Catholic
College and Universities
From the edges to the academic
center
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
In a remarkably brief period of time, the idea of Catholic
Studies has made the transition from innovation to established presence
on American Catholic campuses.
At Georgetown, students in Catholic Studies classes include a
substantial mix of non-Catholics, including Jews and Moslems, said Frank
Ambrosio, a philosopher who designed the introductory course. They hear from
faculty in art, literature, history, womens studies, theology and
philosophy during the introductory course.
In a school in which Catholicism had almost disappeared from
the curriculum, in the view of English professor John Pfordresher,
Catholic Studies has, over seven years, moved Georgetown to reintroduce
Aquinas, fill a chair in Catholic ethics and offer faculty up to $5,000
fellowships to develop their course with a Catholic Studies
spin.
Pfordreshers own favorite course, titled Merited
Execration, looks at four Catholics in Victorian England -- the architect
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the composer
Sir Edward Elgar and the reformer Cardinal John Henry Newman. I try to
show how a hostile environment framed them and what they managed to produce in
that context.
Marianist Fr. James Heft, chancellor of the University of Dayton
in Ohio, likes to quote an anonymous academic that research is to
teaching what sin is to confession. If you dont participate in the
former, you have little to say in the latter.
Heft stressed the tremendous importance of research to
Catholic Studies. Hes heading a feasibility study for a national
Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies that would be at the service of all
levels of Catholic education.
At Scranton University in Pennsylvania, the initial Catholic
Studies talks occurred in what somecalled a hostile
environment.
Susan Mathews, a scripture scholar who directed the program last
year, heard all the reasons why it shouldnt happen at Scranton -- fears
of ghettoization, revisionism, nostalgia, suspicion that Catholic Studies
meant doing Catholic things on campus, she said, quoting an opponent of
the program. Those who were against it had a way of canning the program
without giving us a real hearing, she said, noting that the discussion
became polarized.
Part of the tension arose because proponents of Catholic Studies
set their proposal within the context of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John
Paul IIs 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education. While
the document takes seriously the intellectual mission of the Catholic academy,
it also deals with relations between higher education and church hierarchy. It
has made faculty and administrators -- Jesuit and lay -- hesitate about
curricular changes.
In May Scranton graduated a handful of students who had done the
concentration in Catholic Studies; 20 students have enrolled this semester.
Students also gather for the Liturgy of the Hours and attend Mass together, in
what Mathews called an effort to engage them inside and out.
At another Jesuit campus, Santa Clara University in California,
Catholic Studies is modestly entering its third year with courses in Hispanic
theology, the Catholic church in China -- even one on Karl Rahner, illustrated
with Fellinis film, La Strada.
Demand has also built for a course on Milton and on the English
Protestant Reformation. We have criteria, but try not be be too narrow in
California, said Jesuit Fr. Paul Crowley, who heads the program.
Crowley is glad Catholic Studies has arrived, noting that
any Catholic university can look at Catholicism in an objective manner.
Theology and liturgy dont exhaust Catholicism.
In Chicago, Loyola University opened the first graduate program in
the field last year with 11 students; it has attracted 10 this term. Students
take two core courses -- an overview of American and global Catholicism and a
study of consciousness from the perspective of the scientist, artist and
writer.
Jim Brennan, associate graduate dean, describes the typical
student as a 40-year-old who looks into his computer one morning and realizes
hes never read Plato or she doesnt know what the Renaissance was
trying to achieve. He found the students -- two of them deacons -- by holding
focus groups in local parishes after Sunday Mass. At $1,500 per course,
graduates are coming for personal enrichment, Brennan said. The
programs not training ministers or theologians.
But at DePaul University, all four Catholic Studies majors want
careers in ministry. While the Vincentian-run university is not a preparatory
school for ministry, the new Catholic Studies program does offer a good
broad preparation for graduate school, said its director Augustinian Fr.
James Halstead.
DePaul students also enjoy a link with the Catholic Theological
Union, where, Halstead said, some of the universitys first-class
atheists and agnostics get a mindset adjustment.
John Carroll University in Cleveland inaugurated its Institute of
Catholic Studies Sept. 23 with a lecture by Notre Dame historian George
Marsden. A proposal for a minor in Catholic Studies awaits approval by the
faculty and administration.
Last year students said in a survey that of the schools 28
departments, they would be most interested in having Catholic Studies courses
offered in psychology and sociology. As for the content of the courses,
students chose the saints and arts, and were least interested in papal writings
and church councils.
At Loyola in Baltimore, students broadened their knowledge of
Catholicism by seeing the Vatican Museums traveling collection of angels.
They also learned of their Jesuit heritage by viewing The Mission
and Black Robe.
A two-semester lecture series on Japanese Catholic novelist
Shusaku Endos Silence, on women in Catholicism and on Jesuits and
modernity, is designed to promote Loyolas heritage and enrich faculty and
students, said Jesuit Fr. Joseph Rossi, who directs the Catholic Studies
minor.
Just getting people to talk beyond their own discipline is already
a miracle achieved by Catholic Studies Centers across America, noted Msgr.
Richard Liddy, who directs the undergraduate minor at Seton Hall University in
South Orange, N.J. The greatest resistance to Catholic Studies is not faculty
or administrators, he said, but institutional inertia.
National Catholic Reporter, October 16,
1998
|