Woodstock Report | Woodstock’s Catholic Higher Education Project

[Woodstock Report, March 2007, No. 87]

John Haughey, S.J.

In the second semester of 2004, Father John Haughey, S.J., took a leave of absence from Loyola University, Chicago, to develop a project on Catholic higher education at Woodstock. He gathered together a team of academics who he knew were interested and had taken initiatives at their colleges and universities in examining the subject.

Although “catholic identity” might have become too tired a subject to revisit on some Catholic campuses, or can be a source of tension if broached anew, Haughey felt that it should not be left in a “let sleeping dogs lie” condition. This project goes to the heart of the issue of “Catholic” as a mark of the Church and its institutions in order to generate a hospitality that is more inclusive as well as more faithful to the challenge latent in an eschatological understanding of that mark.

The project team has had four meetings over the course of the last two years in which they have plumbed the issue for the purpose of discerning a direction that both appropriates Ex corde Ecclesiae and goes beyond it. Their collective wisdom has given considerable depth to an understanding that one mind or one locale has not been able to grasp so far. Each member of the team has also contributed an essay to be published in the second volume of a proposed study.

The primary purpose of the project is to assist schools in revisiting where they might go as Catholic in 21st century America in light of the inspiration of their founders. With a particular emphasis on faculty workshops, the approach is to start from below, from their research and teaching. All of the faculty members are given a chance to voice the particular goods they are pursuing through their work. The outcomes sought are a deeper experience of colleagueship and an appreciation of the “wholes” their co-workers aspire to and intend. The desired result is a personal renewal of energy for their own work, but now more aligned with the school’s mission. Both represent “the good under construction” as Flannery O’Connor would put it.

The primary work of the project so far has been accomplished in faculty workshops, which usually have about a dozen participants. The usual process begins with an evening devoted to table fellowship and a presentation on the rationale and method for the time to be spent together. The morning of the next day is spent listening to the narratives that were exchanged the night before in one-on-one dialogues. The rest of the day is spent on discussions prompted by single-page “discussion starters” on some of the topics listed below. Through shared understandings about matters seldom if ever discussed together, commonalities begin to develop or disagreements are given time and room to be expressed and understood.

Some of the topics discussed in these faculty workshops include:

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition as Unfolding
The Anti-intellectual Catholic Tradition and the Anti-Catholic Intellectual Tradition
Is There a Doctrine in the House?
A Spirituality of Research – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Calling to Know and the Vocation of the School
A Template for a Normative Inclusivity of Plural Faiths – Bernard Lonergan
Where, if Anywhere, is Knowing Going?
The Emergent Catholicity of Vatican II
The Hospitality of Tolerance vs. a Hospitality of Engagement
The Banality of Careerism: An Examen – Hannah Arendt
Knowledge as Power for the Common Good and the Glory of God
A Discipline as a Landing on to the Universe of Being and Its Import for Catholicity

Discussion starters on two of these topics are presented in the box below.

In addition to the workshops, two volumes are in the process of being completed. These will serve as resources since they are responsive to the voices and intentionalities heard at eleven different universities where workshops have been conducted.

Haughey outlines several lingering questions and explorations that emerge from the project:

Vatican Council II taught that “the promotion of unity belongs to the innermost nature of the Church.” How is the school promoting human unity or assisting in its partial realization?
Can a normative way of including other faiths, worldviews, and values held by those who are not Catholic at these institutions be developed and become a source of further learning about what an eschatological catholicity might include and mean?
Since the school’s non-Catholic personnel could hardly be considered guests, what would it mean for Catholicism to be the host? On whom would this hosting function fall? In what would it consist?
Vatican II would include a university as an “earthly affair... (hence) it is entirely right to demand autonomy.” It elaborates: “The stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order of created things must be respected as human beings isolate these by the appropriate methods of the individual sciences and arts.”(#36 G&S) To what extent is a Catholic university an “earthly affair” and its disciplines autonomous?
The religious praxis enabled by the American polity supplied the data for the universal right to religious freedom eventually endorsed by the Council. Could it be that the praxis of inclusivity and the Catholic experience of higher educational institutions will eventually supply the Church with the data for a development of doctrine about catholicity?

SAMPLE DISCUSSION STARTERS
From Woodstock’s Catholic Higher Education Faculty Workshops

Dimensions of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

As a faith tradition, it is as strong as the exercise of the gift of faith (and hope and love) of its members; without these there’s no “it” there, not to mention tradition or church.

As a doctrinal tradition, its doctrines are forged with the help of many intellectual traditions, initially and most notably those of Greece, Rome, and the revelation bequeathed to Israel.

