Part Two: The Worrisome Gestation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae

In the spring of 1985 began what would be a strenuous struggle between the Holy See and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) over the fate of Catholic higher education in the United States. It continues to this day.

The Congregation for Catholic Education, then presided over by an American, William Cardinal Baum, sent out a Schema for a planned pontifical document on Catholic higher education, inviting suggestions for improvement. As Roman documents go, it was coherent and thoughtful, equally divided into a policy statement and regulations. It spoke of the Catholic university as a witness to integral truth, an intellectual and moral community where the Gospel would give both inquiry and teaching a fuller resonance. The denizens of such a community would simultaneously meld faith with learning to nourish a culture within the Catholic community and also to poke the secular culture: “Every culture has the right to be respected, but at the same time it must be confronted with the Gospel of Christ.” The outcome should be a shared wisdom in which “ethics have priority over technology, the person has primacy over things, being prevails over having and doing, spirit is superior to matter,” so that, as the draft put it, “intelligence and conscience [predominate] over materialistic processes that threaten to annul the value of the person and the meaning of life.”

Thus far the what; after the policy came the how, worked out in the section detailing the Norms. Since an authentically Catholic commitment to higher education is both pastoral and intellectual, the bishops should work closely with educators—not as “outsiders” (the “Land O’Lakes” slogan had not been forgotten in Rome), but as pastors bound by formal solidarity to those who direct higher education. Together bishops and educators would assure that, from statutes to daily operations, the university would be an academic community with predominantly Catholic personnel. From president to faculty to student body, integrity of doctrine and comportment would be required in the same way as integrity of research and instruction if both the community and the education are to be functionally Catholic. The Roman draft is clear that, although the leadership needs to be Catholic, not all the membership need be so for the university to be a true and loyal Catholic fellowship where each one “shall accept responsibility … both for the common good and for the Catholic identity.”‘

In retrospect, the most obvious affront to the American academic culture, so dominated by individualist prerogative and ambition, seems to be the very presumption of a purposeful academic community that could be loyally united in thought, worship, and comportment. The presidents were entirely opposed. Sister Alice Gallin, O.S.U., executive secretary of the ACCU, stated that Vatican intrusion could only make the schools’ work more difficult. The Catholic colleges and universities, she insisted, existed by virtue of their civil charters, not by virtue of the Church. They were answerable for their performance to accrediting associations, not to the Church. And they were heavily dependent on government funding, not contributions from the Church. Indeed, their very existence required that they be nonsectarian, making no distinction between Catholics and non-Catholics, never attempting to share their faith with others, and allowing no intrusion by the Church in their decisions, teaching, or religious practices. That being said, she went on to assure Rome that all their academic personnel were nevertheless “deeply committed to the Catholic mission of the institution.”

Gallin doubted, however, that Rome could ever understand, let alone appreciate, something so “peculiarly American,” which could never survive presumptuous attempts by the pastors of the Church to claim a part in its destiny. The churchmen’s role should be “to support, to encourage, and to assist the colleges,” while the trustees’ role was to make the decisions. Since certain theologians had been the primary focus of most episcopal interventions, she tartly pointed out that “the university is the home of the theologian, not the bishop, and the bishop must respect that fact.”

“Membership in a church” was insignificant for the faculty in their “commitment to the goals of the university” Gallin explained. Any attempt to include “some-thing as vague as doctrinal integrity and uprightness of life” in their professional undertaking would engender “an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion,” as would attempts by bishops to assure “orthodoxy,” an uncertain entity she isolated with quotes, as in “Catholic” character. The Roman draft “is contrary to the American values of both academic freedom and due process” as defined by civil and constitutional law. If pursued seriously it would violate both the spirit of Vatican II and the standing of the ACCU institutions before American law.

Rebuking Rome

What strikes the reader first is the tone of the rebuke: It is not often that a layperson, albeit a professional academic and a member of a religious order, tells the Holy See to listen up with such bravado. For our purposes, however, that is less significant than the severity of her misinterpretation. The Schema made no suggestion that bishops should claim or aspire to legal authority over a college or university by virtue of its claim to be Catholic. Rome did not require that all parties to this unique sort of intellectual and religious community be Catholic, nor that non- Catholics be “proselytized.” To the contrary, the Schema described a community wherein non-Catholics were welcomed because they wanted to share its purposes, and not, as Gallin’s rebuke implied, because they were protected from such an expectation.

A most interesting feature of the Roman overture is that it proposed the equivalent of accreditation. It made no pretense of commanding. Rome claimed the duty to stipulate what these colleges and universities should be to be acknowledged as Catholic. Granted the name and claims of the ACCU and their sister universities across the world, it does not seem impudent for the Bishop of Rome to say that if they really meant to be Catholic, the way to give truth to the claim was through a vital communion with the Catholic Church, and that there was no communion if not with and through the bishops. Consensual communion, not enforced control, was what the draft proposed.

