Where does the Church do her thinking?
I’m an academic and yet (therefore? ) I’m reluctant to agree with the statement attributed to the president of Notre Dame (following, I believe, one of his predecessors) that the Catholic university is where the Church does her thinking. If one said “one of the places” where the Church does her thinking, it would be all right. But the Church does her thinking also in the pews, in convents, monasteries and seminaries, in retreat centers, on the Bowery, in hospitals and prisons, in homes and workplaces, etc., etc., etc..
It’s typically only one kind of thinking that goes on at universities, Catholic or other, and as important as that is, it is by no means the only kind of thinking of which the Church stands in need, and which the Church herself generates and favors.
If I think back on the great pioneers of Catholic theology in the twentieth century, very few of them did their thinking at Catholic universities: de Lubac and Congar did not; for most of his life Rahner did not; Chenu did not; Schillebeeckx and von Balthasar did not. It is not at all evident that the most important Catholic thinkers of the present day are at Catholic universities.
I think Catholic universities should come up with another self-justification.
My own experience suggests that Catholic colleges bring faith and reason into dialogue in ways that might not happen otherwise.
I received my masters’ degree in public policy from Georgetown back in 1993. Now at the time one could argue that, other than the Jesuit who headed the program, there wasn’t a strong effort to bring a Catholic perspective to bear on the curriculum (no course in Catholic social teaching for example).
But a lot of us there were Catholic and we did try to bring that perspective to bear on what we were studying. Many of us were familiar with Catholic social teaching and it informed our discussions. We took in the lectures over at the Woodstock Center and read America and Commonweal in the stacks when we had a free moment. Sometimes we’d see each other at mass on Sunday at Dahlgren Chapel before heading over to the library.
I don’t think it would have been quite the same experience if we were at the Kennedy School or University of Michigan.
Is this indefinable something that I am struggling to name sufficient justification? I’m not sure. I suppose it’s the same something that led me to send my kids to Catholic school. Tonight my 8 year old and 5 year old spontaneously re-enacted the Stations of the Cross in the kitchen after dinner. It was…different.
Would my kids be able to know Christ without attending Catholic school? Of course. Most Catholics send their kids to public schools these days. But there is something about a place that would interrupt the school day to have the kids follow the Stations of the Cross. Something worth holding on to, I think.
And to J.A.K.’s remarks, the people cried: “Amen, Amen!”
I don’t think Jenkins meant to say that only people within Catholic univeristies think — or think in ways important to the Church. I can think of three reasonable ways of interpreting his statement.
First, as to the discipline of theology–from which Joe’s examples came. All of his examples were priests. It may be possible for priest – theologians to find time and space for the reflective consideration of big topics in settings other than the university, but how likely is it for lay theologians? It seems, for better or worse, that the university setting is really the only opportunity for many lay people to think in a scholarly fashion and get paid for it. (I leave out think tanks here, because I believe their endeavors are not coextensive with the scholarly vocation although there is some overlap.)
Second, t think the dangers and temptations now are different than in the mid-twentieth century. There is pressure to respond instantly, to have an opinion, to be in the news. To –dare I say it– blog. But real scholarship takes time and attention and quiet, and a willingness to wait for results, rather than see them instantaneously. Joe combines the two vocations seemlessly, and extremely well.
I think many people find it harder — and unless they were in a setting that couter-culturally stands in favor of long term, rigorous, capacious projects, wouldn’t do them on their own.
Third, the “Church doing its thinking” refers to more than systematic theology. I interpret Jenkins as saying, “What happens if we bring scientists, and humanists, and social scientists, as well as theologians and philosophers, together, in a way united by our mission?. What new forms of creativity, what new questions, what new answers, will arise?” For example, many of the most pressing moral issues today have their sources in science and economics . I think Jenkins’s hope is that the synergy of faith and a broadly based culture of academic research will be helpful to the Church and to the world.
Of course each of you are partly correct. I particularly like, Cathy’s reply especially a combination of her last two examples.
I didn’t have a “Catholic” education with the exception of four years of high school (9-12)(Ontario education had five years in those days.)
For years, I read Commonweal very much alone. Then in December 1999, the magazine started up its Readers of Commonweal Discussion Group (at commonweal@yahoogroups.com).
It is a forum where Catholics think! It is a forum which brings together many of the same disciplines one finds in a university. It also illustrates how diverse our thinking is and just how many have struggled and continue to struggle with our Church.
