Nino Langiulli is Professor of Philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

What makes Cathoic school Catholic? We have arrived at a most fascinating and perhaps pivotal moment in a controversy that has been growing for three decades, since the 1960s shook up all of American higher education. The great public universities surrendered their task of introducing students to the pursuit of knowledge and truth; instead they reorganized themselves as therapeutic institutions promoting a kind of illiberal millennialism and serving a clientele in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The great private universities followed suit, abandoning along the way their connections to the mainline Protestantism of their foundations; they converted (in George Marsden's perfect phrase) from "Protestant establishment to established unbelief."

The Catholic universities (apparently unaware that the schools marching so bravely forward were actually slipping sidewise off their foundations) quickly got into step. The 1967 Land O'Lakes statement (entitled "The Nature of the Catholic University") declared the intention of the American Catholic university to pattern itself on the secular university in matters of academic freedom and governance, and to liberate itself from juridic attachment to its Catholic character.

Other important statements have followed steadily from all sides of the debate, from educators, American bishops, and the Vatican, with consultations, conferences, drafts, and revised drafts proliferating. In 1990 a papal encyclical in preparation for several years was issued under the title Ex Corde Eccleside, which directs that Catholic universities are to behave as follows: They are to declare publicly their Catholic identity; to make Catholic doctrine and discipline normative in their activities; to defend academic freedom and freedom of conscience within the context of Catholic teaching and the public good; to maintain solidarity with the Church and obtain consent from Church authority to employ the name "Catholic"; to require Catholics in those Catholic institutions to be loyal to, and non-Catholics to respect, Catholic doctrine and morality; to ensure the appointment of instructors with "integrity of doctrine" and "probity of life" (and to provide for the removal of instructors who are contemptuous of such criteria); to require instructors in theology to have ecclesiastical certification; and to ensure that the majority of faculty and administrators be Catholic.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae also states that these General Norms are to be promulgated concretely by the episcopal conferences in conformity with the Code of Canon Law; that is to say, the bishops are to implement the encyclical in their dioceses.

The U.S. bishops had to respond. As Kenneth Whitehead has reported in detail in the NOR (Jul.Aug. 1997), the bishops consulted extensively with the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (the very group that had issued the Land O'Lakes Statement) and in 1996 submitted to the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education a document entitled "Ex Corde Ecclesiae: An Application to the United States." They evidently thought their work was finished. Pio Cardinal Laghi replied in 1997 by detailing the faults of the "Application" and pointedly asking the bishops for a "second draft."

What was wrong with the document? Ex Corde Ecclesiae sets out clear structural requirements for Catholic universities; the "Application" evasively calls instead for Catholic universities to relate to the Magisterium by means of "mutual trust, close and consistent cooperation, and continuing dialogue." Thus the "Application" responds not with compliance but with circumlocution. The American bishops' second draft is still being formulated.

Naturally, Catholic educators have spoken up. There is the 1997 statement by the president of Fordham University, Joseph A. O'Hare, S.J., entitled "Fordham's Catholic Mission." Kevin E. Mackin, O.F.M., the new president of Siena College, published his inaugural address in the same year. Perhaps most notable among these declarations of catholicity (I use the lower-case "c" deliberately) is "Centered Pluralism: A Report of a Faculty Seminar on the Jesuit and Catholic Identity of Georgetown University" (1996).

These three documents contain dissimulation of the kind found in the bishops' "Application" document. In all of them, attempts are made to affirm a Catholic identity while at the same time denying or disguising it. The term "Jesuit" or "Franciscan" is used in place of the term "Catholic" or is given greater emphasis Ulan "Catholic" - as a way of both obscuring the institutions' Catholic identity and masking the obscuring. Fr. O'Hare says that "Catholic identity does not require ecclesiastical control, but does imply a lively sense of Catholic community" and that "the American model of an independent Catholic University ... reflects an ecumenical Catholicism and a post-clerical Catholicism." Fr. Mackin connects Catholicism's religious core with
humanism, asserting that "it is this universal humanism that constitutes the goal of the church's
[note the lower-case'c'] sometimes forbidding particularity and so preserves ... Catholicism ... from degenerating into a mere sect." Forbidding particularity, indeed! Fr. Mackin's approval of what he calls "life-affirming humanism" strikes me as forbiddingly unparticular: Any hedonistic secularist could approve of this as well .

