|
One problem with writing book reviews, as I do on the Café and Amazon sites, is the necessity of reading the books before writing the reviews and/or commentaries. It takes time, obviously, and an honest appraisal of whether the religious and educational content is worth recommending a book to a community of remarkably busy people. On occasion I must read a book twice, particularly if I don’t get the premise the first time around, or if I am critical of the contents and wish to make a fair assessment. With that said, the Café’s first book review/commentary of 2025 is Theology and Catholic Higher Education: Beyond Our Identity Crisis [2024] by Massimo Faggioli, the highly respected theological and historical professor and author at Villanova University in Philadelphia. Is this book relevant to you? I would say yes, because every aspect of Catholic parochial life dating to the apostles and evangelists rests upon theological excellence. Reading Faggioli’s assessment—twice in my case--Catholic education is in serious trouble—financially, ideologically, and religiously—and in some locations may have already died.
Whether you attend or attended Catholic college or not, the health or illness of these collegiate schools impacts the sermons you hear each week from the pulpit, the excellence [or nonexistence] of parish education of children and adults, the curriculum of seminaries, and the availability of books and speakers for the baptized to pursue their independent commitment to Christ that must underlie the faith life of every parish. For many years Catholic parents went to great financial sacrifice to send their offspring to Catholic colleges, many to deepen the Catholic faith of their children. Today, evidently, Catholic colleges are not what we think they are. The issues are many, but I will start with financial issues—and they are not always what we think they are. FOLLOW THE MONEY I earned my bachelor’s degree in philosophy [1971] from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as a simply professed Franciscan brother working toward priestly ordination. I was in my early 20’s and I never thought much about the financial condition of my school. I assumed—correctly—that my Order and others were paying my freight, as I was in vows. I was also dimly aware that the school of philosophy at CUA enjoyed a hefty endowment dating to 1914 from Theodore B. Basselin, a Catholic layperson. His gift included $500,000 to fund a scholarship for “the very best and brightest” seminarians. The Basselin scholarship exists to this day. In 1969 the select Basselin philosopher-students cohort did not include me, but I was not crushed to be consigned to the “give ‘em enough philosophy to get ‘em ordained” cohort. Catholic University is unusual in that it was founded in the late nineteenth century by the bishops of the United States as this country’s “official Catholic school,” and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] is the legal owner. It publicly reports its annual audits, and while I am poor at decoding such reports, I did note that of its endowment income for the last report, restricted gifts exceed general gifts by a ratio of 2-1. About ten years ago CUA was the recipient of a major gift from the Koch Brothers, a transaction that drew protests from within and outside the CUA community for the donors’ politics. More recently, just before Christmas 2024, national media reported that CUA is facing a "structural deficit of $30 million" that the school "must address through both budget cuts and revenue growth," said President Peter Kilpatrick in a Dec. 6 email to alumni. [My letter was lost in the mail.] What will be cut? Who will decide? And given the school’s status as the national Catholic university, what message will be sent from America’s episcopacy, which owns the school and conducts the annual collection held in our churches across the country? The pattern of budget reductions in colleges in the U.S. has been and remains the closure of departments and schools within the colleges with low enrollments and withering interest. Faggioli notes that several Catholic colleges have dropped the requirement of a theology course for all enrolled students, and in a few cases dropped theology departments entirely because of low enrollment. When this happens, is it legitimate to ask what makes a college legitimately Catholic in the first place? The author raises another question along these lines: who is donating the large endowments to Catholic schools, and what precisely do these donors want for their money? It is entirely possible that in your lifetime you have made a “capital gift” to the Church or another non-profit organization of a specific type, or you have a “restricted bequest” in your will for a church or charity, meaning that by civil law your designation must be perpetually honored, to a point. [States’ laws differ.] You could leave your estate, or part of it, to the Diocese you live in, no strings attached, and the money is used at the bishop’s discretion, which is what dioceses hope you do. On the other hand, you may have an affinity for a specific institution or ministry within a diocese or religious order. For example, if part of your Pro-Life commitment involves the adoptions of babies, there is nothing to stop you, all things being equal, from offering a $1 million restricted bequest/grant to your diocese for the exclusive establishment of an adoption program under the umbrella of the Catholic Charities Office of that