Tuesday, January 03, 2006

How do you change a subculture? Three cases

I solicit your reflections on the following questions, in which I am particularly interested in the respective roles of the Church and state -- the role of the Church in preserving and fostering the Gospel and the role of the state in protecting the legitimate rights of its citizens:

  1. How do you reform a morally reprobate sexual subculture within the Catholic priesthood while respecting the personal rights and dignity of individuals involved in the case?
  2. How do you reform a seditious educational subculture of religious dissent within Catholic colleges and universities while respecting the rights of students and scholars to free inquiry?
  3. How do you reform an illiberal utilitarian bias that has infected higher education, often with state complicity (e.g., defense contracts, mounting accreditation requirements for professional programs, etc.) while respecting academic freedom? Can the Church play a role in affiliated universities?
First case: How do you reform a morally reprobate sexual subculture within the Catholic priesthood while respecting the personal rights and dignity of individuals involved in the case?
This problem began, as I understand it, when those who should have been minding the shop let their guards down, perhaps most precipitously beginning back in the 60s. Bishops, priests, vocations directors, deans and rectors became lax and latitudinarian. The issue was broader than homosexuality. The sixties spawned a culture of sexual revolution, experimentation, and license. But insofar as homosexuality was part of the mix, the Church's distinction between the sinner and the sin were exploited to full effect to fuel such fantasies as the notion that as long as one wasn't involved in committing some heinous act like homosexual rape, one's homosexual inclinations (for which one presumably wasn't responsible) might be viewed as divine gifts to be embraced and celebrated.

Fast forward to the sex scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The mainstream media fastidiously avoided the term "homosexual" in reporting the scandal, panting the scandal as an issue of pedophile priests. There were exceptions, of course. Yet as case after case came to light, a landslide of evidence mounted of a subculture in the priesthood of homosexual activity involving teenage boys. According to the study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York:
An overwhelming majority of the victims, 81 percent, were males.... A majority of the victims were post-pubescent .... The John Jay study said that pedophilia ... was a smaller part of the sex abuse problem. It said that 22 percent of the victims were under 10. It added that 51 percent were 11 to 14 years old and 27 percent were 15 to 17 years old. ("John Jay Study Reveals the Extent of Abuse Problem," AmericanCatholic.Org)

Yet the silence of denial on this point has been deafening. For example, in the video, Protecting Our Children, produced by The National Catholic Risk Retention Group, Inc., produced for the purpose of raising the awareness of diocesan volunteers and employees about the widespread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our society, only one of the four victims portrayed in the video was abused by a priest, and the victim was a girl. In other words, precisely zero percent of the abuse it portrays is actually representative of the scandal in the Church. (See "Protecting the Lavender Mafia" by Ken Skuba)

The question, then, is how can this abusive and malignant subculture be reformed or purged? What is the proper role of the government? What is the proper role of the Church? The government of the United States, for its side, has gone after the sex offenders where criminal prosecution has been warranted and possible, and I think several dioceses have cooperated with these criminal inquiries, at least as far as they have done so by making certain records and documention available to civil authorities. Yet on some level St. Paul's rebuke must also weigh in against the Corinthians who looked outside the household of faith to the civil courts of unbelievers for judgment (I Cor. 6:1-11), which probably attests to the reticence of some bishops about turning an ecclesial matter over to civil authorities. At present the Church is undertaking its Apostolic Visitation of American seminaries and houses of formation, and on November 9, 2005, the Vatican released its Instruction "On Priesthood and Those With Homosexual Tendencies," both of which aim to address the problem in question. What think ye?
Second case: How do you reform a seditious educational subculture of religious dissent within Catholic colleges and universities while respecting the rights of students and scholars to free inquiry?

There is little question that American Catholic colleges have significantly lost their Catholic identity over the past decades. One nominally Catholic institution would be about as examplary as another. I remember visiting Georgetown University a few years ago and being hardpressed to find a Catholic chapel anywhere. Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, also a Jesuit institution, naturally likes to pick on Jesuit institutions, and says there are two kinds of Catholic schools -- those that are Jesuit, and those that are Christian. The undisputed flagship Catholic university of the United States, Notre Dame, has theologians on staff that regularly and loudly dissent from Church teaching in the media, and has also been in the news -- controversially -- for having hosted the Vagina Monologues and a gay/lesbian day on campus.

This drift toward dissent picked up momentum precipitously, I believe, in the late 1960s in response to Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968), defending the traditional Catholic teaching against contraception. The response of liberal Catholics, who had been led by liberal theologians and clerics to expect that Vatican accommodation to modern changes in contraceptive technologies was imminent, was open outrage. Charles Curran, a popular liberal professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, formed a coalition of dissenters who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times expressing defiant rejection of Rome's instruction. Curran's case soon became a cause celebre and was championed by leftists, as it was derided by rightists. Curran himself was eventually dismissed from the Catholic University of America in 1986 after the Vatican declared him unfit to teach Catholic theology because of his heterodox positions on such social issues as contraception, homosexuality, and abortion (see William W. May's 1987 book, Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent: The Curran Case and Its Consequences, as well as Larry Witham's 1991 study, which has been greeted by nearly all sides as "fair,"Curran vs. Catholic University: A Study of Authority and Freedom in Conflict).