What began in the 1960s as aggiornamento has become for Catholic colleges and universities in the 1990s radical secularization. Yet those responsible for the de-Catholicizing have wished to maintain a Catholic name and image without a Catholic substance. Playing this double game, they have ensured the recruitment of students from a Catholic constituency while they have also secured public money. But the price of public money, as we now know, was the soul of the Catholic institutions. They became welfare junkies. Some within those institutions were gleeful. They translated aggiornamento as meaning Catholicism conforming to the principles of the Enlightenment. I do not mean by such principles the affirmation of learning, liberty, progress, and toleration, but rather the "liberation" from what the Enlightenment regarded as the chief enemy of human values and as the domain of superstition - the Catholic Church. This conformity was publicly affirmed in the Land O'Lakes document, which was in effect a declaration of independence from the authority of the Church.

We may allow, perhaps, for good intentions on the part of those who from within our colleges surrendered the institutions to the blandishments of the Enlightenment. Seductions and surrenders sometimes come with good intentions and the anticipation of good consequences. The belief that the Catholic institutions would not have "survived" without welfare is, however, neither self-evidently true nor empirically verified.

When Ex Corde Ecclesiae came along, a soft reckoning was in the offing. Faced with the alternatives of either being Catholic or ceasing to call themselves Catholic, some secularized "Catholic" institutions have responded, as I noted above, with baroque dissimulations, while others have simply ignored the encyclical, counting - correctly, so far - on the Catholic bishops of the U.S. not confronting them.

Now entering into the controversy, blandly benevolent in aspect and seeming to offer peace to all parties, is a winsome new concept - the idea that Catholic universities can offer something called "Catholic Studies." Thomas Landy writes cheerfully in America magazine (Jan. 3, 1998) that such programs "may well signal the beginning of a trend in the way Catholic colleges and universities address their religious identity...."

The first question that comes to mind upon learning of the concept is "What are the proponents talking about?" A place set apart for Catholic Studies in a Catholic school is an anomaly. At Harvard, Berkeley, or Michigan State it might make sense, although in some respects it might be patronizing. But the idea of Catholic Studies at Georgetown, Notre Dame, or the Catholic University of America carries the scent of resignation at best or betrayal at worst.

Proponents deny that the establishment of Catholic Studies may make Catholicism the curricular equivalent of such special set-asides as women's studies, ethnic studies, or queer studies. But juridically that is what a Catholic Studies program would be. The status of Catholicism in a Catholic institution thus will take on the character of a minority group or a transgressive sexual preference. Proponents say that Catholic Studies will be an opportunity for faculty and students to explore aspects of Catholic heritage and tradition that might be ignored among other curricular responsibilities. To which the reply is that such things would not be ignored if there were sound departments of theology, philosophy, history, and literature fulfilling their responsibilities.

Proponents of Catholic Studies appear to believe that in the past 30 years most institutions have properly moved away from emphasizing the specifically Catholic element of their mission and have rightly been more concerned with accommodating themselves to their secular counterparts in order to emerge from "ghetto Catholicism." They don't seem to understand that by moving away from emphasizing their specifically Catholic character and mission, Catholic schools cease being Catholic except in name. De facto and de jure, the accommodation has turned out to mean loss of identity, loss of autonomy, and nearly complete secularization. No intervention by any hierarchical Magisterium could possibly compromise academic freedom and academic integrity so thoroughly as the federal and state educational bureaucracies have done and will do. Those faculty members and administrators who fret that any attempt to define and develop Catholic identity and mission would encourage ecclesiastical intervention or episcopal supervision - and would threaten academic integrity' 'freedom, and procedure should remember the power of the state. But perhaps they do remember, and actually prefer massive secular interference in the whole institution to the possible ecclesiastical censure of this or that individual.

