The drama surrounding Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) didn’t rise from nowhere. Rather, it began unobtrusively in 1949, when the Vatican created the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU). The IFCU invited only those chartered and overseen by the Holy See itself. More than half of the institutional activity in Catholic higher education was concentrated in the United States, where there was only one “pontifical” university, so the IFCU educators who gathered through the 1950s were about as numerous as registered black voters in Mobile.
When the IFCU decided to bring in all the civilly chartered Catholic institutions of higher education, Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo (whose education had not gone all that high), the prefect of the Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, agreed on two conditions: First, his office would verify their Catholic credentials, and, second, every university that claimed to be Catholic would be subject to the jurisdiction of his office. To force the issue, he insisted on approving all candidates for honorary degrees.
The IFCU member presidents then put Pizzardo on the spot by electing Notre Dame’s Fr. Theodore Hes-burgh, C.S.C., as their president. The cardinal refused to ratify the election, but there were other, mighty forces at work. Cardinals Spellman of New York and Cicognani, the papal secretary of state, were both asked by the American educators to explain to their colleague how differently matters stood between church and state in the United States. The cardinals explained to Pizzardo that since St. Louis University (which had just irritated him by awarding an honorary degree to theologian Hans Kling) was chartered civilly, the acts of its trustees were civil acts. It would be very provocative for the Church to claim that civil acts required ecclesial endorsement. A wiser man might have seen through the bluff, but Pizzardo was, as Paul would have said, less wise, and he relented in 1965.
That was 16 slow years after Rome had created the federation. It was duly enlarged and all the American presidents, who were not entirely sure why they wanted to be in the federation, found they belonged.
Depleted Coffers
The dominant force in American Catholic higher education was the array of universities and colleges run by the Society of Jesus. The 28 Jesuit presidents, however, found the mid-’60s to be a bleak season indeed. The Society itself was shrinking abruptly: Departures were up and vocations were down. The mood of the bright young men in training had turned anti-intellectual: Now they wanted to struggle for social justice in the barrio, not spend their lives getting advanced degrees. The Jesuit presidents had been kept on a tight leash by their provincial superiors and were impatient to have a free hand. The last negative factor was one the Jesuits shared with all other Catholic educators: With the passage of the National Defense Education Act, the federal and then the state governments began to subsidize independent higher education. The “separation of church and state” was invoked to block funding for church-related institutions just when a financial downturn had made them desperate for aid. This last threat was embodied in two momentous lawsuits, known as the Connecticut case and the Maryland case, respectively.
The Jesuit provincials used to set education policy as a group, and they kept the presidents under surveillance by their national educational secretary. After long maneuvering, the presidents managed to eliminate the secretary, form their own policy roundtable, and shut out the provincials. In the late 1960s, however, the presidents were overwhelmed by an economic lurch that brought their three flagship campuses (Georgetown, Fordham, and Boston College) to the brink of bankruptcy and threatened to draw them all down.
The urgent possibility of government subsidy seemed to be blocked, as the course of national litigation then suggested, because their institutions were “pervasively sectarian.” Their concerns and strategizing were joined by Catholic presidents from every direction. Most lawyers were telling them to change their legal status; withdraw themselves from the authority of their religious orders; and get Christ off the walls, out of the official publications, and off the syllabi.
The presidents rose patriotically to the occasion and took for their wisdom the “Land O’Lakes Statement” of 1967 that “the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”‘ The clerics and members of religious orders assured their prospective governmental benefactors that they now regarded their bishops and religious superiors as “outsiders” to the work of Catholic education. The civil authorities, of course, were also “outsiders,” but the presidents were thinking how nice it would be to invite them indoors.
This resolve was immediately put into practice as hundreds of Catholic college and university presidents began to persuade their sponsoring religious orders to let them rewrite their charters and confide the property and control of their institutions to largely lay trust, ownership, and governance. (The few diocesan universities generally retained their governance structures but admitted more lay members onto their boards.) The shift was not intended to be functionally drastic. The presidents who negotiated the transfer of power intended that they and their successors would emerge, for all practical purposes, as corporations sole. No one imagined that faculties and trustees would find a finesse and a clout of their own and claim a functional share in that sovereignty.
