Cavadini Weighs In
John Cavadini, Chair of the Department of Theology at Notre Dame (and Commonweal contributor) has weighed in with an “open letter” regarding President Jenkins’ recent “closing statement” on the ongoing controversy at the university. It reads, in part:
But Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which the President’s statement cites, speaks of a relationship not in the first place between the Catholic university and the Catholic intellectual tradition, but between the Catholic university and the Church. And, whether we recognize it or not, this relationship to the Church – to the real, incarnate Body of Christ, the Church as it is with all its blemishes and not the abstract, idealized Church in our minds – is the lifeblood and only guarantee of our identity as a Catholic university. There is no Catholic identity apart from affiliation with the Church. Appeal to “the Catholic intellectual tradition” apart from some explicit relationship to the Church risks reducing the tradition itself to an abstraction. And again, I do not mean an imaginary Church we sometimes might wish existed, but the concrete, visible communion of “hierarchic and charismatic gifts,” “at once holy and always in need of purification,” in which “each bishop represents his own church and all of [the bishops] together with the Pope represent the whole Church …” (Lumen Gentium 1.4,8; 3.23).
Hat Tip: Mirror of Justice
Curious that Cavadini weighed in against CNS on McBrien but against Jenkins on this issue. However that may be Cavadini may be in fantasy land by insisting that one be ‘subject’ (my word) to the church in all its warts and blemishes. Who makes the call if a purge is ordered or a crusade to recapture Jerusalem? If one is going to bring in the local bishop here, why not insist on the local bishop to weigh in against Opus Dei or NeoCathechumenate etc?
Is this reopening that can of worms that the pedophilia crisis spared us as the hierarchy backtracked from as its authority suffered? Cavadini calls for a reevaluation of the relationship of the Catholic university to the church. Does he know what he is getting into?
Perhaps a more useful exercise would be to examine why Catholic universities and professors do not evaluate the status of those who today are not allowed to teach as a Catholic. What is really Catholic? Is it just what the present Magisterium says it is. We know that different popes have differed substantially. So why are Haight, Balasuriya, Collins, Kung and Curran, not Catholic?
A characteristic of the late Karol W was that he would do things in public that others were forbidden to do. http://www.kwenu.com/publications/uzonjoku/pope_johnpaul2.htm
Should the whim of one pope, who disregards other popes govern every Catholic in the world?
I wonder if Cavadini knows what he is asking?
This is an extraodinarily well-thought out statement. Thank you for sharing it with us, Peter. First Fr. Miscamble’s response, and then this. I think both letters illustrate that there is a reasonable response to be made to Jenkins assertions that academic freedom requires ND to support openly anti-Catholic endeavors.
Bill, I daresay Dr. Cavadini knows exactly what he is getting into. What an exciting and bracing dialog he is proposing! But perhaps you would prefer that ND just look at the Magisterium and say, “Lalalalalalalal, I’m not LISTENING!”
It seems to me that a grown-up academic institution can handle the kind of dialog Cavadini suggests. I would like to think that mature, intelligent adults can determine what the relationship between the Magisterium and an authentically Catholic academic institution ourght to be.
Sure, the questions are challenging and the right boundaries are difficult to define, but that’s what makes these questions so envigorating! Why run from them by denying the incarnational Church which Cavadini cites? Since when is this the most courageous option?
If it is truly dialogue then there is no problem. I just remember so keenly and vividly the fear that was rampant in Catholic institutions when Ex Corde was issued. “Mature and intelligent?” Would “Catcher in The Rye” have made it in this climate? Are we going to change the months since they were named after pagan gods? Should we change Sunday to the Lord’s Day. The Fathers of the church would have objected to much of the solid theatre that we have today.
Professor Cavadini, in a part of his open letter not re-printed here, calls the Church a “missing conversation partner” in the intellectual life of the kind of Catholic University implied in President Jenkins’s statement. That the real Church, with all its blemishes and flaws might be an important partner in the dialogue about things Catholic on a Catholic university campus sounds appealing, because the real Church needs good scholarship, the best it can get. The tricky part comes in playing out the details of the relationship between those partners in conversation.
When scholars come together as students and faculty in a Catholic university setting to pursue their work in the Catholic tradition their obligation as scholars is to do their work as perfectly as possible. So a practical question would seem to be: would they be likely to enjoy the academic freedom needed to do their work properly on a Catholic campus where the Church as conversation-partner might be represented by the local bishop, and their work would be subject to whatever degree of accountability to authority is implied in the more “explicit relationship” of Church “affiliation” Prof. Cavadini advocates?
The image of the local bishop as a “converation-partner” I find to be laughable. In my diocese (Pittsburgh), when our bishop has been at any meeting I have attended, he has been there to lecture, never to listen.
Isn’t that the core of the problem with defining a Catholic universitry? Our hierarchial church, personified by the bishops, is about power and control, which is totally antithetical to the values of the academy. Bishops do not want to dialogue. They want to dictate.
I think that Prof. Cavadini’s open letter makes some valid and needed points. As he rightly points out, the issue is the relation between a Catholic university and the Catholic Church [which he also rightly points out, does not mean simply the hierarchy]. If some significant relationship is not acknowledged and cultivated, then it is an even greater farce to pat oneself on the back and say that a Catholic unviersity is “where the Church does her thinking.”
Dialogue.