One finds the label "ghetto Catholicism" applied casually and frequently to the way Catholic colleges used to be. But were Catholic colleges ever havens of ghetto Catholicism? Perhaps in the minds of those who understand neither Catholicism nor ghettoes. Members of Catholic institutions prior to the 1960s did not believe that they were, voluntarily or involuntarily, trapped in a ghetto. They were, and knew themselves to be, members of a universal Church and part of an authentic American pluralism and diversity in the system of education.

Catholic Studies programs, on the other hand, could create real Catholic ghettoes in academia. By having a single program called "Catholic," an institution could fail in its responsibility to give the entire curriculum a Catholic character. Catholic Studies proponents express the hope that their programs will have the opposite effect and will revitalize the whole university community. But the more one learns about such programs (Thomas Landy says there are seven now in place), the more doubtful one becomes.

Landy writes that most of the new programs are distinctively post-modem in structure. What does "postmodem" mean here? It becomes clearer when we learn that all of these programs are optional for students and that most of them are available only as minors, not as majors. We also learn that faculty committees considering such programs try, says Landy, to "avoid getting trapped by any single ideological bent." (Since Catholicism is not an ideology, would it be so outre to give the programs trading on the name Catholic a truly Catholic bent?) We are also told that some faculties are reluctant about Catholic Studies because they do not want to confront what Landy calls "contested notions of what constitutes the Catholic tradition."

Why should there be contestation? The Catholic tradition includes, among other things, the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the Magisterium, the Roman Liturgy, the paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature achieved by Catholics on explicitly Catholic themes. A Catholic college imbued with the Catholic spirit and mission would hardly find difficulty in recognizing and including such things in its curriculum for all students.

Landy can hardly discuss Catholicism in American Catholic colleges without mentioning the Saint Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco. It was founded in 1976 and intended, Landy says, "to update the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, emphasizing Christian philosophy, theology, and literature." It has had, he admits, "considerable success in developing a coherent great books program and attracting a large number of students." Yet, he warns us, "the fear is voiced" and "the charge was certainly leveled" that such a program could be "a restorationist project...." He reassures us that "none of the Catholic studies programs founded in the last several years appears to model itself on the Saint Ignatius Institute" and the Institute's "rather traditionalist ecclesiological vision." His reassurance is distinctly unreassuring.

What is needed are not Landy-approved Catholic Studies programs here and there, but a reassertion throughout Catholic higher education of the Catholic mission, and a curriculum that, however it may be organized - historically, thematically, or otherwise - conforms to that mission.

What being a Catholic institution of higher learning means, as regards curriculum, is not presupposing the doctrines of mechanistic materialism and determinism in the sciences, not presupposing nihilism and libertinism in the arts, and not presupposing universal skepticism in epistemology, relativism in ethics, anomic individualism in politics, or historicism in history. It means, as regards administration, not pretending that one can have process without substance.

On the positive side, it means that, informed by the doctrines of the Trinity or its corollaries, the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and Redemption, the presuppositions are: the possibility of knowing truth from falsehood concerning nature and history; the possibility of arriving at what ought and ought not to be done regarding behavior; the possibility of community in politics; the possibility of discerning meaning, beauty, and ugliness in the arts. It also means that the faculties, administrators, and trustees of Catholic institutions must be predominantly Catholic, and that those who are not Catholic must respect and work within the principles of the institution.

Such an authentic reorientation needs to be carried out not solely because the Vatican requires it, but because academic integrity, true academic diversity in America, justice to our students, and fidelity to truth demand it.

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