Don J. Briel
The University and the Church
In his address to American educators on April 17, 2008, Pope
Benedict XVI described the work of the university as an act of intellectual charity, a work that “upholds the essential unity of knowledge
against the fragmentation which ensues when reason is detached
from the pursuit of the truth.” The work of intellectual charity has
as its accompaniment not merely faith but also hope, for as Benedict
noted, “Once their passion for the fullness of truth has been awakened, young people will surely relish the discovery that the question
of what they can know opens up the vast adventure of what they
ought to do. Here they will experience ‘in what’ and ‘in whom’ it is
possible to hope and be inspired to contribute to society in a way that
engenders hope in others.”1 I want to suggest that intellectual charity rightly identifies that love necessary for the university, the love
of the beautiful, the true, the good. But it may not be self-evident
to many today that the university is in any real sense the location
for love, even for that love of learning that was once its boast. The
contemporary university is a complex place and current accounts of
the education bubble raise anew the question of the larger purposes
of higher education.
In one of his more provocative descriptions of the advantages of a
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university education, the English Catholic novelist and essayist, Evelyn Waugh, suggested that its benefits were not so much to the student
as to the parents: “As soon as we become intolerable in the home,
we are sent away to schools and kept there as long as our parents
can afford. If they are really rich, they can keep on educating us all
their lives, sending us from university to university all over the world.
From their point of view, the advantages of education are direct and
wholly delightful. By one simple expedient, they are relieved of the
moral responsibility and physical inconvenience of having us about
the house.” And he concluded, “When we go to prison, they can say,
‘Well, well, we did all we could. We gave him an excellent education.’”2 On another occasion he suggested that the primary advantage
to society in a university education is to take young men out of the
community at a uniquely dangerous age, expose them for three years
to beautiful architecture at Oxford or Cambridge and then release
them back into the public when the primary danger is past.
Waugh was describing his own experience of Oxford in the
1920s, one that struck him as at once artificial and futile. In the end
he did not take a degree. Instead he attended an art school before
turning to fiction. But his skepticism about the university has older
sources as well. In reflecting on the transition from the role of independent masters to the incorporated university, Philippus de Grevia,
chancellor of the University of Paris from 1218 to 1236, described
the work of his university colleagues in the following terms:
At one time, in which each magister taught independently
and when the name of the university was unknown, there
were more lectures and disputations and more interest in
scholarly things. Now, however, when you have joined yourselves together in a university, lectures and disputations have
become less frequent; everything is done hastily, little is
learnt, and the time needed for study is wasted in meetings
and discussions.While the elders debate in their meetings and
enact statutes, the young ones organize villainous plots and
plan their nocturnal attacks.3
the university and the church
It was, perhaps, a more robust age than our own, at least in terms
of the spirit of younger colleagues, but we see already that bureaucratic turn to procedural management at the cost of disputations,
lectures, and the interest in scholarly things, a development that has
achieved a much fuller form in our own time. In sharp contrast with
these resolutely cynical views of the university, Dante claimed in the
Convivio that the age of late adolescence is uniquely appropriate for
a certain kind of transforming education, for it is at this age that the
young are open to what he called a “stupor” or astonishment of mind
that falls on them in the encounter with great and wonderful things.
Such a “stupor” produces two effects: a sense of reverence and a keen
desire to know more. A noble awe and a noble curiosity come to life.
He argued that adolescent education required three primary characteristics: awe, modesty, and shame. “All three are necessary at this
age,” he insisted, “for the following reasons: at this age it is necessary
to feel reverence and a desire for wisdom; at this age it is necessary
to be under control so as not to transgress; at this age it is necessary
to be penitent for a fault so as not to fall into the habit of committing
it.”4 These qualities, virtually absent in the modern university, were
good in themselves but Dante also thought that they constituted the
essential preconditions for the life of friendship and for that nobility of soul, glimpsed in wonder, which leads to beatitude. If they are
not developed at this stage of life it is unlikely, he thought, that they
would be developed at all.
