Massachusetts News 
By Paul Moreno 

May 7--Whether a Vatican directive to restore traditional religious teaching in America’s Catholic colleges prevails is a matter of debate. 

     Liberal Catholics and many Jesuits have joined with the press to subvert this directive and undermine the Vatican’s authority. In some ways, what’s happening is like what happened to America’s formerly Protestant colleges: Apostates whittled away at traditional Christian teachings and then woke up one day to find themselves secular and, in many cases, outright anti-christian. 

     J. Donald Monan, the Jesuit chancellor of Boston College, calls the proposed reforms—and any effort to clarify religious identity—"profoundly detrimental to Catholic higher education." 

     The editors of America, a Jesuit magazine, called the rules "well-intentioned but unworkable and dangerous." The Jesuit editors went on to say that the rules, or "ordinances," might be right for Catholic seminaries, but not for "Catholic colleges and universities that live in a world of accrediting associations and government regulation." 

     Opponents claim that religiously-identified colleges would lose accreditation or government funds, as well as the academic quality that the best Catholic schools had achieved. 

     The major media picked up on the controversy. This was particularly true in Massachusetts, with its many Catholics and Catholic institutions. "The universities are caught between a rock and a hard place," Thomas J. Reese, editor of America, told the Boston Globe. "Clearly they want to be Catholic, but they also want to be a credible institution." As a Globe reporter Kate Zernike put it, "Until now, Catholicism has coexisted with excellence." 

Christianity is Marginalized 

     Daniel J. Mahoney, associate professor of politics at Worcester’s Assumption College, told Massachusetts News: "Since the 1960s, most Catholic colleges have been Catholic only in a nominal way and are reluctant to either admit it or to change it." He added that opponents of traditional religious teaching are also seeking "the dilution of secular academic standards. 

     "They define academic quality by the debased standards of the ‘progressive’ schools, with all the same pathologies of dumbing down the curriculum and abandoning the liberal arts." 

     The Catholic Church’s drive to keep its colleges "Catholic"—prompted by the formal letter from the Vatican—is designed to avoid that "progressive" fate. George Marsden, a Reformed Protestant history professor at Notre Dame, says that every major American university was founded as an evangelical Protestant college. But almost all of these colleges had turned against evangelicalism by the 1920s as liberal Protestants took them over and turned them into universities. 

     Then, said Marsden, "Many of the same forces set in motion by liberal Protestantism, which rooted-out traditional evangelicalism from university education, were eventually turned against the liberal Protestant establishment itself." 

     Though most Protestant universities still called themselves "Christian" as late as the 1950s, religion was increasingly marginalized. Eventually, those schools, such as Harvard and Yale, removed all religious perspectives from education. 

     The Vatican’s letter—Ex Corde Ecclesiae—directs America’s Catholic bishops to make sure that Catholic colleges stay "Catholic." This means that schools such as Georgetown University, Notre Dame, and Boston College, among others, must abide by certain traditional Catholic teachings and rules. (Ex Corde Ecclesiae means "from the heart of the Church," which is where the Vatican says Catholic colleges come from. The letter was released in 1990; America’s bishops issued rules based on the letter in November 1998.) 

     Essentially, the schools must obey Rome when it comes to certain dogmas and they must foster a truly Catholic educational environment. In response to the letter, American bishops drew up several rules in 1998. They include: requirements that university presidents be "faithful Catholics"; that colleges try to fill faculty jobs with "faithful Catholics"; and that theology professors be approved by their local bishop. 

Media Attack Catholic Authority 

     Many observers in Massachusetts have criticized the Jesuit-led campaign against the bishops’ plans. Phil Lawler, who edits Catholic World Report in Dedham, says the opponents have engaged in a heavy campaign of media distortion. 

     "This is really just a truth-in-advertising campaign," Lawler told The Massachusetts News. Lawler, former publisher of the media-watchdog newsletter Presswatch, noted that several stories appeared in the secular media simultaneously. This suggested a coordinated media campaign, he said. 

     Most Catholic college officials have long since abandoned their religious identity, but they’re reluctant to have this publicly known, Lawler said. The bishops are forcing an issue that they’d rather avoid. "A lot of these people are willing to be subject to any authority but the Roman Catholic church," he said. 

     Kenneth D. Whitehead, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education and author of Catholic Colleges and Federal Funding, also sees this as an attempt by liberal Catholic leaders to use the secular media to force the bishops to change their stand. In addition, Whitehead dismissed the idea that the proposed rules might lead to discrimination. He said he heard the same arguments while at the Department of Education, despite the fact that he was the one who judged whether institutions engaged in unlawful discrimination. 

Jesuit Arguments Are Ridiculous 

      Fr. Richard Lamoureax, the former provost of Assumption College, told Massachusetts News that the alleged worries about accredidation and academic credibility by the Jesuits and other opponents of the Vatican letter are "ridiculous." 

     There is nothing illegal about a religious college considering religious qualifications for its faculty, he said. Opponents are using the threat of retaliation as a smoke-screen to avoid addressing the issue of Catholic identity. 

     The accredidation issue and/or loss of federal financial aid argument is "nonsense," said Daniel Mahoney. The bishops’ rules aren’t a threat to non-Catholic faculty, he said, adding that, "All the bishops are asking for is an effort to recruit scholars familiar with the Catholic intellectual tradition." 

Anti-Christian Culture 

     It is widely regarded that American Catholic colleges have steadily lost a distinctively religious character and, like most older American colleges founded as Protestant institutions, become indistinguishable from the secular culture. 

     The 1960s marked "the transition from an era in which Catholic educators challenged modernity to one in which they accepted modernity," said Philip Gleason, author of Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. 

     Whether Catholic colleges change or move further down the secular slope that Harvard and Yale—formerly Protestant institutions—went down will be seen. 

     Yet the words of Fordham University President Joseph O’Hare—a Jesuit who opposes the Vatican’s directive—seem prophetic. In a speech last year, he said: "The history of higher education in the United States provides many examples of institutions that began under religious auspices but over time became increasingly secularized, once the relationship between the university and the wider church community was allowed to diminish to a hollow formality through mutual indifference and a lack of continuing communication," 

     And that fact has led Reformed Protestant Prof. George Marsden to say: "Persons concerned about the place of religion in American life might be particularly concerned that the largely voluntary and commendable disestablishment of religion has led to the virtual establishment of nonbelief, or the near exclusion of religious perspectives from dominant academic life. … In other words, the free exercise of religion does not extend to the dominant intellectual centers of our cutlure." 
    

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