Three centuries before the U.N. or Rome acknowledged the right of all children to education, La Salle announced the right and went to work for it. Sadly, the initiative he launched is now almost without means to do its work in the U.S. The Catholic leadership needs help on this.
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Reviewing edits undertaken by a 3L on a forthcoming essay of mine, I just discovered the following parenthetical added to my citation of John Noonan's now-classic essay Development in Moral Doctrine: "(describing evolution of Catholic Church)." Res ipsa. A distant second is this parenthetical added to "explain" the meaning of par. 831 of the Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae: "(explaining that Catholicism is for entire world)." Not only is the Church sent to the whole world; now she has an -ism that's for everyone.
In my experience, student editors do the conscientious job expected of them, and my current engagement is no exception. The trouble is the hegemony of the Bluebook and its lack of sensitivity to what's really going on in the use of sources and authorities. Which is why I live in fear of the day of the Restatement (Third) of Everything.
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
I am grateful for the comments by Father Kalscheur and Amy Uelmen on my recent post "Catholic Legal Education?" I ended my post by expressing the hope that "the Church" would bring the schools to the test of "the Gospel and the tradition(s) that brought them forth." I did not restrict my reference to the hierarchy or even the clergy: This is a responsibility that extends to the Church. Lay women and men whose vocation in the Church is to teach in the law schools of Catholic universities have duties (and the opportunities for supererogation) that overlap but differ from the responsibilities of clerics and religious in those schools. I of course express no assessment of Jack DiGioia, least of all of his spiritual grounding. I do express, now, a sadness that "Jesuit higher education" seems destined to be led by non-Jesuits. It might be better for the switch, given current possibilities; but something has been lost, something that was very good and was, in my lay opinion, sold short. With respect exactly to the law schools of Jesuit universities in this country in particular, we have less in terms of an inherited image of success than we do with respect to most of the rest of those universities, of course; and laity have always exercised a critical leadership role in those schools, including such fine schoolas as Boston College Law School and Georgetown Law Center. But the very ideal of Jesuits as principally serving lay men and women in their lay initiatives and ministries (see the talk of the Superior General of the Society, Father Kolvenbach at Creighton Univ, of 7 Oct 04) demands of lay men and women in Jesuit Catholic law schools that they develop their own initiative and discipline in bringing the schools to the demands of living at the heart of the Church's mission. That mission, there can be no doubt, demands dialogue with non-Catholics and non-Christians; indeed, it is the possibility of such dialogue at my own law school, Villanova, that makes it a place whose mission of "inclusiveness" I can heartily support. Being "equal partners in dialogue" does not entail (or allow) indifference to the 'truth claims' that make authentic dialogue possible and exigent. I don't so much mourn (the abundant) missed opportunities as I grieve over the (well-attested) self-loathing of Catholics that sometimes leads us to be insufficiently bold in our institutional witness. Father Kalscheur knows infinitely better than I ever could where the Society and its works are and should be going in service of the Church. My own experiences (in trying to advise religious orders of which I am not a member about how they might approach their educational undertakings in the face both of a deeper understanding of the lay vocation in the Church and of the shrinking numbers of religious) have led me to conclude that efforts to have "[fill in the order of your choosing]" education without members of that order taking the principal initiative and providing directions of their own are destined to disappoint. I hope I am wrong about that; these are complex matters that we have only begun to address here. Mr DiGioia may well be the very best person for the current job; my fervent prayer of course is that he is such a person. Whatever the judgment on the latter generic issue, it is plain that lay men and women, in cooperation with the orders or independent of them, but always willing to conform the eventual judgment of the hierarchy, must continue to discern new ways to make the existing and future schools do the Church's work. This will include bold and wise lay presidents committed to taking new initiatives in the work of the Church, but that is not to say that Jesuit-education with sidelined Jesuit leadership isn't a loss of something. But more fundamentally, as Father Burtchaell's book The Dying of the Light taught, it is failure to recognize the schools as part of the Church's mission that leads to the schools' increasing irrelevance to the Church.
Monday, January 31, 2005
As one possible starting point for realistic dreaming about where we can go with Catholic legal education, I recommend Jesuit Education 21: Conference Proceedings on the Future of Jesuit Higher Education (2000) and (2) the review thereof appearing at 70 Archivum Historicum S.I. 181 (2001). The book includes this at p. 446: "I don't know about your Jesuit institution, but I can tell you that at mine, if you want to talk about hiring Catholics for mission, it is about twenty-five years too late. . . . If you were to tell the faculty tomorrow to 'hire for mission' with an emphasis on Catholic rather than, or over and above Jesuit, I know what will happen -- even if the definitional problem can be solved (and it cannot), and even if there were an adequate number of candidates (and there are not), the present faculty simply will simply not do it." The background to the quote concerns Catholic and Jesuit universities writ large, and the question of specifically legal education in the Catholic tradition and Church only raises the stakes, not least because in law we lack the historical images, templates, and touchstones that, at least in part, still inspire and test some attempts to revivify undergraduate (and some graduate) education in the American Catholic scene. Rick is right, I think, that the possibility of making truth claims has to be faced at the threshold -- embarrassing though this may be. (Try fitting this notion into the current mission statement of the Georgetown University Law Center, satellite enterprise of that Jesuit University that could not locate a Jesuit to succeed to its presidency). I am inclined to agree with Father Burtchaell that, though it won't necessarily help the "Catholic" universities and colleges in the eyses of the obsessive rankers of this and that, they need to be subjected to the test of the Gospel and tradition(s) that brought them forth and, until the other day, refined them. And who other than the Church itself can, and perhaps will, see that this comes to pass?
Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Those of us living "in the world" can benefit from a relatively new series of spiritual writings generated in remote cloisters. The Carthusian Novice Conference Series, published by Cistercian (sic) Studies, provides in its several volumes unique access to the contemporary spirituality of those men and women who (as T. Merton said) "have gone the furthest, climbed the highest." Particularly at a time when many are wondering where God is in this creation of His, the Carthusian theology of God's presence and of how we discern it seems particularly ripe for study and reflection. It's not for everyone, I suspect -- but many of us can be grateful that the Carthusians are sharing with us, in an unprecedented way, what they learn about a world they take all their time to listen to and to pray about and for. There is reassurance in the motto of these persevering pilgrims: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis."
Those of us living "in the world" can benefit from a relatively new series of spiritual writings generated in remote cloisters. The Carthusian Novice Conference Series, published by Cistercian (sic) Studies, provides in its several volumes unique access to the contemporary spirituality of those men and women who (as T. Merton said) "have gone the furthest, climbed the highest." Particularly at a time when many are wondering where God is in this creation of His, the Carthusian theology of God's presence and of how we discern it seems particularly ripe for study and reflection. It's not for everyone, I suspect -- but many of us can be grateful that the Carthusians are sharing with us, in an unprecedented way, what they learn about a world they take all their time to listen to and to pray about and for. There is reassurance in the motto of these persevering pilgrims: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis."