The two landmark cases were finally adjudicated in 1971 (Connecticut) and 1976 (Maryland) on terms that made it clear that ecclesial governance would not, after all, stand in the way of federal subsidy to Catholic higher education. But since the desperately needed funds had begun to flow and neither the displaced religious superiors nor the regnant presidents could yet know the long-term outcome of their deed, no one took the occasion to revisit the abrupt shift of authority. The presidents became adept at spooking their constituencies with periodic frights about withdrawal from dependence on the civic purse. It was, one might say, a welcome threat.
Chronic Worries
The drama was more complex than either onlookers or participants then appreciated. The fiscal panic that fell upon Catholic educational leaders in the decade leading up to Maryland coincided with the unsettling and angry crescendo of the war in Vietnam. Campus unrest brought down a generation of college presidents, including many of the Catholic ones, but their successors came into a new security, and eventually affluence, as money for tuition grants, building, and research began to flow. The largesse was not only civic. American Catholics were coming into a surprising prosperity and an equally surprising readiness to memorialize themselves at their alma maters. The presidents of the end of the fatter, late-’70s could hardly recall the harried desperation of their predecessors at the end of the lean- ’60s and early-’70s. Enrollments burgeoned, endowments plumped, faculty/student ratios improved, and Catholic colleges were now competitively (at least in a financial sense) recruiting new teachers from better graduate and professional schools. Catholic colleges had always been more urban than those of any other church, and now they began to sprout profitable credentialing programs to serve the young professionals working there.
There were very few eyes sharp enough to deconstruct the promotional literature and notice that “Catholic” had become a recessive descriptor, which was first downplayed and then omitted as a reminder of bygone narrowness. This practice was never uniform. When the target constituency was clearly Catholic, as in undergraduate recruitment, parent and alumni giving, most large capital campaigns, or presentations to the board, the Catholic icons and vocabulary were usually there. But graduate and professional programs and faculty recruitment began to be put forward in the motley of equal opportunity and equal manners. This bleaching of identity became an accelerated process since the newer, brighter, and more alienated faculty and administrators, merely by presence which was increasing in both numbers and proportion, seemed to choke back the traditional concern and conversation about the endeavor being authentically and articulately Catholic.
Some sense of this trend can be seen in “The Catholic University in the Modern World,” a manifesto adopted in 1972.3 The IFCU had drafted it as an official policy statement five years earlier; it was the Land O’Lakes Statement writ large. After five years of unresolved internal and external wrangling, it was finally adopted—not by the IFCU, where it encountered opposition, but by a Congress of the Catholic Universities of the World that took place in Rome.
The document lists four defining characteristics of a Catholic university: 1) a Christian inspiration of both individuals and community; 2) reflection on human knowledge in the light of the Catholic faith; 3) fidelity to the Christian message as it comes from the Church; and 4) commitment to the service of the people of God and of the human family. All universities that realize these “fundamental conditions,” said the document, are thereby Catholic universities.
Nothing very contentious here. What strikes the reader 25 years later, though, is the presupposition that this would be effortless. There is, indeed, an extensive passage on internal governance that sharpens up as it claims “true autonomy and academic freedom” in teaching and research—and in the selection of the academics who do the teaching and research. Apart from an allowance that “faculty members who belong to the Christian and Catholic tradition can bring to their research a further dimension or reality which often needs to be emphasized,” and that the department of religious studies should be “preeminent in scholars of the Christian and Catholic tradition” (however that be specified ecclesially), there is little concern expressed that Catholic scholars might be needed for a Catholic university, or any suggestion that a really Catholic university might prove to be a cat among the pigeons. Any claim that the Gospel tradition would actually yield an intellectual advantage is absent. The document is not terribly long, yet it reads like a cup of hot milk before retiring.
But that was the mood in those days. Three years later the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) reported that all the Catholic colleges and universities were “striving vigorously” to manifest those four “defining characteristics,” but cautioned its members that their relationship to the Church “would best be handled in ways that would not invite court challenge.” Church authorities could be counted on for delicacy and were aware that insensitivity or interference on their part might destroy the good being done on campus. “An authentic Catholic institution of higher learning must be free to be Catholic.”‘ The clear message was: “Don’t tread on me.” The presidents’ coup had aroused some antagonism among the bishops, but by 1977 many of them had been persuaded that their universities and colleges had to conform to U.S. practices to survive. That meant cooperation between Church and campus, but no juridical tie.
