I want to second Patrick Brennan's recommendation of Jesuit Education 21: Conference Proceedings on the Future of Jesuit Higher Education as a helpful resource for fruitful reflection on the important question of how to understand the identity and mission of a Jesuit, Catholic law school. I attended that conference at a time in my own apostolic discernment when I was struggling with the question of whether it made sense for me to live out my Jesuit priestly mission as a legal academic. I found one of the conference talks particularly helpful, "The Jesuit Mission and the Dialogue with Culture," by John McDade, S.J. His essay is a thought-provoking reflection on the implications for Jesuit higher education that flow from the Society of Jesus' understanding of its mission as involving a commitment to bringing the Gospel into dialogue with contemporary culture. In an American culture that is profoundly shaped by law, and in an academic culture that is often hostile to religion, the Jesuit law school can, and should, have an important role to play in this mission of bringing the Gospel into dialogue with culture.
In our most recent General Congregation (GC 34), the Society of Jesus articulated a vision for pursuing this mission through a ministry of conversation, not one of impostion:
"A genuine attempt to work from within the shared experience of Christians and unbelievers in a secular and critical culture, built upon respect and friendship, is the only successful starting point. Our ministry towards atheists and agnostics [and believers from other traditions] will either be a meeting of equal partners in dialogue, addressing common questions, or it will be hollow."
McDade recognizes that GC 34's commitment to a dialogue with culture gives rise to a ministry characterized by an inherent tension -- an unavoidable creative tension between respectful, authentic dialogue -- which demands real listening and openness to learning and change in conversation with others -- and proclamation of the Good News that transforms all cultures. He sees this tension alive in GC 34's use of two Christological images to describe the relation of Gospel and culture:
"[T]he first is Incarnational in which inculturation [and dialogue are] seen as a dimension of the indwelling of the Word of God in all the divesity of human experience. The Word comes to dwell in all human cultures [even the law school] and shapes them. The second is Paschal and dialectical: cultures, under the liberating power of the Gospel, are freed from their negative features by being confronted with the counterchallenge of the Kingdom. The Word confronts and challenges human cultures [even the law school] by refusing to be assimilated by them." [Jesuit Education 21, at 57]
Different institutions, with different histories and traditions, will give flesh to this mission of dialogue and proclamation with its inherent creative tension in different ways. There is no single magic bullet answer to the mission and identity question. I don't think it's particularly fruitful to mourn the missed opportunities of the hiring decisions of the last 25 years or to spin out a narrative in which we seek to recover the dying light of a lost golden age that probably never existed. Instead we ought to acknowledge that we are asking a new question about law schools: how do we in our various institutions embody a ministry of legal education animated by the long tradition of the the Church and the Society of Jesus that (1) engages in rigorous intellectual pursuit of all authentically human questions, including questions arising from faith and from the promotion of the justice of God's kingdom, (2) that risks serious, respectful, open, potentially transformative dialogue engaging the questions and experiences of our colleagues and students, and (3) that helps to form students for professional lives that are integrated into a human life understood as vocation to wholeness and freedom.
The question of how to embody that mission of dialogue and proclamation in the law school culture is definitely a question worth struggling with.
On a somewhat different front, as a member of the Society of Jesus and a Georgetown alumnus, I was a bit dismayed by Patrick's characterization of Georgetown as "that Jesuit University that could not locate a Jesuit to succeed to its presidency." I don't think our struggle with the questions of institutional identity and mission is much advanced by implying that authentic identity is somehow tied to whether or not the president of the institution is a Jesuit or a lay person.
Id' like to again quote from GC 34, which reaffirmed the commitment of the Society of Jesus to cooperation with the laity in mission:
"A lay person can be the Director of a Jesuit work. . . . The emerging "Church of the Laity" will . . . have an impact on our own Jesuit apostolic works. This transformation can enrich these works and expand their Ignatian character, if we know how to cooperate with the grace of the emergence of the laity. When we speak of "our" apostolates," we will mean something different by "our." It will signify a genuine Ignatian partnership of laity and Jesuits, each of us acting according to our proper vocation. Lay persons will rightly take on a greater role of responsibility and leadership within these works. Jesuits will be called on to support them in their initiative by Ignatian formation, inculcation of Jesuit apostolic values, and the witness of our priestly and religious lives. If our service will be humbler, it will also be more challenging and creative, and more in accord with the graces we have received. This actualization of the vocation of the laity can show more clearly the grace of our vocation."