There is nothing like reading and writing to force you to clarify your thoughts. That is what universities really teach you. As Dufresne says quoting Elias Chacour in the current issue, what ENDURES is “…the possibility to weight and value things and to go beyond the present situation, to be creative and inventive and to ask questions…”
As a child we learned “God is everywhere”. Perhaps to the question where does the Chruch do its thinking; perhaps the answer is “everywhere”.
For J. Peter Nixon:
I agree wit the substance of your post. I would like, however, to offer a correction to your claim that there were no courses on Catholic social thought.
I have taught for 22 years at Georgetown and as long as I have been there we have had a variety of courses on Catholic social teaching: The Bible and Social Justice, Theology and Social Action; Black Liberation Theology of Social Justice. There were also courses in the philosophy department, and through the interdisciplinary programs, Justice and Peace and Catholic Studies. Fr. Richard McSorley and Coleman Mccarthy both covered these areas. These courses were offered in the College so they may have escaped your notice. I think John Langan would be surprised by your claim since his entire career at Georgetown has been devoted to Catholic social teaching, as was Brian Hehir’s when he taught there. Georgetown has had a long-standing commitment to this area of study.
The examples Joe Komanchak offers are history. Joe, do you have any current examples, you’d offer for discussion?
Peggy: Are you asking me for examples of Catholics who think but aren’t at Catholic Universities? Well, we could start with the editors of “Commonweal” throughout its history. And I know of a couple named Steinfels who have done most of their thinking outside a Catholic university.
But what of Jean Vanier, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day (history, too?, Sidney Callahan, the Cunneens; David Tracy, Bernard McGinn, William Shea, Charles Taylor, almost all of the Catholic theologians in Great Britain and in France, etc. etc., and I wonder, in reply to Cathy, whether the majority of lay theologians are at Catholic institutions. How many do you want?
I’m surprised at the reactions to my post. I was not denigrating the importance of Catholic colleges and univesities. (I teach at one.) The examples given of what can happen there are inspiring. It’s just that I think the slogan proposed greatly oversimplifies and over-reaches. To repeat: the Church needs and engages in a lot of other kinds of thinking than the sort that goes on at universities.
(And I don’t forget the business school at a Jesuit university that took out seven expensive ads in the “NY Times” inviting people to apply “Because Darwin was right” about the “survival of the fittest”, and students could find at that school “a vital survival tool.” Was it the Church that was thinking there?)
Joe, I appreciate the nuance you’re injecting into Jenkins’s slogan, but I find it somewhat constricted to claim that one kind of thinking goes on at Catholic universities. I haven’t been out of one for all that long, and I can tell you that several ways of church thinking happen in classrooms, in dorm rooms, in student centers, under trees, while building houses, while working, in coffee bars, bar bars, on strolls through the park, et cetera. My point is that university life comprises a much wider array of experiences and thinking than those circumscribed by interactions between professors and students.
Grant: Who could deny this? My point is not that only one kind of thought goes on at Catholic universities, but that a lot of Catholic thought goes on elsewhere, thanks be to God, and the slogan suggests a monopoly. I should think that the editors of a Catholic lay journal would demur.
I remember a couple of years ago a theologian at a Catholic university said something to the effect that Dorothy Day was a saint, but, the implication was, not a theologian, and so his university should not hire a man who was trying to articulate a theory for her practice. Dorothy Day did a lot of thinking. So did Thomas Merton. So did Basil Pennington.
Without raising the question again of “Who is the Church?” I took your first post Joe (and Jenkins statement–not original with him) to mean something corporate and not primarly individual. Do you think we could usefully describe a distinction between individual Catholic thinkers and communal Catholic Thinking? I am a Catholic and I think, but I often have reference to Catholic thinking, the community’s development and understanding of the Great Tradition.
I honestly don’t think that Jenkins meant to denigrate the rich Catholic intellectual life outside Catholic universities. He’s not that kind of a person.
In respnse to Joe’s question, I would say that of course there are lay Catholics doing wonderful work in theology at non-Catholic institutions. I was educated in theology at one of those places–Yale.. And I love Yale dearly, including the possibilities it offered me of being Catholic in a broadly ecumenical environment.
But to be honest, as a lay person I have learned something by being at Notre Dame (the first Catholic institution I have spent any time in) that I did not learn at Yale. I imagine it’s something that priests and religious teaching at non-Catholic instituitons already know, because they have been formed in Catholic envornoments. There were a few Catholics in my graduate program –which meant that in our young minds at least, the Catholic Church was us. In our little community, off the record, in conversations, we spoke for the Church. There wasn’t the passionate contestation about what it means to be Catholic that you find at Notre Dame, and no doubt other Catholic schools too. At Notre Dame, I have learned that the Catholic Church, and those committed to the articulation of its tradition, and the carrying out of its mission, is a lot broader than I had originally thought.