As a theological tradition, its contents are ever developing; new understandings aren’t always seen as consistent with those already in place; time legitimates some or passes over others.

As a learning tradition, it learns from whomever, especially the academy; no discipline is alien nor irrelevant to this tradition; ergo, it is an on-going argument about “the true and the good.”

As a multi-cultural tradition, its richness is in proportion to its appropriation of the gifts of the cultures – aesthetic, liturgical, literary, linguistic, etc.

As a self-correcting tradition, it revises its teachings in light of new evidence of their prior limitations; however, it remains organic without being blown away by the winds of change.

As a teleological tradition, it knows there is an end to which all its learning is vectored; it foresees a time when “three ‘things’ will last, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.”

As a generative tradition, it is continually adding ethical insight and teachings to its tradition, among which is a body of Catholic social thought and an evolving position on war and peace.

As a tradition of hospitality, it is institutionally unparalleled in being able to host a degree of pluralism within its ever expanding transcultural umbrella; its schools are “a home for all faiths.”

As an aesthetic tradition, it seeks to capture and convey the beauty of the realm of the divine and thereby elicit a response from the whole person not simply their intellectual intentionality.

The Catholic intellectual tradition at a university, an ever developing phenomenon, is fed by those whose unbiased research and teaching are concerned with competence in their disciplines with an eye to both truth and the common good. This is admittedly a very broad way of looking at the feeder point of this tradition. What makes it Catholic if it has been produced by so many who were or are not Catholic? It is Catholic since their contributions both inform and can be appropriated by the tradition, howsoever slowly. Furthermore, the party responsible for the transmission of this intellectual tradition is the Church which becomes the patron, protector, and advocate of what it has learned. Vis-à-vis the world, this tradition is both feeder and fed; hence it functions as a filter within and for the civilizations. It owes to the next generation a more authentic version of the contents it has inherited, rather than an uncritical transmission of the same. It would help if the academics contributing to this tradition were themselves morally self-transcending, but their intellectual selftranscendence as scholars is the sine qua non of their contribution.

Is There a Doctrine in the House?

One is likely to make little headway in trying to understand the relation between the Church and a Catholic university by posing the question in macro terms, i.e., two institutions vis-à-vis one another. It is better to start with one’s own field of knowledge and, through the conclusions of its findings and the questions it poses, get to matters of its value and its nexus with ultimacy.

The doctrine articulated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 supplied the definitive understanding of Christ as Christians came to understand him. It gives full play to the humanity of Jesus by not allowing it to be absorbed by his divinity. It holds that an uncreated divine nature and that of a created human nature came into a wholly unique union (“hypostatic”) in the person of Jesus. This sublation of two natures into his unique person took place without either being marginalized or annihilated. Hence, the humanity of Jesus is completed by the divinity without his having ceased in any way to be human; for believers he became one of us in the incarnation and remains so now. Catholicism teaches that it is through this union that God intends to bring all created reality and our knowledge of it to its completion and fullness.

Knowledge of this doctrine is necessary if faculty want to know why Catholic universities were born historically ex corde ecclesiae and why there is still a commitment to them. This doctrine is also the key to understanding the radical difference between the rationale for these schools and their secular counterparts. This doctrine, furthermore, is also the foundation of academic freedom since each field of knowledge must be allowed to develop itself just as Christ’s human nature developed humanly. A school that traces its raison d’etre to this understanding of Christ must be academically au courant with the scholarship in the fields of study it teaches. It must do justice to each field without preempting them either with piety or with carelessness. To quote Bernard Lonergan, S.J., “A second-rate Catholic university is no more acceptable to God in the New Law than was the sacrifice of maimed or diseased beasts in the Old Law.”

So the Catholic faith’s analogue for connecting a field of knowledge with Christ is the union of Jesus’ humanity to his divinity. These are not to be confused or conflated. By the same token, if there is a complete separation between these two then the telos of knowing can become obscure or positivist or powerdriven. Wherever this manner of conjoining the divine and the human is formally encouraged by an educational institution, it can expect to become just as anomalous to its counterparts in the present age as Christ was to his contemporaries.

Since the connection between a discipline and Christian faith can be helped by knowledge of this doctrine, those who teach in Catholic schools should be apprised of its foundational character without, of course, being required to subscribe to it.

There are five ways a school can be at odds with this Christological doctrine. One is to deny a priori that a discipline is connected to it in any way. Another is to connect the field to Christ prematurely without doing the hard work of being competent in the field. The third is to attempt to control the findings of a field by authority, either ecclesiastical or academic. The fourth is to be satisfied with the relationship being merely extrinsic. The fifth is to leave the connection up to students without providing them with any means or encouragement for making a connection.