Good Scholarship & True Education


(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)



In addition, one can usually find an article or two written in defense of traditional Catholic values and the pre-Vatican II Catholic heritage in the United States. Someone on the masthead seems to understand that the term “Jesuit Catholic Mission” should be more than just a catchy slogan to convince Catholic middle-class parents to take out a second mortgage to pay their children’s tuition at Fordham or Georgetown.

The May 21st issue was a good example. In an article entitled “Virginity Lost and Found,” Julie A. Collins, a teacher of religious studies at Georgetown Prep in North Bethesda, Md., argued that Catholic schools “have got to be more intentional, more vocal, more explicit about promoting chastity”; that Catholic educators have a responsibility to make clear to adolescents that “recreational sex creates a world of the used and the users, a naked hell that leaves one convinced that love is illusion and fidelity a joke.” Collins asks, “When was the last time that you heard a homily or a retreat talk on chastity? When in a classroom was chastity lauded along with Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolent social change or Mother Teresa’s passion for the poor?” And, “if we as a culture and as a church do not applaud chastity, can we be surprised that our young do not value it?” it can’t be said much better than that. I hope the powers-that-be in the Church are listening.

In that same issue Michael M. Clarke, an associate professor of English at the Jesuits’ Loyola University Chicago, takes on the familiar charge that Catholic universities are constricted by their ties to the Church, thereby denying their faculties academic freedom and their students exposure to the full spectrum of scholarly views. Quite the contrary, says Clarke: “A university’s Catholic identity provides something that is ‘value-added’ to the other elements by which we measure a good education.” “In a Catholic university we are not less free, but more free. We teach in a setting in which religion is valued and move in surroundings that are permeated with visible and audible expressions of respect for and heartfelt reliance on faith.”

Precisely. Come on. Who is close-minded? The secular educational establishment that treats thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman as irrelevant, and the moral questions that shaped the heritage of the West as politically incorrect intrusions into the educational process? Or those who introduce their students to the role that religious belief has played in shaping our world? Clarke: “Intellectual integrity and distinction require that we include the religious element of human life in our teaching and scholarship. In a Catholic university, we are not only more free to do so, we owe it to our students to ensure that they are cognizant of the place off religion and understand its concepts. This is not proselytizing. It is good scholarship – and true education.”

I can attest to Clarke’s insight. He is right about Catholic colleges – that is, about Catholic colleges in the days before the self-doubts spawned by the “spirit of Vatican II” threw them into disarray. I graduated from Fordham in 1964 and then moved into circles where I worked with educators trained at some of the country’s leading private and public secular universities. At the risk of sounding boastful (it will only seem boastful; the credit goes to the Catholic schools I attended, not to me), my education was decidedly broader and more balanced than that of my colleagues. I never felt left out of the discussion at faculty meetings and academic conferences. Fordham introduced me to the dialectic that dominates the secular scholarly world, to Hegel and Marx, Freud and John Dewey, Sartre, Camus and Kierkegaard, Brecht and Ibsen. I knew at least as much about these thinkers as my secular counterparts.

But here’s the point: My colleagues knew next to nothing about St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, natural law theory, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frances Thompson, John Courtney Murray, the controversies surrounding Teilhard de Chardin, Jacques Maritain’s analysis of the distinction between “society” and “the state,” subsidiarity, and Modernism. This entire swathe of scholarship was unknown territory for them. I submit that only a fool or an anti-Catholic bigot would argue that their education was enhanced by this gap. I can say without qualification, or fear that partisanship is clouding my judgment, that my experience at “parochial” schools was far broader than theirs.

The enemies of Catholic universities in the pre-Vatican II era will likely go to their graves painting our schools as authoritarian, anti-intellectual, anti-sex, medieval, backward, repressive – you know the drill. But they will go to their graves wrong. Michael M. Clarke is correct: There was once solid “value-added” in Catholic education; Clarke’s goal is to restore it. Sad to say, he reports that not many of his colleagues at Loyola University Chicago agree. Their goal is to make Catholic colleges carbon copies of the soulless modern secular colleges, into what the Irish rebel leader Patrick Pearse called “death machines.” They “tend to assume that it is not the business of faculty to promote the university’s Catholic identity.” He reports that “Not only do we not discuss the religious ideas underlying the topics we teach and write about; in some cases we do not even see them. This impoverishes us as scholars, and it impoverishes our students.”

Next time you meet a recent graduate of a Catholic college ask him or her what subsidiarity means, or what he thinks about Thomas More’s stand against Henry VIII. I suspect that you will find that the old “value-added” is no longer being added. They are likely to know more about Betty Friedan than Orestes Brownson these days.

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