Gallin was quickly followed by a small group of presidents who used more obliging language to make the same points.’ The Schema, as they read it, was unacceptable because it would place Catholic colleges and universities under the direct jurisdictional control of Church authorities. The negative effects of that would be almost too numerous to mention, but they ventured to list some anyway: loss of academic accreditation, total forfeiture of financial support from federal and state governments and from private foundations, submission of all pre-existing contractual obligations to the Church for approval or disapproval, liability to litigation for discriminatory employment practices, loss of credibility in the academy, quashing of academic freedom…

As an academic gambit, the presidents’ intervention was not fruitful, if critical attention to their statement is any measure. The Roman draft proceeded from the straightforward notion that a university determined to be Catholic would have some active relationship with the pastors of the Catholic Church. The Catholic bishop would deal with the Catholic university as an autonomous entity committed to appropriate academic freedom. Period. Nothing was said about jurisdiction, control, or subjection. The only provision for specific Church action was that Catholic theologians on the faculty would be expected to include a “mandate” from the bishop along with their other credentials. The Catholic university simply required recognition as Catholic, and the Church’s terms were a great deal simpler than those of other accrediting authorities. The presidents seemed to imagine that Rome reserved the right to evaluate the orthodoxy of their theologians, but the implication of the Schema was that Rome wanted an authentically Catholic university to possess both the will and the wherewithal to address such challenges itself, well before the Church was asked to withdraw its accreditation.

In effect, if Gallin did speak for the presidents as she claimed, their position was simple: It meant little or nothing for them to accommodate the Church, and everything to accommodate the state. The briefer rejection by the cadre of presidents stands on the same ground.’ Ever since the appeal in 1967 to base the destiny of the 235 Catholic colleges and universities solely on their own presidential “Trust me:’ Catholics have been testing whether any ministry so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. The evidence is that it cannot.

This discussion took place in 1986. In 1987 John Paul II came back to this country, and once more he devoted an address to the Catholic educators. As if to begin with “As I was saying,” he went directly to the chief point at issue. The Catholic identity of their institutions, he said, “depends upon the explicit profession of Catholicity on the part of the university as an institution and also upon the personal conviction and sense of mission on the part of its professors and administrators.” Far from being an awkward proposition in the free market of ideas, faith motivates the university to search for the truth. Its research and teaching “proceed from the vision and perspective of faith,” and since the search for truth and the search for God are so companionable, the teaching office of the Church and the Catholic university share a similarly “intimate relationship.”

The pope will not allow pluralism to be used as an excuse. “The respect for persons which pluralism rightly envisions does not justify the view that ultimate questions about human life and destiny have no final answers or that all beliefs are of equal value, provided that none is asserted as absolutely true and normative. Truth,” John Paul said briskly, “is not served in this way” As an obvious riposte to the warning that bishops needed a visa to come into the theologians’ domain, he said that it was the bishops’ responsibility to assure the faithful authenticity of what was taught in the Church. “In this they need the assistance of Catholic theologians, who perform an estimable service to the Church. But theologians also need the charism entrusted by Christ to the bishops and, in the first place, to the bishop of Rome. The fruits of their work, in order to enrich the life stream of the ecclesial community, must ultimately be tested and validated by the Magisterium.”

Far from suggesting the Church be given entree to authorize or discipline the faculty, the pope was implying the universities should have the gumption to do so themselves. He concluded by reminding the presidents of their task “of preserving and strengthening” their Catholic character, which he defined as an “institutional commitment to the word of God as proclaimed by the Catholic Church.”

When word of a revised draft of the proposed document sped across the Atlantic in 1988, the bishops and the presidents naturally wondered how the rebuke from the ACCU had gone down in Rome. John Paul’s recent insistence to the presidents that to be Catholic their institutions had to be upfront about their identity, maintain a faculty who vitally shared the faith and communion of the Church, and contribute to the pluralism of America rather than absorbing it, gave promise of a tough rewrite. Not to worry. The old working paper had been scrapped and the new one could have almost been written by Gallin herself. The text had grown fivefold in length, but the gain was in bulk, not weight.

The draft distinguished several times between Catholic academics, who carry the “primary responsibility to accept and foster” institutional fidelity to the Catholic Church, and their non-Catholic colleagues who offer recognition, respect, and honor. There was, however, no express concern that the former should predominate. Prospective faculty were to be informed of the distinctive character of the university and their responsibilities to it, but evidently their acceptance of that standard was not a qualification to be evaluated before appointment. Presidents and trustees were expected to promote the university’s distinctive Catholic identity, though not necessarily by sharing it as Catholics.

The new draft’s chief concern about sponsorship seemed to be an assurance of theological fidelity, on which it dwelled rather specifically. It did mention the “academic community” of the university, but narrowed its functional concern to specific doctrinal harmony rather than the deeper intellectual fellowship, perspective, and fidelity that Catholic communion might inspire. It was as if Rome had been misled by its own headlines and agenda to believe that the major index of degradation in Catholic efforts at higher education was the small handful of theologians said to have gone astray.