The Vatican response to the deterioration of Catholic identity at Catholic institutions of higher learning was the document, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities), issued August 15, 1990. On the one hand, many if not most mainline universities continued to carry on with business as usual, settling for cosmetic changes at most and ignoring the more substantial demands of the document, mandating that professors of Catholic theology must profess theology that is in fact Catholic as understood by the Catholic Church and requiring Catholics who teach the theological disciplines in a Catholic university to have a mandatum granted by competent ecclesiastical authority (i.e., bishop).

On the other hand, others have responded more supportively. The Cardinal Newman Society, a national intercollegiate organization of more than 16,000 college leaders, educators, students, alumni and others dedicated to the renewal of Catholic identity at Catholic colleges and universities in the United States in keeping with the principles of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, has been surveying developments in Catholic higher education for some time. For example, it has noted cases of historically Catholic institutions that are no longer recognized by the Church as Catholic: "We know of four colleges that have are no longer recognized as Catholic by the bishops since Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, was issued in 1990: Marist College (NY), Marymount Manhattan College (NY), Nazareth College (NY) and Saint John Fisher College (NY). THESE ARE NOT CATHOLIC!" (Cardinal Newman Society, "Catholic Colleges"). More importantly, however, it has produced critiques of the curricula and course content and events conducted at colleges and universities that are still recognized as Catholic across the country, and the results are not encouraging. The following is a sampling:

Times and cultures, of course, change; which raises sticking points in identifying the institutional identity and mission of academic institutions. A case in point is one of England's most prestigious religious colleges, St. Philip's Sixth Form College in Birmingham, England, founded by Cardinal Newman and proudly counting J.R.R. Tolkien among its alumni. In October of 1992 The Times (Oct. 5, 1992) carried an article announcing a plan by the administration to turn the institution into a nonsectarian school on the ground that more than two-thirds of the students were now non-Catholic. In fact, as a result of an increased multicultural and non-Christian student population, the Lord's Prayer and Sign of the Cross have been "deemed inappropriate" at the college.

The problem raised by the trustees and dissenting parents, however, was that the terms of the college trust deed state that buildings are to be provided for "the performance of public worship according to the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion" and that the college is to be operated "in accordance with the principles of the Roman Catholic faith" -- which seemed to leave no legal means of implementing the proposed changes. But the administration argued that the mitigating circumstances of a changed cultural climate now permitted it to redirect the original terms of the trust deed by way of the legal doctrine of "cy pres" (or "nearest equivalent"), alleging that the secular multiculturalism of the late 20th-century made a strictly Catholic education, as envisaged by the original grantors, unrealistic. Since "cy pres" applies only where it is impossible to carry out the purposes of the trust, and since benefactors who explicitly give their property for a defined purpose have an inviolable right to have their property used for that purpose if there is any reasonable way in which this can still be done, the relevant question is this: Does having a multicultural student body prevent St. Philip's, a traditionally Catholic college, from teaching its voluntarily enrolled students the Catholic Faith? To pose the question is to reveal its absurdity.

Some Catholic schools, of course, are pontifical institutions whose Vatican affiliation ties them ineluctably to the Catholic Church. Others have varying forms of governance, some being affiliated with religious orders, others with governance shared between administration and faculty under a board of trustees, offering considrably more fluidity. Catholic college presidents used invariably to be clerics. This is no longer so. Even trustees now may be Catholic or non-Catholic, often with little if any idea of what they, in principle, hold in trust.

It is hard, therefore, to generalize about the precise rights of faculty in terms of academic freedom in Catholic academic institutions across the board. Situations may vary legally from one school to another. What remains clear is that just as individual faculty members are entitled by the nature of their profession to free academic inquiry within the parameters specified by law and by the religious mandates of their academic institutions, so Catholic colleges and universities are entitled by the nature of their institutional purpose to mandate what instructional content is consistent with their religious mission. The leftist National Catholic Reporter (February 25, 2005), as part of a cover story about Vatican "repression" under the pontificate of John Paul II, compiled a list of 24 individuals censured worldwide by the Vatican during the past 26 years as "evidence" (The List) . Karl Keating, of the Catholic Answers apologetics organization, in his e-letter of March 9, 2005, comments on this list but draws the opposite conclusion: that the Vatican has been almost laughably lenient! Obviously, it is a question of perspective.

Again, what think ye?

Third case: How do you reform an illiberal utilitarian bias that has infected higher education, often with state complicity (e.g., defense contracts, mounting accreditation requirements for professional programs, etc.) while respecting academic freedom? Can the Church play a role in affiliated universities?

