Choosing a Catholic college is no easy task these days. Even Mark Hinchliff, a Princeton graduate and a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, finds it difficult to determine which Catholic schools are authentically Catholic. A convert, Hinchliff is under some pressure to figure it out, as the oldest of his five children is now seventeen. “I’d like to interest my daughter in a couple of good Catholic schools, but I’m starting from near total ignorance,” Hinchliff admitted.
He’s not alone. With the increasing secularization of the majority of the nation’s 219 Catholic colleges and universities, it’s becoming more and more difficult for Catholic parents to know whether they are getting what they are paying for.
That secularization, experts say, began with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Conference. University presidents and administrators at that conference declared that “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.”
As a result, the ownership of many Catholic universities originally founded by religious orders and communities was handed over to lay boards of trustees.
Although Pope John Paul II vigorously addressed the issue of Catholic higher education and especially the loss of Catholic identity in his 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”), Catholic parents and students are no closer today to knowing which theology professors are teaching authentic Catholic doctrine. Three years after the U.S. deadline for bishops to require the mandatum (see sidebar), some bishops have yet to require it or even grant it when theology professors have requested it voluntarily. Moreover, some bishops and theologians have decided that the issue is a private matter; in other words, parents and students have no right to know whether a professor has agreed to teach in union with the Church.
Bill Banchy of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote personal letters to each of the sixty-eight theologians at three Ohio Catholic universities—the College of Mount St. Joseph, the University of Dayton, and Xavier University—to ask if they had obtained the mandatum.
Banchy’s enquiry was met with resistance and hostility. Only thirteen of the sixty-eight theologians responded. Of those, only three said they had received the mandatum.
“The others scolded me for interfering where they felt I had no business,” said Banchy.
John Paul II reiterated his call for fidelity to the Church’s teachings on college campuses during a June 24, 2004, visit by U.S. bishops from the ecclesiastical provinces of Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Anchorage, Alaska.
The Holy Father said, “The Church’s educational institutions will be able to contribute effectively to the new evangelization only if they clearly preserve and foster their Catholic identity. This means that the content of the education they impart should make constant reference to Jesus Christ and his message as the Church presents it in her dogmatic and moral teaching.”
Quoting the U.S. bishops’ document Application of ‘Ex Corde Ecclesiae’ in the United States, he continued, “By their very nature, Catholic colleges and universities are called to offer an institutional witness of fidelity to Christ and his word as it comes to us from the Church, a public witness expressed in the canonical requirement of the mandatum.”
Nevertheless, historically Catholic colleges often find themselves host to a variety of less-than-Catholic teachings and activities. This past February, at least twenty-seven Catholic universities hosted Eve Ensler’s offensive play The Vagina Monologues. Sixteen schools defied the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement on “Catholics in Political Life” by hosting pro-abortion commencement speakers. The U.S. school named after Mary—the University of Notre Dame—has twice hosted a Queer Film Festival, despite the objections of the local ordinary, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana.
One of the few organizations focused exclusively on the renewal of Catholic higher education is the Cardinal Newman Society, based in Manassas, Virginia. Founded in 1993 by Patrick Reilly, the non-profit society has been successful in drawing attention to the secularization of the nation’s schools and calling for Catholic institutions to embrace their Catholic identity.
Fighting the Good Fight
Reilly is no stranger to controversy. His battle for authentically Catholic colleges began while he was still a junior at Fordham University, New York’s Jesuit college. Reilly served as editor of the student newspaper, The Ram, and was also active in the campus’s student pro-life group.
There, faced with the creation of a pro-abortion student organization on campus, he witnessed firsthand one school’s caving to the “spirit of the age.”
“I caught wind that students were planning to ask for funding and formal recognition for a pro-abortion club,” said Reilly. “So I set up a meeting with the university president, Fr. Joseph O’Hare. I asked him point-blank if he was going to allow students to set up such a club. He told me, ‘No, that sounds totally inappropriate.’”
Yet the following semester, the club was approved and the president released a statement saying that Catholics could disagree on matters of public policy with regard to abortion.
That’s when Reilly began defending the faith, writing opinion columns such as “Pro-Choice Is No Choice at a Catholic University” in the student newspaper.
Soon after the approval of the pro-abortion club, Fordham recognized and funded a student homosexual group in clear opposition to Catholic Church teaching.
Everything came to a head in early 1991.