But a second tide of alarm soon rose against this second, thoroughly amiable, draft. The lingering requirement, now firmly lodged in the 1983 revised Code of Canon Law, that those teaching Catholic theology on Catholic campuses required recognition from the Church, was vilified as an intrusion so violative of internal college autonomy that compliant Catholic colleges and their students would forfeit all public funding under a First Amendment challenge.’ Critics of the document-in-progress continued to focus on this “mandate” as a stubborn Vatican folly that would cost the Church in America her grand establishment of Catholic higher education.

A year later the Congregation formally invited still further response to its draft. A group of 90 educators and 37 bishops from 40 countries was invited to Rome in April 1989. A commission of 15 people, elected by the delegates, gathered afterward to work over a third, unpublished draft, which was finally passed to the prelates who sat on the congregation.’ A final draft went to the pope, who worked on it for several months. The extensive consultation had been more public and more layered than was usual at the Holy See. Since the second draft had in so many of its features bent to the presidents’ wind, many expected the apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, enacted at last on August 15, 1990, to go far to meet their last demands. But in what really mattered to them, it did not.

Advantage of Faith

The American presidents in particular had been tireless in warning that their institutions were still cadets in the eyes of the more dignified, pace-setting universities of our land. The prejudiced notion that Catholic universities were more inclined to proselytize on behalf of largely emotive and ethnic loyalties than to honor rigorous scholarship was still alive and persuasive, and the academy wanted a strong signal from Catholics that they were anxious to earn the respect of their cultured despisers … on the despisers’ terms. Also, the financial windfall from federal and state funding, which had brought a salvific subsidy upon which the universities’ annual budgets were now becoming dependent, was being regularly threatened by officials and litigants scouting for evidence that the Catholics were talking out of both sides of their mouths and were privately protecting distinctive elements that were not just harmless symbols. The presidents had asked Rome for slack, for a smooth document that would talk accommodation but allow the presidents to carry on earnestly, using that cover to raise up articulate believers unto the Lord.

In the meantime a Polish hand seemed to have picked up the pen. Ex Corde Ecclesiae does not speak of the role of the church as a supplicant in a pluriform culture. It speaks of the church having much to learn, not from membership in the public or academic cultures, but from engaging them and prevailing. Writing in the first person, the pope recalls that his many pilgrim journeys ..

are for me a lively and promising sign of the fecundity of the Christian mind in the heart of every culture. They give me a well-founded hope for a new flowering of a Christian culture in the rich and varied context of our changing times, which certainly face serious challenges but which also bear so much promise under the action of the Spirit of truth and of love.

The Church’s “way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has ‘an intimate conviction that truth is [its] real ally … and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith,'” is to consecrate itself without reserve to the impartial search for truth, with “a clear awareness that by its Catholic character a university is made more capable of conducting an impartial search for truth, a search that is neither subordinated to nor conditioned by a particular interest of any kind.” Since the Catholic university’s search “for certainty and wisdom” is of such benefit to everyone, within and without, all Catholics are invited “to guard the rights and freedom of these institutions in civil society and to offer them economic aid.”

At a stroke the pope set his theme: Catholics maintain universities out of their conviction that their faith is a singular advantage, both of motive and of perception, in the impartial search for truth, and that is why they consider them “one of the best instruments” offered to an age which is searching for certainty and wisdom. We do not enter the search as apprentices; we are born to it.

The document is slim, mostly new, and mostly to the point. John Paul presented no definition of the Catholic university; indeed, he adopted verbatim the 1972 roster of essential characteristics: Christian inspiration, reflection in faith, fidelity to the message of Christ in the Church, commitment to serve Church and world. As a place of research, it is a place of witness: This is explicit evidence that the church sees knowledge and the search for knowledge as intrinsically valuable.

Through a good part of the text the pope played a riff on how many ways the Church, with its large agenda and repertoire, inveterately uses its universities to integrate faith with reason. Integration of this sort would be commonplace in a community that was simultaneously and equally intellectual, moral, and ecclesial.

John Paul expected some turbulence to result. There is no hiding it. A university of this sort will be a medium of evangelization, and to describe it he drew in an unusually eloquent theme from Paul VI: “It is a question not only of preaching the Gospel in ever wider geographic areas or to ever greater numbers of people, but also of affecting, as it were, upsetting, through the power of the Gospel, humanity’s criteria of judgment….”

The second draft had concluded with 72 norms; the finished text has only had seven. But the pope shifted discourse sharply to make it rhetorically clear that in the “Norms” section he moved from explanation to imperatives.

The pope was laying down the requirements for those institutions which freely choose to be Catholic. He allowed of no “third way” whereby the campus Catholicism could be unilateral and rhetorical. The revised Code of Canon Law had incorporated some of these Norms and supplemented others. They apply universally, though the protocols for applying them in each country will have to be worked out between the bishops and presidents there … and then reviewed by Rome. All Catholic universities are expected to incorporate both the Norms and their local applications into their charters and bylaws, because every Catholic university must be linked with the Catholic Church by either a statutory bond or a formal undertaking. Rhetoric cannot replace formal engagements. Each institution must eventually publish a mission statement firm and full enough to put everyone on notice about the identity and, it claims the concrete provisions that sustain it.

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