diocese. But suppose that the diocese in question has an aging seminary desperate to bring its faculty, library, and plumbing up to code? This is not far-fetched. My home diocese of Buffalo, N.Y., is working feverishly to scrape together $100 million to avoid a catastrophic dissolution. It recently sold its diocesan seminary for $4 million to World Mission Society of God, a non-denominational religious organization. MONEY “WITH STRINGS?” Yes and no. I doubt that many Café readers have the wherewithal to establish an endowment anywhere near Mr. Basselin’s for Catholic University philosophy prodigies, but however we make gifts to the Church, we are in a real sense participating in Pope Francis’s principle of synodality; we are using our gifts to express approval, support, and appreciation for a specific ministry or outreach, or the way it is managed. In the above case, the donor is stating with his gift that local options for the sanctity of life overwhelm the need to save, for example, a sinking seminary when there are several other seminaries within the state. Not to be crass here, but money does speak and given the neglect of the Synod on Synodality in much of the United States, monetary support is one of the few vehicles that faithful Catholics can articulate support or dissatisfaction with the direction of the local church in matters outside of doctrine. [ For any questions involving estate planning, wills, etc., always consult your certified financial manager, your tax advisor, and your attorney in the gift planning phase.] A concern among many Catholics is the danger that large gifts from philanthropists who hold a different economic world view from Pope Francis might influence with their financial support Catholic colleges, including their theology departments--toward a more positive interpretation of American capitalism. The pope’s encyclicals on global warming and the world economy, among others, have been critical of the policies of the major world powers, including the United States. The NAPA Valley Institute meets annually to foster religious devotion and culture building within the Church and society. Many bishops attend this gathering. The group's missions include fidelity to the Church and the reshaping of American culture. I don’t lose much sleep about NAPA and other groups. In fact, NAPA’s introductory video is inspiring. My concern is more along these lines: that those college officers and boards of directors who are planning the budgetary cuts and restructuring of colleges like my CUA are savvy enough to recognize the role played by theology in Catholic life and not unduly influenced by donors’ world outlook. [This was my concern about the Synod. I thought the idea was great, but given the poverty of Catholic education at the parish level I wondered what people would bring to the table to talk about?] ARE THESE NEW ISSUES IN THE AMERICAN CHURCH? Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, a distinguished American Church Historian at Catholic University, created quite a stir when he published this piece in an ecclesiastical journal: “The development within the last two decades of numerous and competing graduate schools, none of which is adequately endowed, and few of which have the trained personnel, the equipment in libraries and laboratories, and the professional wage scales to warrant their ambitious undertakings. The result of this proliferation of competing Catholic universities is a perpetuation of mediocrity and the draining away from each other of the strength that is necessary if really superior achievements are to be attained." Monsignor Ellis penned this critique in 1955! Ellis assessed the American Catholic higher education scene accurately. He was a graduate of tiny St. Viator College in Illinois—some years after the future Bishop Fulton Sheen attended the same school—and saw his alma mater close in 1937 with a senior class of twenty. Later, still a layperson, Ellis was so disappointed in the history department of Catholic University in Washington that he applied for admission to the University of Illinois-a Big Ten state school--and would have transferred there if he had been able to obtain a scholarship. Faggioli explains the difference between the Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, and those in Europe. The latter were true to the medieval tradition of scholarship, where theology blossomed side by side in communion with the human sciences. Think St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274]. At the risk of gross simplification, suffice to say that Catholic American higher learning was of the “trade school variety,” [my term] sites for training, not philosophizing. I have never been able to nail down the exact number of seminaries functioning in the United States by, say, 1950, but when I started thinking about entering the seminary in the late 1950’s, there were at least four within an hour of my house. Any history of American Catholicism must discuss the GI Bill of 1944, the federal aid package for returning World War II veterans which included college tuition. The sudden need for Catholic college placements was an unusual generational boost to many of those two hundred Catholic colleges that Ellis had discussed before. But even here, the need was career orientation, “training for future accountants, businessmen, and the like.” The same can be said for Catholic seminaries, which needed volumes of new parish priests for the postwar boom. [Los Angeles was opening a