So for those of us lay people who were entirely educated at non-Catholic schools, the opportunity to be at a Catholic school, at least for a time, can teach us something about the Church that we already know intellectually, but may not know existentially.
A relevant issue that has not surfaced in this discussion was broached on Amy Welborn’s page by “Alfredo” who teaches at Notre Dame.
“The real problem is that the hiring policies of the last thirty years have given us a faculty, especially in the humanities and science, that is more and more devoid of Catholic sensibilities….Father Jenkins sincerely wants to do something about it. The question is whether he will be able to.”
It’s not a question of: “who is the Church,” but of “where are the Catholics?”
There is in the discussion, I believe, a confusions of categories. Is there a Catholic physics? a Catholic biology?
If not, there is likely no Catholic theology.
There are good thinkers – a particular ability – who may or may not be Catholics. G.K. Chesterton comes to mind.
For a thinker there is an advantage to being Catholic: it preserves one from such dangerously fallacious tautologies as the quoted “survival of the fittest”. And such impossibilities as a universe without a beginning.
Anent Margaret Steinfel’s mention of the question “Who is the Church”, the Catechism is pretty clear:
“899 The initiative of lay Christians is necessary especially when the matter involves discovering or inventing the means for permeating social, political, and economic realities with the demands of Christian doctrine and life. This initiative is a normal element of the life of the Church:
Lay believers are in the front line of Church life; for them the Church is the animating principle of human society. Therefore, they in particular ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the faithful on earth under the leadership of the Pope, the common Head, and of the bishops in communion with him. They are the Church”.
I think Cathy (above) gets it right twice: First, Fr. Jenkins’s claim is neither that the Church thinks only at Notre Dame (or at Catholic universities generally) nor that the thinking that goes on at Catholic universities is privileged over or more valuable than that which goes on elsewhere. Second, my own experience at Notre Dame is, it sounds, like Cathy’s, in that I never attended a Catholic school and so “the opportunity to be at a Catholic school, at least for a time, can teach [me] something about the Church that [I] already know intellectually, but may not know existentially.”
I have re-read my first post and I’m still unable to find anything in it that calls into question that Catholic colleges and universities are good things, and I could make a case (in fact I have made the case in publications) that they are a very important means by which the Church attempts to have a redemptive role in history.
But, for goodness sakes, why is it so hard to acknowledge that important, vital thinking also goes on elsewhere in the Church? I know it’s less sexy to say that “the Catholic university is one of the places where the Church does her thinking,” and it won’t fit on a bumper-sticker, but isn’t that the truth of it? Does modesty come so hard to university-types?
I think people at Notre Dame are acutely aware of the importance of Bob’s question. It’s not just a question of findng Catholics from top graduate schools, it’s also a question of encouraging Catholics (including Domers) to go to graduate school, rather than into business or law.
But to want to go to graduate school in the humanities, one has to fall in love with the intellectual life–it’s a life of dedication, sacrifice, and yes–existential risk.
Catholic universities talk glibly about the integration of faith and reason. I worry that believing students at Catholic univeristies are taught to think that integration of faith and reason is easy, or without risk– that reason’s task is essentially to function as a lawyer for faith. If that’s the sum total of your idea of the relationship of faith and reason, you’re not going to be an intellectual. You’re treating your mind in an instrumental way. You’re an apologist–you’re a laywer for the faith — but you’re not an intellectual.
And if you’re not an intellectual, why go to grad school for six or seven years to live a life of genteel poverty, when you can earn so much more defending the faith, or promoting the culture of life, in other ways.
Joe,
In the same way that you ask, who could deny that a variety of thought occurs at Catholic colleges? I wonder, would Jenkins deny that the church’s thinking happens apart from Catholic colleges? Who would deny that? Certainly not a Holy Cross priest formed in community. And nowhere in the statement does Jenkins deny it. It is, after all, a statement responding to an issue that arose on a Catholic college campus. He’s addressing that community. Were you hoping for a caveat clarifying for his readers the notion that the church’s thinking happens off campus, too? You read Jenkins’s sentence as strictly as possible (it contains no “only” ), and then wonder why responders to your post read you just as strictly. I’m curious: how do you distinguish between the thinking that occurs within the Catholic college community and the thinking that happens in your list of locales?