So, the choice of a lay person as president of a university may mean something more than the simple failure "to locate a Jesuit to succeed to its presidency." It may instead reflect a considered apostolic judgment, made for appropriate apostolic reasons, that this particular lay person is the right choice to lead this particular institution at this particular moment in time.
I have a deep and ongoing concern for the Jesuit and Catholic identity of Georgetown. I am grateful for the profoundly Jesuit and Catholic experience that I had during my four years there as an undergraduate; my introduction to the Catholic intellectual tradition, to a deeply rooted faith that was open to struggling with questions, and to priests whose ministry in the classroom and in the chapel provided powerful witness to the meaning of the Incarnation all shaped my faith in very concrete ways. If that weren't enough, I doubt that I would be a Jesuit in the absence of my experience of such a place.
From what I know of Jack DiGioia, he is a man deeply rooted in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and commited to Jesuit higher education and the mission of the Society of Jesus. As a Jesuit (and in light of the governing documents of the Society of Jesus as I understand them), my primary concern is that the president share the vision of St. Ignatius and the Society of Jesus, whether or not he has S.J. behind his name.
We had a discussion on this blog, a few months ago, about "subsidiarity" and the Third Circuit's decision striking down the Solomon Amendment (which requires, among other things, law schools at universities receiving federal money to permit the military to recruit) on First Amendment grounds. Another court has weighed in. Go here (to uber-law-blogger Howard Bashman's site) for more. As I have discussed elsewhere (and in a recent issue of Commonweal Magazine), I regard the First Amendment arguments against the Solomon Amendment -- advanced in this case by various professors at Yale Law School -- to be quite unconvincing (and, in some respects, a bit disingenuous).
Rick
I have just posted an essay that deals with some of the issues that have come up in the discussions on Catholic legal education, “An Explicit Connection Between Faith and Justice in Catholic Legal Education: Why Rock the Boat?” (forthcoming as part of a Detroit-Marcy Law & Religion Symposium). As Patrick might frame it, it attempts to respond to the questions of what can be “realistically” done in Catholic law schools where mission questions have not been a focal point for a number of years and where there are now faculties and student bodies which are quite religiously diverse. This may be counter-intuitive for some folks, but I strongly believe that one of the most important paths for Catholic legal education is to frame many of our discussions in the context of interfaith dialogue. I don’t believe that approach takes anything away from expressing Jesus as “Way, Truth and Life” – in fact, I think this approach is often a deeper invitation to discover the beauty and depth of that Way, Truth and Life – because it includes a profound respect for the identity of the other and the richness of their traditions. I’d be curious to know what you all think. To follow up on one of Patrick’s comments, from the essay you’ll see that I would also be concerned about thin mission statements – but I’m not sure it’s fair to make a sweeping generalization based on whether a school’s president is of that school’s religious order or lay – I think the questions and concerns there might be more complex. Amy
Andrew Sullivan asks, "Why not an anti-abortion amendment?":
The Senate Republicans have vowed to push their anti-gay marriage amendment, even though it won't stand a chance of getting the necessary 67 votes. The point is political and rhetorical. They are trying to build momentum, raise money, and keep the cause of banning same-sex unions alive. So why not push an anti-abortion amendment instead? They have one such amendment on hand. Both proposed amendments are allegedly against judicial meddling. Both will fail. But one deals with a much graver issue, by the religious right's reckoning - an immense loss of human life, rather than the grave evil of two human beings committing to one another for life. So why this priority? Surely, abortion is a more important matter than same-sex marriage - even for the religious right. Or is it?
Rob
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?
According to this article (thanks to Domenico Bettinelli), some officials in Lowell, Massachusetts believe that "local Catholic churches shuttered as part of the Archdiocese of Boston's parish consolidation process should no longer be exempt from city property taxes. . . . Last week, [city] councilors voted unanimously to prepare a schedule for assessing property taxes against eligible church buildings as soon as possible." Mayor Armand Mercier commented, "The taxpayers of Lowell have been subsidizing these tax-exempt entities and were very willing to do so because of the benefit of the churches toward the faithful," he said. "However, that's no longer the case, and the city of Lowell taxpayers should no longer be subsidizing these buildings."
What is interesting (to me) about this story, from a "legal theory" perspective, is what it reveals about the basis for churches' exemption from taxation. That is, Mayor Mercier's view is that the tax exemption is extended, as a matter of grace, to churches because and to the extent that these churches provide a public benefit that justifies the "subsidization" in question. Churches are not tax-exempt because of anything in constitutional law or political theory that either insulates churches from taxation or disables government from taxing them.
Rick