Isn’t this just something that liberals want to do? Except if its a dialogue about how heterodox one’s opponent is, conservatives have rare interest in “dialogue.” St. Blog’s denizens demonstrate they are more interested in the on-line version of “kick while down” and pile on’s-termed “fisking.” Something like sharks smelling blood in the water.
Which is quite the shame. I could truly learn something from more dialogue, yet it truly is the past-time of liberals.
Like the incredbily rich dialogue generated by this ND performance.
Jenkin’s much-derided opinion has brought out interesting and assorted versions of the relationship between Catholic scholars, Catholic higher education centers, and the heirarchical Church, both sharpening and questioning roles and meanings. Not to mention the relationship of these institutions to the secular academy. These are discussions which would not have happened if the Cardinal Newman Society had its way (which is, as an aside, the way I would have seen it too).
This crisis has created good and great thinking on the role of the Catholic university within the Church and the world. (And hysterical rants.)
But it occurred now because Jenkins allowed the VMs to occur on campus, in the context of some post-production discussions and then a larger discussion of the role of these institutions of higher education.
But this thinking which has honed both important charisms and questions for these institutions has resulted from the dialogue which the presentation of the tasteless and abominable VMs produced. From a process conservatives find inherently distasteful among the cool-headed to heretical among the rest.
Dialogue is not the tool of the conservatives. It is the achilles heel of the liberals, but it has been a tool of growth in this debate.
Daniel wrote:
“Dialogue is not the tool of the conservatives. It is the achilles heel of the liberals, but it has been a tool of growth in this debate.”
Perhaps Daniel you can explaing the above to me? Can anyone? It is a paradox, but Augustine, who insisted that all should remain within the Catholic church, demanded that the just and unjust remain in until the final judgment. Is that what is meant by blemishes and flaws? But good old Augie did not want you in if you disagreed. On that basis Augustine would have okayed the VM as long as the university firmly adhered to the Creed.
Maybe I should stick with Daniel’s statement?
I hope those who have been following this discussion have accessed Thomas P. Carney, Jr’s reply to Father Wilson Miscamble CSC in defence of Fr. Jenkins.
It is available at http://media.www.ndsmcobserver.com/media/storage/paper660/news/2006/04/21/Viewpoint/The-Catholic.University.Commending.Jenkins.Position-1865165.shtml?sourcedomain=www.ndsmcobserver.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com
(sorry I don’t know where to shorten that)
I think Carney has really caught the essense of the depth of Jenkins thought. I particularly appreciated his closing two paragraphs shared below
“In short, I believe that everyone ought to be welcome at a university, even (or, more precisely, especially) a Catholic university, because we have a special obligation to confront – to engage. The American Bishops have placed on all the Church’s institutions an obligation to make clear the Church’s social teachings. And truth is taught, at least in part, by examination of error. Just as light shines brightest when contrasted to the dark, the Light of the Word is made clear when set in contrast to erroneous views. But given the intensity of the criticism, I am left to wonder if the critics have actually read what Jenkins so carefully wrote, for setting those objectionable themes in the context of Catholic teaching is precisely what he proposes.
We have a message, and it is joyous. We should proclaim it, indeed, sing it – and not just to ourselves as in the shower, but to the world. And if the University’s response here, precisely tailored to engage the errors of the world in the context of Catholic teachings, is not satisfactory, then nothing would be – short of abject abandonment of our role in the evangelical tradition, our prophetic mission, to present the truth of the Resurrection of Christ, both God and man, to the world, so that the world may see and believe, rather than cowering behind the stone, shielding under the bushel the full majesty of that which we believe.”
John,
Based on your recommendation, I read Carney’s response expecting to see something that would at least challenge my point of view if not change it. I have to say I was disappointed.
Did this really articulate anything new or all that interesting. The essence of Carney’s argument is that (1) he’s offended (poor baby) and (2) that a Catholic university should be welcoming above all else?
Certainly a Catholic university should be a hospitable place for an exchange of many varied ideas. But is hospitality the raison d’etre of being a Catholic university. I would argue that the primary responsibility of a Catholic university is to demonstrate how a Catholic worldview engages a world of ideas and that hospitality must be conducted in the context of our Catholicsm–which, btw, will be exclusionary as a matter of fact because not everybody respects or feels welcome in Catholicsm (which, frankly says more about them than it does the Church, but that’s another post.)
If this is the best the left side of the pew can offer in this debate. Hang it up and go home.
Greg,
I regret that you choose to focus in on so few of Carney’s words. It seems to me you may be using glasses a tad too dark to see the light that shines through in his letter. Carney most emphatically calls society as well as all Catholics to be “engaged” in “Catholic teaching(s)”
I do not believe evangelization is meant to be an exclusionary activity and that appears to me what you are implying.
By commenting on this blog you are engaging us, as Carney says “truth is taught, at least in part, by examination of error.” You are here because you perceive many of us to be in error. That is legitimate.
The difference in worldviews is however profound. I suspect the world view you prefer is not one of intellectual discourse but one of intellectual enforcement. Believe as the magisterium teaches and has always taught or leave. This is Fr. Heft’s Closed Circle approach to Catholic education.
Both Jenkins, Carney and student Marisa Sandahl’s replies are more congruent with Heft’s Open Concept metaphor of Catholic education.
It is an idea that I would invite you to think more deeply about.