Catholic Studies For What? Pt.II

I pursued the Master of Arts program in Catholic Studies with the possibility of proceeding to a PhD elsewhere afterwards. The interdisciplinary program provided the perfect environment in which to evaluate my academic inclinations and assess my competency for further studies. Such programs have become popular initiatives at universities in North America since the inception of the first of its kind 25 years ago by Dr Briel at the University of St Thomas. I entered it pragmatically minded, appreciating the instrumental value of the degree as a stepping stone to further studies. I also recognized that it would act to balance my expressly secular and analytical philosophical education, during which the likes of Aquinas & others we’re only mentioned in passing, if at all (not even in the so-called ‘Philosophy of Religion’ class!). And though my expectations were sincere, they were nevertheless narrow. 

In those two brief and brilliant years, I did not merely absorb a conglomeration of interesting and varied facts in return for an expensive credential. Instead, I studied the liberal arts… and felt it. My heart was dissected by Dante, navigated by Newman, moved my More, and augmented by Augustine. I was known by these thinkers more than I knew myself. History was unravelled before me and I saw humanity’s rawness, with Christ in the midst. Texts acted upon me; not I upon them. My intellect ran towards God and dragged my soul along with it. Facts spoke to one another through the centuries, rather than standing in isolation, providing a three-dimensional dialogue of human existence as affected and interpreted by the Catholic tradition. This might sound like an LSD trip, but I ensure that the only drugs in my system were caffeine and the odd afternoon pint (the happy hours around the college were ridiculously good!). This was Newman’s “Idea of a Univerisity”, alive and giving to my mind and soul.

Yet, along with all this splendor, there was a sense (perhaps self-imposed) in which we, the Catholic Studies types, were a bizarre and curious sub-culture. A mutation of the liberal arts; an exception of the education system and the estranged sibling of the university, "over there" across the avenue. My rose-tinted vision of the general institution was dulled as I soon learnt that the friction between administration and humanities faculty was not confined to my side of the Atlantic, nor my side of the English Channel, but was a phenomenon infecting academia worldwide, of which its absence was enjoyed only in certain pockets, and not necessarily at all “Catholic” universities. In learning of the unique and few orthodox bastions of the U.S., where administrative leaders held and facilitated the same Newmanian vision of liberal arts as their professorial staff, I had hoped my institution was among of them… but I was wrong. (George Weigel talks about this succinctly in his recent Homage to Briel, as it pertains to the 1967 Land O' Lakes Statement)

Especially within the past years, the university administration has undergone several drastic changes with regards to its core “’Mission”, affecting how it markets itself to the wider world. Though purportedly a Catholic liberal arts university, the institution is increasingly presenting itself as a pluralistic advocate of “diversity” and “excellence”, exclaiming with great pride its noble and unifying refrain: “All for the Common Good!” It is the hymn found in various forms at an increasing amount of “Christian” institutions nowadays that seek to find their identity in an ever-secularized and technical academic marketplace. The hope is that these endorsements will rank them shoulder-to-shoulder with secular degree-vendors that in essence stand for exactly the same: regardless of race, gender, religion or political opinion, all are for the Common Good! Concepts such as “Ecumenism” and “Interreligious dialogue” take precedence. It is can seem a relatively harmless post-modern endeavour, but when explicitly Catholic institutions tone-down their orthodoxy and advocacy of the liberal arts (as Newman defined) for the sake of such an agenda, they effectively compartmentalize and muffle the true source of the Common Good—God.

For all intents and purposes, the redirection aims at emulating an academic foundation akin to that of my English alma-mater, where equality was the highest good and religion was an optional extra, albeit under the guise of a so-called "Catholic" name. Therein, the individual becomes the pole around which the common good emerges, and not God Himself. A pearl of great price is bought and discarded for the sake of the field in which is it found, and with it, the pews of a once-ornate chapel slowly relinquish their former inhabitants. I returned to that school a few months later, to find directly behind the Center for Catholic Studies the newly erected Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center. I often find it hard to have a constructive conversation with someone of a differing opinion if one of us doesn't really know where we clearly stand on a position, and the reasons we should even stand there. Such dialogue can swiftly become a shipwreck, where the vast submerged iceberg meets the hull of the surface-level vessel.

I lament this transition—one which was in the works long before I arrived on campus. It speaks of the same instrumentalism of education which I first encountered in the philosophy school board meetings—a discipline which, even in the marketing of its own programs, was forced to compromise its intrinsic worth by proclaiming that its student would benefit from an array of skills to enhance “employability”. Now a school that purported to be "liberal arts" had lost its sense of the true meaning of such. I don’t deny that employability is important—in fact, I felt it all the more as a newly-wed with a baby boy. Young people should be encouraged to make well-informed decisions that will affect their future prospects. But I think it is a narrow definition of future security to grant that this condition can only be satisfied through explicit or implicit practical skills. Values and faith determine one's future, in this life and the next, and this is not transmuted in the science lab. Indeed, they can be received from the pulpit and in the confessional, but if they can be radically enhanced in the classroom, through history, literature, theology, philosophy and the arts, as I have especially experienced at Catholic Studies, then therein lies a pearl of great price.