Bob Imbelli asks: Where are the Catholics on Catholic campuses?
My impression is that there are many Catholic faculty on some Catholic campuses, and on other, there Catholics and many others. Once it seemed to me that the Catholics on Catholic campuses were often the most conflicted about Catholic thinking and Catholic identity. These were often the people who wrangled with the reigning religious order over a whole variety of issues, including academic freedom (there must be some interesting stories at UND [and elsewhere] about those days). In the meantime, it was often the “others,” Protestant and Jews who fostered an interest in Catholic thinking and identity.
I think that period has passed for the most part. Now in many places the question of Catholic thinking and identity has been relieved of lots of baggage because members of the religious orders have either themselves become engaged in a question bigger than maintaining control and/or they are simply fewer in number on the campus.
This means that Catholic colleges and universities have to address an almost wholly unprecedented set of questions. I would guess that’s what Jenkins was trying to do (and true the VM may not be the most engaging object of our attention [though it would seem to raise a number of issues which some Catholics want to deny or ignore. What's to say except that these are sins!]). But I digress.
Can addressing these question be done (as Bob Imbelli seems to suggest–at this late date)? Or as many hope, including me and probably Bob: given new circumstances and a new generation of Catholic thinkers, how can it be done?
I have no particular interest in Fr. Jenkins’ remarks, nor in the problem to which he was addressing himself. That’s why I posted my reflections as a new theme.
Type the words “where the Church does its thinking” into Google and you will be brought to 100 places where the phrase occurs. Sometimes it occurs as “a place where…”, sometimes as “the place where…” (Both ND and CUA use “the place where…., and not in general, but of themselves!” Hmm.)
I’ve never much liked the phrase, for the reasons given, which I needn’t repeat.
And, Grant, I fail to see how even the strictest reading of my first post would suggest that I don’t think Catholic universities important.
I thought Fr. Komonchak’s initial post added just the right nuance in answering the question: Where does the Church do her thinking? She does her thinking in all the places he mentions, which included her universities.
My own view is that certainly our Catholic universities are places where original thinking should and does occur. More often, however, I think Catholic universities are places where original thinking is synthesized and where different strands of original thinking, regardless of their sources, are put into dialogue with each other and with the Church- as Fr.Jenkins notes. Of course, this same synthesis occurs in each thoughtful Catholic, in every Catholic reading and study group, etc., etc. To point that out does nothing to diminish the importance of the mission of our Catholic universities.
Joe,
I never said you don’t think Catholic universities important, nor did I see anyone saying that in response to your post. Given the amount of time and energy you’ve given to working at one, it would be an absurd claim. My point was that I find your reading of Jenkins’s sentence constricted.
Iprof:
Right you are. There were lots of courses in Catholic social teaching offered at the undergraduate level at Georgetown, and perhaps at the graduate level as well. What I meant was that there was no requirement at that time that MPP students take a graduate level course in Catholic social teaching and none offered specifically by program faculty. There was a required course in Ethics and Public Policy, but it focused heavily on Locke. I don’t know if Judy Feder has remedied this since she took over management of the program
Joe:
I don’t think that most of the posters here are trying to argue against your point. I think they are taking up the question at the end of your post: If Catholic universities are not the only place where the Church does her thinking (and I think most of the posters here would agree with you on that), then what other justifications for these institutions are there? I think that many of those posting here–including yourself–have tried to offer thoughtful answers to that question.
Joseph,
It seems to me that Jenkins said something that is commonly said about universities, whether Catholic or otherwise: that they are the place where society does its thinking, or where individuals go to do their thinking. Of course, that can’t be taken literally, and, as you implicitly recognized in your original post, everyone recognizes that thinking occurs outside the university.
But if this is plainly true, then you’re right, the university needs a better self-justification, or a better self-definition.
Saying that the university is where we do our thinking, while not taken literally by anyone, does imply something to the effect that we do our best thinking when we’re attending university or teaching there. It does nothing to encourage us in a goal which I think should be a given — namely to do much better thinking after university and long after we’ve left it.
Fr. Jenkins might have been better off with another old adage about schools and universities: that in these place we learn for the first time HOW to think (that is, we learn how to think critically and fruitfully).
But Fr. Jenkins’ statement already included a quote that suggests how to define a university: “As Pope John Paul II wrote, the Catholic university is ‘a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture’ “. That’s a definition already suggested in some of the other comments to this post.
I think you’re raised an issue worth thinking about. Language should be precise, and it’s worth thinking about the precise meaning of Fr. Jenkins’ statement.