What Dante described as awe, that bewilderment of the mind
at seeing and hearing great things, Aquinas had earlier described as
admiratio, that sense of wonder at the recognition of the ordering
of things to their ultimate end, which is God. As Christopher Blum
reminds us, in Aquinas’s view of education, “Every science and art is
ordered to one [end] namely to the perfection of man, which is his
beatitude.”5 This we know instinctively for, as Blum notes, “we do
not admire random occurrences; we are frightened by them.”6 But
this recognition of the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge,
the desire to contemplate the origin, relations, and ends of things,
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has been set aside in favor of what Aquinas called the vice of curiosity, a vice that is rightly contrasted with the virtue of studiousness.
For Aquinas, the task of study was to curb the desire for knowledge,
at least for that knowledge which is unintegrated, or what Bl. John
­Henry Newman called mere information, and what the Enlightenment praised as encyclopedic knowledge. But is this true in the modern university? One does hear of stupor among undergraduates, but
not often of this kind. And so I raise the question: do we invite students into that awareness of great and wonderful things that Dante
described, an awareness that promises a transformation of experience, a noble awe, and a noble curiosity? Recently I happened to
speak with two philosophers, committed and well trained, who were
reflecting on the fact that students no longer speak with one another
after class. Instead they leave the classroom at the end of the period
as they had entered it, checking text messages or listening to music. In addition they noted that students rarely seek them out during
their office hours and suggested that universities needed to create a
new architecture that might promote a deeper sense of community
and interaction. Although architecture is not unimportant in shaping
these experiences, I suspect that the source of the problem lies deeper than architecture and deeper too than the alienating pressures of
modern technology. Shortly before her suicide,Virginia Woolf wrote
a letter to her sister in which she indicated that her inability to address what she called the vast, the general question—the meaning of
life—meant that life was not worth living. We confront a situation
now in which that vast, that general question is difficult to raise in a
university setting. This is not without consequences.
A number of years ago, the then archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal George, argued that a university without an integrating vision
is simply a high-class trade school. Many were puzzled by this remark, assuming that he was critiquing the new emphasis on career
preparation that marks the modern university, an emphasis that one
associates most directly with new vocational or trade schools. But as
he later pointed out, high-class trade schools are very important in-
the university and the church
stitutions and he listed Harvard and Yale among them. But he added,
“If they have lost . . . any kind of integrating vision, then they are
there to serve . . . [merely] an individual purpose, and the demands
of individual disciplines which are left un-integrated, except in the
desires of students themselves.”7 Of course, the classical ideal of the
university, which presupposed the encounter with this wonder and
awe, was to form in students that philosophical habit of mind that enabled them to see things whole, to see things in relation, to be capax
universi. In contrast, the trade school, high class or not, reduced the
university to a mere carrier of disciplines. As such it becomes not a
university but a multiversity nominally presiding over a set of disciplinary guilds, each anxious to protect its autonomy and increase its
relative influence.
The questions of the nature and mission of the Catholic university
have been the subject of widespread discussion and debate in recent
years, having reached a new level of intensity with the publication of
the apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae in 1990. I do not intend
here to attempt to resolve or even to summarize the various tensions that have characterized these discussions except to confess that
a certain fatigue has emerged in the predictability of the ideological
language, both of the right and the left, that has come to predominate in these discussions. But I would also like to insist that the basic
question to raise is not that of the contemporary relevance of the
Catholic university but rather the nature and relevance of the modern university itself.
