By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what will follow in this column. I am fully on the side of those who want to preserve a strong Catholic identity in the curriculum and campus life at Catholic colleges.
Whenever I hear an administrator at a Catholic college talk about the need to “move beyond the seminary model” of Catholic colleges in the past, my hackles go up. I know the administrator is going to push for policies that will take Catholic colleges down the same path that led to the full secularization of the Ivy League schools, which once were affiliated with Protestant denominations.
That said, a letter to the editor in the Jesuits’ America magazine a few months ago, from a woman who graduated from a Catholic women’s college in the pre-Vatican II era, struck a chord with me. Her experiences echo mine at Fordham in the early 1960s. She concludes, “The issue of ‘Catholic identity’ in Catholic universities and colleges is not as simple as some would have it.” I have to agree.
The woman begins by describing her time at college, where she lived “not just in single-sex dorms, but on a single-sex campus.” Her professors? “Mostly (maybe all) Catholic.” “We had crucifixes in every classroom; and most professors started class with a prayer.” Her curriculum? “Six semesters of philosophy and six of theology long before ‘peace and justice’ studies had arrived.” Her point? “My classmates and I grew up…doing all the things that some believe would be the magic needed to stem the hemorrhaging of adults from the Catholic Church.”
She says it didn’t work, that “about 25 percent of my classmates left the church immediately upon graduation. Over the years, more than half, pushing two-thirds of my friends and classmates left the church.” She adds that those who “are still going to Mass don’t believe in what the church teaches. Some don’t even believe in God.” She concludes that there “is no panacea, no magical formula to ‘keep’ young adults in the church.”
I can’t say that the percentage of my Fordham classmates who left the Church is similar to this woman’s. I have no way of knowing the percentage. Perhaps the number of graduates in this women’s class was small enough for her to keep track of what happened to them over the years. That was not my experience. But judging from what I saw while in attendance at Fordham, it would not shock me if a comparable number left the Church: There was not much overt piety on display in the cafeteria and student lounge during my time at the school.
But I always assumed that many of the young men I knew followed the familiar pattern of returning to active parish life when they married and had families. But I have no numbers to back up that statement.
However, what if this woman is correct, and that it can be demonstrated that the Catholic colleges of old with their strong Catholic identity did little to strengthen the faith of their undergraduates?
I had an analogous thought 10 or 15 years ago when I started to read stories in the press about how secular Spain had become: legalized abortion and divorce, a thriving porn industry. In 2005, the country legalized same-sex marriage and the right of adoption by same-sex couples. It is true that many of these changes were instituted by the country’s Socialist Party, but the Socialist Party that instituted these policies was elected by the Spanish people. I had been told that would never happen.
By whom? Back in the early 1970s, I attended a lecture sponsored by Triumph magazine, a staunchly traditionalist Catholic publication whose editors took much inspiration from the religious fervor of the Spanish people. One of the speakers that evening was a Spanish priest who dismissed out-of-hand the notion that abortion would ever be made legal in Spain because of the special relationship between the Church and the Spanish people.
During the Franco years, Roman Catholicism was the only religion to have legal status, and laws were on the books banning divorce, abortion, and the sale of contraceptives. Catholic religious instruction was mandatory, even in public schools.
This priest (I don’t remember his name, even though I can still picture him at the podium) insisted that this “special relationship” between the Church and the Spanish government had formed a citizenry that was solidly Catholic, and that the United States should take heed; that our stress on the separation of church and state was responsible for the societal decay we were experiencing.
The Spanish priest was articulate and persuasive, but he was wrong. The years as a “confessional state” did not immunize Spain from the societal trends that swept over Europe in the last decades of the 20th century, just as the stress on the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges before Vatican II did not ensure that their alumni would stay faithful.
Spain’s stress on its Catholic heritage during the Franco years did not halt the country’s drift to the secular left after he was gone.
One could argue that a government similar to Franco’s would have made a difference if it held power. Maybe. But that would have meant continued authoritarian rule. However, we are not talking about political theory just now. We are talking about Catholic universities. Sooner or later, their students graduate. The question is whether they will stay Catholic.
The moral of the story? It would be interesting to hear our readers’ views on this question. Certainly we should not conclude that it is a mistake for a Catholic university to encourage Catholic spiritual formation for its students, even if that effort will fail in many cases. I have read reports that the graduates of modern Catholic colleges with a strong emphasis on the faith — Christendom College in Virginia, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Thomas Aquinas College in California — remain practicing Catholics long after their graduation.
Is that true, and, more important, can those results be replicated in much larger Catholic universities such as Notre Dame and Georgetown? Or is it inevitable that their graduates will follow the pattern described by the woman writing to America?
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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