By JUSTIN PETRISEK and ADAM CASSANDRA
(Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society [www.cardinalnewman
society.org]. All rights reserved.)
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The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was an outspoken critic of his alma mater Georgetown University’s failure to protect its Catholic identity, but the university seemed to ignore those criticisms and has continued to support campus efforts that disregard Church teaching. Now the university administration is touting Scalia’s legacy and embracing him as a “son of Georgetown,” while faculty are accusing him of “bigotry” and are expressing joy in Scalia’s passing.
“When I was at Georgetown, it was a very Catholic place. It’s not anymore — and that’s too bad,” Scalia famously said when speaking to college students in October 2013. He posed the question to the students, “What has happened to Catholic universities, that they would lose their reason for being?”
Educated at the Jesuit Xavier High School in New York City, Scalia went on to attend Georgetown University before graduating summa cum laude and going off to Harvard Law School. “Georgetown University is not Catholic anymore,” Scalia stated again in an interview with The Remnant in May 2014. But in the 1950s “they rolled you out of bed to attend Mass,” he said. “Not anymore.”
In addition to the criticisms of Scalia, and others, The Cardinal Newman Society has reported on continued instances of Catholic identity abuse at Georgetown, including performances of The Vagina Monologues; professors openly contradicting Church teaching by advocating for abortion and contraception; connections to Planned Parenthood; support for LGBTQ activism; and honoring abortion advocates.
Georgetown also received heated criticism for covering up the name of Jesus during President Obama’s speech on campus in April 2009. And alumni have even filed a canon law petition to the Vatican pointing out numerous examples of scandal at the university.
Following news of Scalia’s passing on February 13, Georgetown President John DeGioia issued a statement on his Facebook page calling him “an extraordinary man of devout faith, whose life and career bore witness to the intellectual excellence and commitment to justice central to the Catholic and Jesuit tradition of education.”
DeGioia added, “We are proud to call him a son of Georgetown.”
Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor also issued a statement on February 13 calling Scalia “a giant in the history of the law” and “a brilliant jurist whose opinions and scholarship profoundly transformed the law. . . . We will all miss him.”
Additionally, the university published a memorial page on its website February 16 that noted Scalia was “a devout Catholic,” and pointed to ways in which he was connected to the Georgetown community.
But several Georgetown professors have openly expressed disdain for Scalia.
Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown, posted an article criticizing Scalia at Foreign Policy Magazine just hours after news broke of his passing. Brooks began the article by writing:
“Prepare yourself for pious proclamations of sorrow. Justice Antonin Scalia, stalwart conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1986, is dead! Flags will be at half-mast, and for a few days, at least, everyone will pretend to consider Scalia’s death a terrible loss to the Court, the country, and the global legal and judicial communities.”
Brooks went on to claim that Scalia’s death would be greeted with “joyful private choruses of ‘Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.’ Or maybe not so private.”
Two other Georgetown Law professors, Mike Seidman and Gary Peller, sent a campus-wide email on February 16 in response to Treanor’s statement, calling Scalia a defender of “oppression and bigotry” who “bullied lawyers, trafficked in personal humiliation of advocates, and openly sided with the party of intolerance in the ‘culture wars’ he often invoked.”
Scalia “was not a legal figure to be lionized or emulated by our students” as he represented “voices of intolerance,” according to the email.
As a result of his Catholic education and Catholic upbringing, Scalia found the moral and spiritual formation of Catholic colleges of extreme importance, particularly in a society that has pulled so many institutions away from their Catholic heritage, he told those gathered at The Cardinal Newman Society conference in October 1997.
He challenged Catholic colleges to do everything they could to retain their Catholic identity and not to forget their duty in moral formation. There is a real need, he said, for the Catholic university “…because of the moral environment in which its work is conducted — an environment that sternly disapproves what the Church teaches, and in most cases what traditional Christianity has always taught, to be sinful.
“Part of the task of a Catholic university, at least at the undergraduate level, must be precisely moral formation. Catholic universities cannot avoid that task, and indeed betray the expectations of tuition-paying, Catholic parents if they shirk it.”
Law schools, like Catholic undergraduate programs, also have a moral obligation to their students, according to Scalia. “This has nothing to do with making students better lawyers, but everything to do with making them better men and women,” Scalia said during a speech at Duquesne University School of Law in September 2011. “Moral formation is a respectable goal for any educational institution, even a law school.”
“The American landscape is strewn with colleges and universities, many of them the finest academically in the land, that were once denominational, but in principle or practice no longer are,” Scalia said at the Newman Society conference in 1997.
“With foolish sectarian pride I thought that could never happen to Catholic institutions. Of course I was wrong. We started later, but we are on the same road.”
Justice Antonin Scalia deserves nothing but respect and admiration for his contributions, not only to the law of this country, but also to the strengthening of Catholic education, said Newman Society President Patrick Reilly.
“In his characteristically frank and insightful manner, Justice Scalia said precisely what has been a bedrock principle of the Newman Society — that the heart of a faithful Catholic education is formation and not secular prestige,” Reilly said of Scalia’s comments at the Newman Society conference.
“It was notable that such an eminent justice would so publicly challenge Catholic college leaders, and it was a great encouragement and motivation to those of us who were committed to the renewal of Catholic education.”
“We mourn his loss in this world but pray that he finds much deserved love and peace in the arms of Christ,” Reilly said.
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