In this context, it may be useful to consider this more fundamental question in light of David Schindler’s reflection on the privileged
status of liberalism in contemporary Western culture. In Heart of the
World, Center of the Church, Schindler criticized some of Western liberalism’s most entrenched presuppositions, most directly, for our
proposes, the presupposition that one can cultivate a pure rationality, freed from the contamination of cultural, religious, or political
assumptions, a rationality that claims to be universal rather than
particular or partisan, and thus the only proper basis of academic
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inquiry. This rationality is enshrined, he argues, in the notion of the
post-Enlightenment university, and has come to be taken for granted
even by Catholic educators such as Theodore Hesburgh, longtime
president of Notre Dame, who insisted that this is simply assumed by
“all university people throughout the world as essential to anything
that wishes to merit the name of university in the modern context.”8
Schindler criticizes this account of a normative, pure rationality and,
in doing so, raises fundamental questions about the modern idea of
the university itself as well as the critical methodologies that it takes
for granted as the principal expression of this pure rationality.
Fr. Hesburgh had argued that the Catholic university must be a
university first and Catholic second, indicating that “one may add
descriptive adjectives to this or that university, calling it public or
private, Catholic or Protestant, British or American, but the university must first and foremost be a university, or else the thing that
the qualifiers qualify is something, but not a university.”9 I think that
Schindler is right to critique this now dominant view both of the
university itself and of the rationality on which it both depends and
serves, one in which Catholicism is merely a value added on to the
essentially normative secular character of the university. In saying
this I do not imply that the modern university itself is a corrupt idea
or that the Catholic university can exist in isolation from the intellectual claims of modern secular culture. But I do want to insist that
the Catholic intellectual tradition cannot be considered to be merely
an ornamental value qualifying the secular university. A much more
complex dialectical relation should characterize their relations.
Twenty years ago, Michael Buckley surveyed mission statements
at Catholic universities, including those under the auspices of his
own Jesuit community. He was struck by the fact that most of them
“do not advance much beyond American civil religion and a committed social ethic.” He noted that “One looks in vain for anything
that reads or demands—as inescapably appropriate—the name
of God, of Christ, of Church, and of theology or indeed anything
uniquely Christian or Catholic in the paragraphs that speak of the
the university and the church
core curriculum.”10 It is not surprising then that the Catholic, Christian character of the university was “shaded off into a vacuity that
offers neither specification nor direction to the education given by
the institution.”11But of course this is hardly surprising if Jesuit universities in the United States in fact share the basic presupposition
that they are universities first and Catholic or Jesuit second. They
will, perhaps inevitably, conceive their religious mission as merely
complementary to their pursuit of a pure rationality as it is found at
any secular institution of higher learning. In this sense, the situation
is remarkably similar to that of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant
colleges and universities at which religious claims were relegated to
the margins of the academy and housed in separate schools of divinity. Faith becomes a voluntary and somewhat eccentric private value,
well removed from the real business of the university.
The former president of Georgetown, Timothy Healy, had indicated that Georgetown was essentially engaged in “a secular business,
and the university is a secular entity with a clear secular job to do.”
The Church can “deeply influence how the secular job is done,”12 but
one should not presume that this deep influence would substantively
modify the secular character of the university. In fact, it is clear that
Fr. Healy would not have supported such a modification. But are we
really prepared to accept such an absolute distinction? If we move
from the immediate question of university education, it seems to
me, at a minimum, to be a very open question whether contemporary proceduralist accounts of law, for example, provide an adequate
foundation for human justice. As George Parkin Grant reminded us
forty years ago, it was once possible to take for granted the relevance
of a classical account of the relations of law and human rights in which
“justice is not a certain set of external political arrangements which
are a useful means of the realization of our self-interests; it is the very
inward harmony of human beings in terms of which they are alone
able to calculate their self-interest properly. . . . For justice is the
inward harmony which makes a self truly a self (or in more accurate
language which today sounds archaic: justice in its inward appear-
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ance is the harmony which makes a soul truly a soul).”13 As Grant
pointed out in his reflections on the modern paradoxes surrounding
the legal and moral issues related to abortion, the detachment of the
English common law tradition from its roots in canon law and its
deeper foundation in natural law is not without consequences. For
example, when we decide that the mother is a person and the fetus
is not we do so on ontological rather than scientific grounds. And so
he asks:
On what basis do we draw the line? Why are the retarded, the
criminal or the mentally ill persons? What is it which divides
adults from foetuses when the latter have only to cross the
bridge of time to catch up with the former? Is the decision
saying that what makes an individual a person, and therefore
the possessor of rights, is the ability to calculate and assent to
contracts? Why are beings so valuable as to require rights, just
because they are capable of this calculation? What has happened to the stern demands of equal justice when it sacrifices
the right to existence of the inarticulate to the convenience
of the articulate? But thought cannot rest in these particular
questionings about justice. Through them we are given the
fundamental questions. What is it, if anything, about human
beings that makes it good that they should have such rights?