The 1976 judgment by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roemer, the Maryland case, resolved doubts that remained from Tilton, the Connecticut case, in 1971: Most Catholic colleges and universities were now free from the threat of being disqualified from most federal grants. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 (which amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) also made it clear that a college or university that authentically identified itself as a “religious educational institution” was exempt from the prohibition against discrimination in employment on grounds of religion if it chose to be staffed with its own. Catholic colleges and universities, provided they consistently exercised a preference for Catholic employees, were specifically acknowledged to be within their legal rights.
This should have been an enormous relief, and some legal interpreters assured religious colleges and universities that there was no need any Ionger to dissemble about their commitments. The Catholic educators, however, did not take this as a signal to correct their course. In 1977, for instance, the College and University Department of the NCEA took sharp offense when representatives of the bishops’ conference appeared before governmental bodies on higher education- related issues. Any implication of “Church control” would be “destructive of the efforts to maintain the ‘arms length’ distance between Church and college/university demanded in Court decisions.”
When drafts of a new Code of Canon Law decreed that the right to be called a Catholic university had to be authorized by the Holy See or a national conference of bishops, and that theology teachers should have the prior endorsement of their diocesan bishop, the NCEA replied that baptism was the only ecclesial prerequisite to offering a Catholic education or Catholic theology “Responsibility for the protection of the doctrine and discipline of the Church, which is the concern of the whole community of believers, resides individually and collectively in the faculty and administration….” Yet there were few groups within the community of believers that manifested less eagerness in 1977 to exercise or discipline that protective concern than the presidents and faculties of the Catholic colleges and universities.
Quiet Coup
In 1978, events took a decisive turn. The presidents were energized by two strong motives: to vindicate the eligibility of their institutions for their share of the new governmental largesse; and to relieve their institutions of the embarrassment of being thought answerable for their Catholic character. The two motives naturally coincided because litigation filed in the mid-’60s seemed to require dissociation from Church authorities. By the mid-’70s, when the litigation turned in their favor, the presidential refusal to correct course was a clear signal that there had been other, less clearly expressed, reasons for their coup.
There were a few dissidents among the presidents, plus some observers of Catholic higher education who saw the presidential takeover as fatally devious, but their grieving was too strident to get a hearing. Who was prepared to believe that in the two decades since the presidents had assumed virtually sole responsibility for their colleges and universities, most of the indices of their Catholic character had sharply declined?
The arrival of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 brought to the fore the sort of fellow who could imagine that something was amiss.
The presidents saw through the decade darkly, as did most of us. But John Paul II did not worry about seeing darkly. On his first journey to the United States, in October of 1979, he met with the bishops a day before he met with the Catholic educators, and sounded a motif that served as overture to the next day, if not to his pontificate. After courteously reviewing with praise the many accomplishments of the Church in this country, he began to speak of the “ministry of truth.”
Brothers in Christ: As we proclaim the truth in love, it is not possible for us to avoid all criticism; nor is it possible to please everyone. But it is possible to work for the real benefit of everyone. And so we are humbly convinced that God is with us in our ministry of truth, and that he “did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control” (2 Tm 1:7).
One of the greatest rights of the faithful is to receive the word of God in its purity and integrity as guaranteed by the Magisterium of the universal Church: the authentic Magisterium of the bishops of the Catholic Church teaching in union with the pope. . . . The Holy Spirit is active in enlightening the minds of his faithful with his truth and in inflaming their hearts with his love. But these insights of faith and this sensus fidelium are not independent of the Magisterium of the Church, which is an instrument of the same Holy Spirit and is assisted by him.’
Papal discourse is not normally seeded with passages that stand out, but in hindsight one can see that John Paul was emphatically enunciating the theme he would offer the presidents on the following day, “the ministry of truth”:
Every university or college is qualified by a specific mode of being. Yours is the qualification of being Catholic, of affirming God, his revelation, and the Catholic Church as the guardian and interpreter of that revelation. The term “Catholic” will never be a mere label, either added or dropped according to the pressures of various forces.
For a group of men and women whose anxiety to be received as worthy peers by an academy that saw no advantage in any such sectarian identity, this brought heartburn. When he went on to insist that they manifest “without equivocation” the Catholic nature of their institutions, could he have known that for many of them it was equivocation that promised survival? He pressed on. “The desire to come to the knowledge of the truth,” he reminded them, was the deepest and noblest aspiration of the human person. “Truth and science are not gratuitous conquests, but the result of a surrender to objectivity and of the exploration of all aspects of nature and man.” That was good. That was what the academy liked to hear, even when it doubted the sincerity of Catholics who said it.
