R.R. Reno addresses the issue in a trenchant article entitled "Personality, Place, and Catholic Education" (First Things, May 13, 2008). He begins his article like this:
Some friends said, “Ho, hum.” They thought Pope Benedict’s recent address to Catholic educators during his U.S. visit was a nonevent. My reaction was different. Benedict brought home to me the daunting challenge of Catholic education. He observed that Catholic universities should not simply inform minds but also change lives by fostering a “personal intimacy with Jesus Christ.” “A particular responsibility” of Catholic educators, he said, “is to evoke among the young the desire for the act of faith, encouraging them to commit themselves to the ecclesial life that follows from this belief.”The problem isn't that he lacks for support, says Reno. At the university where he teaches, they have a well-crafted mission statement, extensive core requirements in philosophy and theology, etc. All those pieces are in place. Well and good. But Benedict presses the issue: The deepest distinctive that makes the biggest difference in Catholic education is the proclamation of Christ as the way, the truth, and the life. "Are we making that kind of difference?" asks Reno. It's a hard, searching question. In the most substantial portion of his article, Reno comes to the point:
Personal intimacy with Christ! It gave me pause....
Let me put the problem plainly. The lecture hall is not a church, and the laboratory may give us access to the mysteries of the natural world, but it has no saving sacraments. Nearly all the work of higher education involves intellectual training, and as John Henry Newman realized in his own reflections on education, mental refinement often has little influence on the will. “Quarry rock with razors, or moor a vessel with a thread of silk,” he wrote in his masterful lectures The Idea of a University, “then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man.”Reno says that he can be dyspeptic, which should endear him to Ralph. As a result, he says, he can become rather jaudiced about the whole question of Catholic education and even about where he teaches. There is no blueprint, no formula, no ten-point action plan for guaranteeing renewal. Benedict's vision can only be realized by the painfully slow process of building and sustaining living Catholic intellectual cultures. This cannot be achieved by some sort of gimmick. Instead, he writes, "the future will be made at each college and university by way of thousands of decisions: whom do we recruit as students, to whom do we offer scholarships, whom do we hire, whom do we tenure, who gets the endowed chair, who is made dean or president. People matter, and, as Newman points out, when it comes to influencing the will, people matter most."
... Newman was utterly convinced that education can be transformative, and he pointed the way toward the real source of influence. The will is engaged, thought Newman, by personality, and institutions have personalities. By his reckoning, a university is not simply a matter of classes and assignments, lab reports and carefully argued seminar papers. It’s not just about what students learn—and so quickly forget. Instead, a university is a culture unto itself. It’s a place—or at least it can be a place—that has what he called an “ethical atmosphere” that provides a “living teaching.” A college or university can have a genius loci.
So strongly did Newman feel that true education involves a culture with constant and often insensible influence over the lives of students that he expressed a preference for an undergraduate education with stimulating peers and no professors or classes at an Oxford college over a carefully planned-out and well-taught curriculum designed as if students were interchangeable, disembodied minds. (One can easily imagine his disdain for the idea of distance education over the Internet!)
... Newman’s realistic sense of the limits of mental training and the importance of personality has helped me see the true nature of the problem Catholic educators face in living up to Benedict’s rightful call for an evangelical core to a genuinely Catholic university. In the past, the genius loci of American Catholic colleges and universities came from the distinctive charisms of the religious orders that ran them. Their drastic decline is the simple, devastating fact that explains nearly all the aimlessness and uncertainty in contemporary Catholic higher education. Half-hearted half measures have produced, at best, half successes. The retreat of Catholic identity into campus ministry, social-justice programs, and courses on ethics has kept the flame alive but at the cost of giving up on the classroom and the professoriate. Many institutions are seeing the secularizing results, which is why the question of Catholic identity has become so important in the last decade.
The Newman quote, said the Musings reader who emailed me the link to this article, "makes me ask, if apologetics is not what drives those big Evangelical churches, what does, and can Catholics learn anything from the answer to that question?" I am not sure whether the answer is apologetics, although the subject is surely neglected to our own detriment in serious ways; but the question is one, surely, from which we can learn. The challenge of Benedict is for Catholic educators to face the fact that no strategy of rational argument or analysis will suffice to create a living Catholic intellectual culture without personal intimacy with Jesus Christ, and that this intimacy cannot be relegated entirely to extra-curricular ancillary functions of campus ministry, social-justice programs, and the like. It can't be compartmentalized. Rather Jesus must be found and faced within the academic discourse of the classroom itself.
[Hat tip to J.M.]
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