What is it about any of us that makes our just due fuller than
that of stones or flies or chickens or bears?14
This is why the proceduralist tendencies of Western liberalism
pose such serious challenges and correlatively why a Catholic university’s approach to legal education must involve more than the
addition of a context of values to the normative secular account of
justice. What is required is a substantive reconsideration of the very
nature of justice itself with an appeal to theological and philosophical
sources long since dismissed by contemporary culture. In this sense I
think that Schindler is fundamentally correct in insisting that to “have
a Catholic university,” it is “necessary to have a Catholic mind.”15 For
the university and the church
without it, the modern tendency to celebrate a public, universal rationality while tolerating a private set of religious values and practices
inevitably leads to the voluntarizing or fideizing of the Catholic faith.
Many critics contend that Schindler’s account signifies simply a
longing for a precritical, sectarian college of the late nineteenth century, one whose intellectual pretensions rarely surpassed and often
significantly failed to meet the academic standard of seminary formation. It is some indication of the success of this view that when Pope
Saint John Paul II argued that the Catholic university shares in the
Church’s larger mission of evangelization, many American Catholic
academics paused in some confusion. Schindler does not hesitate to
insist that “As Catholic, the Catholic university has its origin in the
fundamental mission in the universal call to holiness affirmed with
special emphasis at the Second Vatican Council. As a university, the
Catholic university must carry out the fundamental mission in specific reference to the intelligence.”16
Of course, this raises the larger question of the various audiences
that the Catholic university is called to address. Is the principal audience that of the secular academy and its learned societies and accrediting agencies, is it the Church, is it the undergraduate student body,
is it specialized graduate research, is it civil society and its secular
institutions? Perhaps of necessity it must attend to each of these audiences. But this does not free us from the basic question—which
audience is primary? Schindler presumes that the role of the Catholic
intelligence has been reduced to a “public” or “critical” function that
cannot in any real way modify the essential presuppositions of modern secular thought and it is, therefore, essentially compromised;
that is, the modern Catholic university has come to accept that its
primary audience is indeed that of the secular academy, and its accrediting agencies.
In a manner similar to that of Schindler, James T. Burtchaell has
argued that the Catholic university must understand itself as an “academic household of the faith,” that is, that its principal audience
must be the Church. As Catholics, he argued, our ideal “would be a
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venture of higher education carried out within the communio sanctorum, the community of sanctified people, the collective of Christ’s
holy gifts. We would engage in the work of learning as a communion of believers, in the hope of a dynamic synergism between faith
once handed on to the saints and a strenuous inquiry into knowledge
running off in all directions.”17 In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, John Paul had
stressed the same point, that it is the Catholic university’s privileged
task “to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality
that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as if they were
antithetical: the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing
the fount of truth.”18 We should not assume that such a view would
entail that only Catholics could participate fully in such a community
of persons or that secular knowledge would be irrelevant to it. In
fact, if the Catholic university is genuinely committed to the pursuit
of universal knowledge, it must as well be committed to a genuine
dialogue with other religious and secular traditions.
The secular academy too has universal claims but they rest upon
the adequacy of the notion of universal rationality that Schindler has
attacked. But for a Catholic university, this view seems to me altogether inadequate. Are those distinct “orders of reality” capable of an
existential unity and integrity? The assertion that they are is at the
heart of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and it seems to me, has traditionally been
presumed as central to a Catholic philosophy of education, however
varied this has been in other respects. But this has surely been called
into question by the often uncritical embrace of the reigning theory
of rationality in the modern academy.