The pope was not content that Catholic educators be peers in that academy. He wanted them to think they enjoyed an advantage: “Because he is bound by the total truth on man, the Christian will, in his research and in his teaching, reject any partial vision of human reality, but he will let himself be enlightened by his faith in the creation of God and the redemption of Christ.”
A year after the papal visit, the bishops published their first ever pastoral letter on Catholic higher education. It was largely appreciative of the educators’ perceived need to satisfy the expectations of their secular colleagues. The pope had spoken of witness to a living and operative Christianity, of the “Catholic patrimony,” of how academic excellence is best appreciated in the context of the Church’s mission of evangelization, and of a Gospel going beyond professional competence to impregnate social thought-patterns and standards of judgment.
By contrast, the bishops (not, perhaps, without drafting help from the presidents) looked in the opposite direction and spoke of Catholic efforts as valuable for pluralism, of academic freedom for the sake of educational quality, of the need for Catholics to measure up to the norms of the wider academic community, and of the institution’s Catholic character showing forth in the “values of the Judeo-Christian view of life.” No one reading this tame letter could have foreseen that the bishops would soon come to be designated as a nuisance by the educators.
Losing Focus
The chief grievance the bishops might have raised in 1980, but did not, was the presidents’ resolute unwillingness to recognize that their ability to offer a Catholic education required the open and purposeful recruitment of a faculty among whom Catholics would pre-dominate and lead, in every way. By 1980, their financial welfare was in spate. The larger and older but severely unwelcome question should then have been apparent: Why were Catholic educational executives so unable to assert that a discriminating Catholic faith was a positive component of academic excellence (not just a complement to it), and was a distinctive advantage their institutions meant to cultivate and offer within the world of scholarship? The bishops, while pointing out that “Catholics who completely share the Catholic vision and heritage of faith carry the greatest responsibility to maintain the Catholic character of these institutions” and that “the recruitment and retention of com-mitted and competent Catholic faculty are essential,” were evidently unaware that this had become a mental reservation: presidents would agree to it out loud, but virtually none of them was treating it as a live-or-die issue for their schools.
In the years to follow, the primary educational initiative of Rome was in the hands of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, from time to time turned its dissatisfaction on various scholars and was sometimes joined by local bishops doing the same. The notoriety of these disciplinary skirmishes, which varied in their rigor, gave the impression that in the pastoral imagination of the hierarchy, irresponsible liberality among theologians was the gravest of their concerns for Catholic intellectual life. The roster of scholars singled out for criticism remains in current memory (including several from other countries whose causes were taken up over here): Hans Kung, Jacques Pohier, Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran, Daniel Maguire, Gustavo Guttierez, Richard McBrien, Matthew Fox, Anthony Kosnick, Marcel Xhaufflaire, John McNeill. The Vatican’s refusal to approve an honorary degree from Fribourg’s Faculty of Theology for Archbishop Rembert Weakland may also be a case in point. The long-term loss from such episodes was unclear, since there were abiding memories of tall figures who had been under a similar shadow awhile in yesteryear: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Herbert Doms, Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, and Edouard Schillebeeckx. In some cases, older and newer, the challenge led to private dialogue which usually mended confidence on either side.
In retrospect, this singling out of controversial individuals seriously distracted from the larger and less noticed regression of the institutional communities from their Catholic identity. Legal and financial circumstances had significantly altered in their favor since being invoked two decades earlier to justify official dissociation from ecclesial accountability. At the time, the dissociation was presented as a mere legal formality, not an emancipation, but it was proving through later events to look like a defection in thought, word, and deed. Indeed, what the presidents had originally intended as their personal emancipation to govern their campuses free of any need to answer to the Church for their fidelity had, within one short generation, seen the faculty and later the trustees begin to emancipate themselves from the presidents.
As the boards came into their own, the issue of Catholic character was hardly more than a public relations issue. An empowered faculty viewed it largely as a sentimental slogan that, if ever taken seriously, would prove odious and embarrassing. They were, in the event, spared that odium and embarrassment.