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Catholic Higher Education and the Enlightenment: on Borderlines and Roots
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
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The task of the scholar and the university is the creative appropriation of a tradition in a new context. The documents of the church and recent commentators use the image of “borderline” to indicate the place and role of Catholic higher education. That image indicates well enough that the task of Catholic higher education is the mediation of the Catholic tradition. But let me turn to another aspect of the image of the borderline. Modern culture, or, in its broadest sense, the Enlightenment, is not only to be pictured on the other side of a borderline, but as a “root.” Catholic higher education has two roots, both of which are its own, one the church and one the culture. The Enlightenment is also its heritage.
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- Copyright © The College Theology Society 1993
References
1 And it speaks to three publics like David Tracy's theologian: the church, the academy, the public (see Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism [New York: Crossroad, 1981], 3–46Google Scholar). On the public task of Catholic higher education, see Shea, W. M., “Beyond Tolerance: Pluralism and Catholic Higher Education” in Apczynski, J., ed., Theology and the University (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 255–72;Google Scholar and O'Brien, David, “The Church and Catholic Higher Education,” Horizons 17 (1990): 7–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Cameron, J. M., “Academic Freedom in the Catholic University” University of Dayton Lecture, 09 14, 1978 (printed).Google Scholar
3 Neuhaus, Richard J., The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987);Google Scholar also, with Berger, Peter, Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of Religion (New York: Seabury, 1976).Google Scholar
4 For example, the Land O'Lakes statement of 1967 is unequivocal in its acceptance of the AAUP principle: “The Catholic university today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively 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.” This seems to me to be a classic statement of the Enlightenment root of Catholic higher education. The text can be found in The Catholic University: A Modern Appraisal, ed. McCluskey, N. G. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970).Google Scholar A case might be made that later church documents reveal the Land O'Lakes statement to be the aberration. In 1979 Sapientia Christiana conditioned that commitment with the requirement for a canonical mission for theology/religion teachers, and the new Code of Canon Law in 1983 mentions a “mandate” for theologians in Cn 812. There are in the Document of the Congregation on Christian Education several instance in which the recognition of academic freedom is carefully, but not specifically, modified.
5 See Portier, William (“The Mission of a Catholic College” in Apczynski, , 237–54Google Scholar), on the question whether the Enlightenment represents a radical break with the past in regard to freedom of inquiry. In the typical Enlightenment view Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, presents an anti-human ideology inherently opposed to Enlightenment humanism. Although there are data to support the accusation, these are not all the data there are, and some Enlightenment figures chose to ignore the other. To repeat the remark of Tracy, David in Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, and Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987)Google Scholar, there is no tradition, the Enlightenment included, that is not morally ambiguous.
6 See Heft, James, “Academic Freedom and the Catholic Community” in Apczynski, , 207–36;Google ScholarKelly, George A., ed., Why Should a Catholic University Survive? (New York: St. John's University, 1973);Google Scholar and McCluskey, Neil G. S.J., ed., The Catholic University: A Modern Appraisal (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970).Google Scholar For a view from within the controversy, see the essays by O'Reilly, Peter and Lauer, Rosemary on St. John's University in Continuum 4 (Summer 1966): 223–52.Google Scholar
7 See George Kelly; David O'Brien warns about losing a sharp sense of Catholic identity in his Horizons essay. Colleges in New York took down their crucifixes in order to qualify for state funds; a few Catholic colleges gave up their Catholic identity entirely, among them Manhattanville College. But it may also be true that Catholic colleges curtail their academic interest in the name of Catholic identity, at least in the sense that their devotion to traditional Catholic communitarian values exceeds their devotion to academic excellence.
8 On the variety of American Catholic adjustments and reactions to American culture, see Patrick Carey's introductory essay to his collection of texts, American Catholic Religious Thought: The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition (New York: Paulist, 1987)Google Scholar, and his essay “American Catholicism and the Enlightenment Ethos,” a paper read at the Woodrow Wilson Center in April 1990, and to appear in a volume of papers entitled Knowledge and Belief in America from Cambridge University Press, edited by Michael J. Lacey and myself. See also the typology outlined by David O'Brien, including Roman Catholicism, in his Public Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1989).Google Scholar On the Catholic modernist crisis of the turn of the twentieth century and its Integralist component, see Daly, Gabriel, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (London: Clarendon, 1980)Google Scholar, and Kurtz, Lester, The Politics of Heresy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar
9 See Bennett, William J., “To Reclaim a Legacy” (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984);Google ScholarShea, W., “John Dewey and the Crisis of the Canon,” American Journal of Education 97 (May 1989): 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “From Classicism to Method: John Dewey and Bernard Lonergan,” American Journal of Education 99 (May 1991): 298–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the conservative interpretation of current tensions in the Catholic Church, see Kelly, George A., The Crisis of Authority (Chicago: Regnery, 1982).Google Scholar
10 See “The Mission of Holy Cross,” a paper prepared by a faculty committee under the chairmanship of David O'Brien.In it we read: “…an American Catholic liberal arts college shares much with any other American liberal arts college: a commitment to standards of open, critical inquiry which derive from the Enlightenment, to tolerance born of insight into the plural and ambiguous character of societies and of history, and to an intellectual and moral community which affirms freedom of inquiry, of speech, and of religion. Holy Cross thus in large part accepts the institutional structures and assumptions about knowledge and inquiry that are honored in any Western college or university” (8). This is an interesting confirmation of my “two source theory.”
11 Shea, W., “Beyond Tolerance: Pluralism in Catholic Higher Education” in Apczynski, , 255–72.Google Scholar