But does anyone really hold this principle of rationality in our
own time, even though it seems irreplaceable? This is the question
that confronts the modern academy and one that it is singularly illequipped to answer. The historian C. John Sommerville raises this
question directly:
If our universities are to become more than professional
schools, then rationalism needs to be in dialogue with other
the university and the church
“traditions of inquiry.” For the most important matters in life
include such matters as hope, depression, trust, purpose, and
wisdom. If secularism purges such concerns from the curriculum for lack of a way to address them, the public may
conclude that the football team really is the most important
part of the university. But if they are taken up, we will find
ourselves using terms that seem to belong in a religious discourse. We have dodged this issue by saying that the true,
good, just are all political, meaning that they can’t be discussed but only voted on. But in fact they could be discussed,
if our discussions were to recognize a dimension of ultimacy.
It will do wonders in drawing attention and respect to our
universities.19
Of course, one of the greatest ironies of our time is the often
slavish imitation of much of Christian higher education of this increasingly discredited naturalistic model of university life and its rejection of ultimacy. I am reminded of Walker Percy’s argument that
we live in an age yet to be named, but we can affirm at least that it
is both postmodern and post-Christian. “The present age,” he said,
“is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which in an individual person, could be characterized as dementia.”20 Perhaps one
primary expression of this new situation is involved in the reduction
of all religious claims to therapeutic explanations. In such a context,
all religions are equal and equally invalid. The only remaining value
of religion is its instrumental and therapeutic private utility. But religion has been remarkably resilient in the face of secularism and we
now confront the need to acknowledge the fact that we can neither
fully repress religious truth claims nor escape their political and cultural implications. Again, I turn to Sommerville:
The terms we use to describe human affairs are not comfortable within a language of naturalism. We have not seriously
attempted their translation into that language since B. F. Skin-
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ner gave it up half a century ago. When we say that human is
a religious term, we mean that it has coherent meanings in
a religious discourse. It relates grammatically to other concepts like “purpose,” “creation,” “evil,” “equality,” “concern,”
“beauty,” and “wealth,” which will bog down any naturalistic
analysis. All these terms have recognized uses within religious
discourse. If we want to use them at all (and clearly we must)
it will be hard to avoid religious associations. If universities
rule out all such discussions as soon as they recognize them
as religious (involving even Plato, for instance), then serious
discussions will migrate to some other venue.21
And in large measure this migration from the university to various
intellectual centers and think tanks has already occurred.
The university has lost this noble vision and settled for something
far more modest. Let me turn briefly to Newman’s basic arguments
about the ends of the university: 1) Its primary end is to form a
habit of mind in its students enabling them to see things in relation
thus enabling them to make proper judgments about any reality they
encounter. 2) In order to achieve this end, it had to teach universal
knowledge, therefore no object of study could be excluded from its
interests. 3) This would require a recognition of the relation of the
various disciplines within what he called the circle of knowledge, a
tension of relations in which each discipline found its proper place
and limit. This tension never took the form of a stable equilibrium
for the adjustments and collisions of the disciplines were necessarily
ongoing. 4) The university to achieve these ends depends on the assistance of the Church not in order to obtain the complement of a religious principle but rather in order to achieve its proper intellectual
end. 5) The Church’s assistance took two forms: first, the exercise
of its authority in securing that interdisciplinary tension in pursuit
of the unity of knowledge (mainly in the role of revealed theology)
and second, the development of the residential college, the place of
moral formation and of elementary studies that complements the
theoretical or notional work of the university in seeking that unity.
the university and the church
The university was the work of the lecturer, while the work of the
college was conducted by the tutor whose relation to his students
was not one of instruction but of education and personal formation.
The complementary tension of the college and the university was
essential to the achievement of the integral habit of mind on which
Newman had insisted. It is also essential to the achievement of the
two primary goals of the university reiterated by John Paul in Ex
Corde Ecclesiae: the unity of knowledge and the ultimate complementarity of faith and reason.
