This issue marks the first time, in my tenure as editor, that Crisis has devoted its entire features section to a single topic and a single author. Crisis takes this step confident our readers will agree that the time is long overdue to tell the whole story of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“Out of the Heart of the Church”), Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education.
Recently, attacks on Ex Corde have flooded the Catholic press. No doubt these articles are aimed at the bishops, who, at an upcoming meeting in November, will finally vote on a plan to implement Ex Corde in the United States. Recall that this document was published nine years ago!
Fr. James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C., former provost of the University of Notre Dame and author of the magisterial The Dying of the Light, has provided a great and timely service to all of us by his comprehensive account of the creation of Ex Corde, along with his answers to the standard objections to it.
With the publication of this article it is hoped that the debate surrounding Ex Corde will move beyond stale issues of government funding or academic freedom. The real issues are much deeper and rarely discussed: the Church’s teaching on sexual morality and the reasonable limits to any insti¬tution that calls itself “Catholic”.
Not since publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968 has a papal document aroused as much resistance and con-fusion. In fact, the resistance to Humanae Vitae and the resistance to Ex Corde have, unexpectedly, become intertwined. Over the past three decades, the faculties of many Catholic universities have filled up with tenured educators whose attitude towards Catholicism is shaped by dissent from and skepticism of the teachings of Humanae Vitae. To those faculty, the looming implementation of Ex Corde portends a quashing of dissent on matters of sexual morality.
One might think that issues of sexual morality would only touch upon the subject matter of a few disciplines in theology and philosophy. But, with the politicization of all knowledge along gender lines, in the style of Michel Foucault, the question of sexual morality and the authority of the Church are felt to directly challenge the postmodern mentality of faculty in contemporary universities.
In this light, it is important to keep in mind one of Burtchaell’s most telling points: When the college presidents moved to provide their boards with more power in shaping university identity, the real recipients of power were ultimately the faculties. So the picture Burtchaell presents is not the typical one of college presidents alone wanting to ignore their bishops. Rather, he paints a picture of presidents looking for new sources of government funding who unwittingly play into the hands of tenured faculty who, for deep philosophical and religious reasons, don’t want the full weight of the Catholic tradition felt on their campus.
Some may wonder how a faculty, employed by an administration and a board of trustees, succeeds in taking control of an institution. The answer lies in the fact that faculty hire new faculty; their recommendations are rarely overturned by administrators. The ideas and books the faculty selects become the “furniture of the mind” for every student. Over time, administrators using a different set of furniture find themselves in a very uncomfortable position.
Unless college presidents, through their administrative subordinates and department chairs, play a very diplomatic game of guiding faculty hiring committees to desirable ends, the character of a faculty reproduces itself generation after generation, only to be reinforced by their students. Few college presidents, given the strenuous demands of constant fundraising and other obligations, have the time or energy to focus on the strategic problems of guiding faculty hiring and shaping curriculum. College presidents understandably claim success merely by virtue of keeping their institutions afloat.
All appearances to the contrary, it is probable that Catholic college presidents are looking for a graceful way to re-establish relations with their bishops. Boards of trustees are very likely of the same mind. Faculty, however, operating as they do in a highly politicized intellectual environment, one which actively enforces conformity, will need the greatest help in seeing that a stronger relationship to the Church will, as history attests, provide a clearer vision of the realities it is their vocation to understand.