Most church-related liberal arts colleges and universities in the United States were founded in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and the same is true of Catholic institutions. Most church-related colleges and universities were founded initially as institutions devoted to the professions of training clergy and teachers and, if they were co-ed or women's institutions, nurses. Again, Catholic institutions were not too different. They came to the new world with a long tradition of liberal arts education, which was embedded in the curricular assumptions of their institutions from the beginning. Add to that the emergent American ideal of a liberal arts education as something to which a greater part of the population aspired, and by the end of the Second World War, for better or worse, it was largely an expectation nearly all graduates from high school would go on to complete a liberal arts college degree.

What this meant, in practice, was generally a freshman and sophomore year devoted to a standardized core curriculum in the liberal arts (a bit of English, mathematics, natural science, history, social science, philosophy, economics, foreign language, etc.) and a junior and senior year devoted to a specialized major (in one of those disciplines). While the general expectation of a "college education" has not changed, the educational landscape has changed considerably over the last several decades, with the traditional core curriculum in the liberal arts being increasingly eroded under the pressure of professional programs (business, physical therapy, occupational therapy, exercise science, nursing, counseling, etc.). This encroachment of practical interests from the professional world has presented a challenge to the identity and traditional mission of liberal arts institutions.

I have elsewhere chronicled the crisis weathered by our own institution in recent years, and as yet I have my doubts that we are altogether out of the woods. See for example, "A Critical Look at the Proposed New Core Curriculum" (October 12, 2005) presented by the College of History, Philosophy, and Religion to a special called assembly of the faculty of Lenoir-Rhyne College last fall; "The LRC curriculum battle in the blogsphere" (August 26, 2005) ; and "Kurt Schmidt: Why are liberal arts classes being cut?" (September 05, 2005) . The critical question seems to come down to something like this: if we're going to call ourselves a liberal arts institution, then how can we allow ourselves to cut our liberal arts core down to an 8-hour puff core course? How could we justify charging the seventh highest tuition of any educational institution in North Carolina if a student could get the same education by going to a local community college?

But the issues go deeper still. Part of the meaning of the "liberal" in liberal arts has to do with the freedom of these theoretical pursuits from externally imposed practical, utilitarian ends. The value of the liberal arts does not lie academically in their utility. In fact, academically, they have no utilitarian value whatever. Their worth lies elsewhere, as ends worthy of being pursued for their own sake rather than for the sake of ulterior purposes that lay beyond. Academic freedom, therefore, lies precisely in the freedom of intellectual prusuits for their own sake, independent of, say, political or ideological purposes that might be served by the academy, which would otherwise subordinate those intellectual pursuits to a form of utilitarian servitude. But this is precisely what happens when academic institutions allow themselves and their policies to be shaped by federal subsidies, grants, and programs, and defense contracts for educational research.

Here, for example, is a Department of Defense announcment of a program in its University Research Initiative called "The Department of Defense (DoD) Fiscal Year 2005 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP)":

The Department of Defense (DoD) announces the Fiscal Year 2005 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), a part of the University Research Initiative (URI). DURIP is designed to improve the capabilities of U.S. institutions of higher education (hereafter referred to as "universities") to conduct researchand to educate scientists and engineers in areas important to national defense, by providing funds for the acquisition of research equipment.

Clearly, a university whose curriculum has been subordinated to the practical utilitarian designs of a government's defense department has forfeited its academic freedom at least in this respect. To that extent it has cut itself off from the tradition of the liberal arts, whose arts were always understood to be "liberal" in the sense of being free of practical, utilitarian ends. The academy must be a place where ideas can be pursued and mulled over for their own sake.

Here it might be asked whether the Church cannot also serve to impose extrinsic utilitarian purposes upon the academy as well as the state; and I suppose this is possible. Yet I think one's haste to jump to this conclusion may lead him to overlook something singularly different about the case of the educational instution established by the Church. For here the mission of the Church is not extrinsically related to the purposes of education. The faithful Christian understands this. For him, the purposes of academic freedom are inherently -- not extrinsically -- subordinated to the purposes of love of God and service to the Church. That is the significance, most certainly, of the title of John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae -- that is, the educational instituion and its mission is envisioned as proceeding "from out of the heart of the Church." There is, in principle, no conflict here.

All of which raises a question I've pondered for some time: What role might the Church play in resisting the encroachments of these corrosive illiberal utilitarian pressures upon the liberal arts traditions of her colleges and universities? It seems to me the Church could with good reason exercise some clout in the defense of the liberal arts tradition. For one thing, like the liberal arts, the agenda of the Church
itself is not something that has a value that is calculable in practical utilitarian terms. The worship and love of God, whatever sublimated do ut des (I give to you in order that you give to me) utilitarian contractual motives it may be susceptible of, is ultimately a matter of useless self-transcendence, something worthy of undertaking as a good in and of itself. In this respect, the Church is on the same page as the liberal arts tradition in its view of what is ultimately worth doing: it is worth doing for its own sake, and not because it is extraneously useful. Furthermore, the Church in many cases has a proper avenue through her ties of affiliation with her academic instutions for exercising a rightful authority over their policies in view of their institutional mission.

Again, what think ye?

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