The modern university has assumed a more modest task. As the
former dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, has noted, the “old institutional structures survive,” however, “many have lost their meaning. The curriculum is richer than ever, but it is no longer wrapped
around any identifiable ideals.”22 The modern university has, Lewis
continued, “willingly surrendered its moral authority to shape the
souls of its students. Harvard wants students to be safe and healthy,
but security and safety are the limits of its ambitions. Harvard articulates no ideal of what it means to be a good person, as opposed to a
well person.”23 Frank O’Malley argued that Newman
would have been distressed by our inveterate instinct, in the
fashion of the day, to materialize rather than to spiritualize the
intellect, to plunder the treasures of the soul by turning the
wonderful and mysterious mind inside out in the adulation
of bald facts, figures and formulas. In times past our Catholic
colleges may have tended to stress religion at the expense of
intellectual development; today infected by the rationalism of
the American intellectual climate, they dedicate themselves
as fervently as the next to the achievement of soullessness
and the need to reunite the intellect and spirit is generally
unrecognized.24
In light of these general reflections let me summarize briefly those
obstacles to the fulfillment of the great souled wonder that Dante
stressed and that integral habit of mind that Newman had praised.
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1) The fragmentation of the circle of knowledge that left various
disciplines isolated from the claims of the others in a jealous cycle of
mutual suspicion and resentment. Think of the implications of this
fragmentation. If one seeks to have a proper understanding of the
nature and dignity of the human person, one might turn to a psychological account, an economic account, a sociological account, a
theological account, an historical account, a biological or chemical
account. Each of these disciplinary perspectives clarifies some aspect
of the larger object. Each is in this sense true but the partial character of its explanation is not merely incomplete but effectively disordered and thus untrue if it is expressed without a proper relation to
all other explanations. To know the human person rightly requires
an integrated interdisciplinary perspective. But where is this to be
found and how is it to be achieved? Does the university foster it? It is
increasingly difficult even to raise such questions.
2) The compartmentalization of modern experience and indeed
of the university itself. The intellectual pretensions of the university
are often expressed without any reference to the pastoral mission
of religious formation exercised now in isolated programs of campus ministry. Many theology departments refuse to offer courses in
spiritual theology fearing that they would risk an engagement with
personal religious experience. At the same time, the increasingly reductionist approaches to human formation that Lewis described at
Harvard as therapeutic rather than moral are consigned to the work
of student services. In such a compartmentalized structure, do we
invite students to a serious reflection on the possibility of a life of integral virtue and judgment? Do students experience the fundamental unity of their diverse experiences of the classroom, Mass, campus
social events, and the sports field?
3) As a result of the fragmentation of knowledge, a growing distrust of the capacity to know the truth.The consequences for the awe
and wonder Dante described are direct and paralyzing. Instead, we
have the more modest tolerance of diverse disciplinary perspectives.
In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis described the shift from truth to
the university and the church
perspective manifested in what the higher demon Screwtape calls the
Historical Point of View. His young nephew,Wormwood, a demon in
training, had written to his uncle expressing the fear that well educated people, because they have been introduced to wisdom in reading the great texts of the past might be immune to his temptations
to a skeptical relativism. Screwtape hastened to assure him that this
should be the least of his concerns. “The Historical Point of View,” he
assured him, “means that when a learned man is presented with any
statement from an ancient author, the one question he never asks is
whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and
how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books,
and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history
of thought, it illustrates . . . and so on.”25 In fact, he said, the Historical Point of View is one of the main weapons in the satanic arsenal.