“Fordham chose Marion Wright Edelman as the commencement speaker,” said Reilly. Edelman, president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, was a close ally of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider. “I mailed out letters to the parents of all of the graduating seniors to tell them what was happening and asked them to call the school to protest.”
According to Reilly, the school received many telephone calls. In response, the university changed the locks on the newspaper office door and wouldn’t allow Reilly to gather his personal belongings until after commencement.
“They were worried I was going to use the newspaper to protest the commencement activities. So much for academic freedom,” said Reilly. “After I graduated they allowed me to enter the offices, escorted, to get my stuff out.”
After graduation, Reilly continued to mail Fordham alumni and donors information about the university’s activities. Within a year after Reilly’s graduation, Fordham discontinued its support for both groups and didn’t allow them to reapply, saying that neither group had hosted the required number of activities.
Reilly’s activities as a student served as tremendous preparation for beginning his work with the Cardinal Newman Society. Today, Reilly puts those experiences to use in addressing issues at Catholic college campuses across the country.
In addition to the organization’s annual protests of the staging of Ensler’s play and inappropriate commencement speakers, the organization has helped nearly two dozen independent student newspapers get started on college campuses and has led an initiative to foster eucharistic adoration on campuses. Last year the organization released the results of a five-year investigation demonstrating Catholic colleges’ support for the “culture of death,” citing schools that refer students to abortion businesses through their health services or the schools’ web sites.
“We see our work as a form of housecleaning,” said Reilly. “First, you clear away the obvious debris. The next step is to scrub away the dirt.”
A statistic from a Higher Education Research Institute study shows the importance of Reilly’s work.
The study, conducted by the University of California-Los Angeles, showed that Catholic students’ moral views were weaker, rather than stronger, after four years on a Catholic college campus. At thirty-eight of the Catholic colleges surveyed, 37.9 percent of Catholic freshmen said in 1997 that abortion should be legal. Four years later, as seniors, 51.7 percent supported legalized abortion.
Hope on the Horizon?
One promising development at Catholic institutions of higher learning over the past few years has been a trend to declare formerly Catholic colleges no longer Catholic. This has happened at at least four schools to date. Reilly believes it will happen at more.
Ex Corde gives local bishops the responsibility for determining whether colleges can be described as “Catholic.” Schools established prior to 1990 are assumed to be Catholic unless a bishop declares otherwise.
In 2003, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, was declared “no longer Catholic” by Edward Cardinal Egan. Nazareth College and Saint John Fisher College, both in Rochester, New York, were declared no longer Catholic by Bishop Matthew Clark.
In May 2005, protests over Marymount Manhattan College’s May 20 commencement address by pro-abortion Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton led to a dispute over whether Marymount is Catholic.
For the past forty years, the school has been listed in P. J. Kenedy & Son’s Official Catholic Directory, a sourcebook identifying Catholic organizations for the purposes of grant foundations. Inclusion in the directory occurs only after an institution has submitted considerable paperwork to diocesan officials. No information can be added or removed from the directory without permission by a diocese. Yet, despite the school’s listing, Marymount itself says that it has not been Catholic since the 1960s.
“Marymount Manhattan College is an independent, non-sectarian, private liberal arts college,” said Margaret Minson, vice president for institutional advancement at Marymount.
Reilly described the college’s inclusion in the directory as misleading.
“If you’re in the directory, your bishop officially recognizes your entity as Catholic,” said Reilly. “Some Catholic foundations will give grant dollars only to organizations listed in the directory. It’s in the school’s best interest to keep its identity vague. If it remains vague, they can continue to get funds from the alumni who don’t realize how much the school has changed.”
The publication director for the Official Catholic Directory said she didn’t see how a forty-four-year-old oversight could be possible.
“I’ve been the editor of this book for twenty-four years,” said Jeanne Hanline, publication director for the directory. “If they’re saying they haven’t been Catholic since the 1960s, I would have to scratch my head here.”
“The salient fact is that Marymount Manhattan College was identified as Catholic in the Official Catholic Directory throughout its history,” said Reilly. “There is no point in disputing who is responsible for the listing, but everyone agrees that the college is non-sectarian. It is not Catholic and any confusion about its identity is now ended.”
With the election of a new pope, Reilly wonders whether more institutions might shed their claim to be Catholic.
“This has been decades in the making,” said Reilly. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ex Corde isn’t taken to the next step under Pope Benedict XVI.”