new Catholic school every ninety days in the late 1940’s.] Ellis’s main concern remained unchanged, though. American theological thinkers were still no match for their European counterparts. To carry the concern further, were Catholic collegians--and all students in Catholic schools, really--exposed to the depths of personal reflection on the Faith or the meaning of life as part of their Catholic college experience, particularly as more laymen joined faculties and religious order members began the decline that continues to this day? VATICAN II [1962-1965] AND BEYOND It is fair to say that, across the board, the Catholic Church in the United States was not academically prepared for Vatican II. Only one American theologian made a significant contribution to the Vatican II documents, Father John Courtney Murray in the Declaration on Religious Liberty. The U.S. bishops, themselves divided on the outcome of the Council, were uncertain on how to manage its implementation back home. [Cardinal Spellman: “None of this will get past the Statue of Liberty.”] If you are getting on in years, you may remember the 1960’s and beyond as a period of contention and unrest in the Church, not to mention American society. We have a shorthand for describing this ecclesiastical turmoil: the “conservatives,” who were distressed for many reasons involving excessive changes in the Church, versus the “liberals,” who felt that the Conciliar changes had not gone far enough. Faggioli acknowledges this American division but adds a more critical edge to the liberal component of the Church, an outlook not as widely acknowledged [but, spot on.] The author takes issue with the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement, the product of a post-Conciliar meeting at Notre Dame of American theologians, college administrators, and others to define the need for university theologians and their departments to do their work without interference from the Vatican or the bishops of the U.S. [An example: the Vatican had silenced the American Father Murray in the 1950’s for his writings on church and state prior to the Council.] The author is frank about post-conciliar anger which fueled the conduct and writing of “liberal” Catholic thinkers, writers, and educators, an anger that colored the way in which the Vatican Council changes were introduced to the U.S. Church at large. At Land O’Lakes, for example, this anger was a response to years of Roman and episcopal disciplinary binding, which was probably true in many quarters of the U.S. Church. But in the case of Catholic academia, a claim of independence of sorts from Church authorities by Catholic theologians and faculties raised a bigger issue, one that partly inspired the author to pen this work. Faggioli notes that many Catholic college students ideally come to our Catholic campuses looking for the happy marriage of the academic roots of Faith with the best of the human sciences, i.e., the medieval ideal of faith and reason. Or at least this was the parental hope. But what they heard in many religion/theology classrooms after Vatican II was the discrediting of the entire medieval Church and the construction of a postmodern church which may be fueled by fear as much as anything. As a psychotherapist I must take note of the excessive anguish expressed by some when a Catholic receives communion on the tongue. Is this a fear that we are “headed back to Egypt and the cruelties of the pharaohs?” It is true that the Church has been uneven and heavy handed in imposing the liturgical changes since 1965. The issue of the Tridentine Mass is a good case in point. Vatican II, in Sacrosanctum Concilium, could just as easily permitted the Pius V/Council of Trent’s Latin Mass format of 1570 as an option for priests and faithful after Vatican II for reasons of conscience and piety while teaching the same liturgical principles promulgated at the Council in 1963. Before Vatican II we were already living with seven distinct major Mass rites. I wonder if our schools and catechetical programs across the board describe, for example, the Byzantine Rite of the Mass, with emphasis upon its history as well as its style. History would also teach us that Pius V [r. 1566-1572] was generous in his dealings with local Mass rites which had arisen in multiple regions of Europe over a millennium, such as the local Lyonese rite in Lyon, France, still celebrated today. [I confess that as a pastor in the 1970's and 1980's I had little sympathy for those uncomfortable with the "new Mass." My attitude said: "Get With the Program."] Faggioli does not get into all the specifics I have raised here, and I’m sure that you or other readers may draw different insights and conclusions from his text. But it is fair to say that the backbone of his thinking is his insistence that unity is a divine mark of the Church, in this case a unity in the institutions that form our understandings of the Catholic Faith. But he is not advocating a static unity, either, because stasis is not a quality of a Church guided by the Spirit. Catholic teachers, writers, and professors made major breakthroughs in Vatican II, and their university settings have enriched the Church. We could have done more. Love, trust, respect, discussion, and fraternity cannot remain static, either, any more than a marriage. Faggioli, by his wisdom and candor, has awakened us to a challenging Church future, from top to bottom.
0 Comments
|
For Folks Who Can't Read Everything
Archives
January 2025
|
RSS Feed