4) A fundamental separation of faith and reason in which faith is
reduced to a private emotive principle and reason an instrumental
public value. Faith then has no role in the public square or implications for an understanding of culture or the common good. Implicitly, Catholic universities themselves have often seemed to acquiesce
in this reduction of faith to the private sphere producing what Fred
Freddoso has described as the phenomenon of the Catholic university as a public university in a Catholic neighborhood. That is, the rites
and practices of the faith are performed for the private needs of individuals but the university itself is not in any essential way modified
by these private choices. Or as James Burtchaell more provocatively
put it, we now have the situation of a Catholic university “that is no
more Catholic than an A & P grocery store in an Italian, Polish or
Irish neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, which in any given
afternoon, will just happen to have a number of Catholics serving,
shopping, or shoplifting in it.”26
5) A revision of general education curricula that effectively marginalizes the study of Christian culture and its role in shaping Western civilization. What replaces this is not so much the global vision
of diverse historical cultures, which is perhaps by its very nature
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impossible to achieve, but rather an emerging “unitary” culture that
Christopher Dawson rightly warned against:
For in this unitary culture, there is little room for the concepts
which are fundamental to the Catholic or Christian view—
the supernatural, spiritual authority, God and the soul—in
fact, the whole notion of the transcendent. So unless students
can learn something of Christian thought and the Christian
way of life and the norms of the Christian community—they
are placed in a position of cultural estrangement—the social
inferiority of the ghetto without the old self-containedness
and self-sufficiency.27
It is now urgently necessary to reflect upon the state of the modern university, its inability or even unwillingness to invite that awe,
that opening to wonder and greatness of soul praised by Dante, and
to reconsider the providential character of the Catholic university’s
commitments to the unity of knowledge and the ultimate complementarity of faith and reason, which in fact invite that wonder and
disclose its ultimate promise. The Catholic university has a unique
opportunity, indeed responsibility, to sustain this great tradition, not
only in overcoming that fragmentation at the heart of the contemporary multiversity but also in integrating faith and reason in ways that
invite both deep intellectual reflection and renewed moral purpose.
Notes
1. Pope Benedict XVI, “Address to Educators,” Washington, DC, April 17, 2008.
2. Evelyn Waugh, “Careers for our Sons: Education,” in Donat Gallagher, ed., Essays and
Reviews of EvelynWaugh (Boston: Little Brown, 1984), 50–51.
3. Cited in Walter Ruegg, “Expectations of Church, Crown and Municipality,” in
H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 15.
4. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, trans. William Walrond Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 281.
5. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Proemium: “Omnes autem scientiae et artes ordinantur in unum, scilicet ad hominis perfectionem, quae est eius
the university and the church
beatitude.” Cited in Christopher O. Blum, Rejoicing in the Truth:Wisdom and the Educator’s Craft (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2015), 107.
6.Ibid., 69.
7. Francis Cardinal George, “Universities that are Truly Catholic and Truly Academic,”
address of September 22, 1998, to the inaugural convocation of presidents and faculty members of Chicago area Catholic colleges and universities.
8. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 4.
9.Ibid.
10. Michael Buckley, SJ, “The Catholic University and the Promise Inherent in Its Identity,” Catholic Universities in Church and Society (Georgetown: Georgetown University
Press, 1993), 77.
11.Ibid.
12. Cited in Buckley, 80.
13. George Parkin Grant, English Speaking Justice (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1995), 44–45.
14.Ibid., 71–72.
15. David L. Schindler, Heart of theWorld, Center of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism and Liberation (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 147.
16.Ibid., 148–49.
17. James T. Burtchaell, CSC, Lecture, University of Saint Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota,
April 12, 1998.
18. Pope John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 1.3.
19. C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 22.
20. Walker Percy, “Why are You a Catholic?” in Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991), 309.
21.Sommerville, Secular University, 31–32.
22. Harry R. Lewis, ExcellenceWithout a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (New
York: Public Affairs, 2006), xii.
23.Ibid., 159–60.
24. Frank O’Malley, “The Thinker in the Church: The Spirit of Newman,” The Review of
Politics, June 1948, 17.
25. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001), 150–
51.
26. James T. Burtchaell, CSC, UST Lecture.
27. Christopher Dawson, The Crisis ofWestern Education (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961),
150.
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