Catholic and
Jesuit
What does it mean at Marquette? |
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If you want
to start a lively conversation with Rev. Robert Wild,
S.J., ask him to define Catholic, Jesuit education at
Marquette University. Even before being named president
of the university in 1996, Father Wild had been working
from his perspective as a professor and later as a provincial
to ensure the preservation of the religious identity
and core values that have characterized Jesuit colleges
and universities for centuries.
Now looking forward to his
10th anniversary in the office of the president, he enjoys
the satisfaction that comes from having worked tirelessly
and successfully with students, faculty, staff and alumni
to ensure that Marquette fulfills its promise to provide
a transformational education so that students graduate
not only better educated but better human beings.
Here, he talks about how Marquette
continues to strengthen its Catholic, Jesuit identity. |
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 efore coming back to Marquette, I was from
1985 to 1991 the provincial or regional head of the Chicago
Province of the
Jesuits. There are 10 such Jesuit provincials in the
United States, and when we gathered together as we did several
times a year, the thing we talked about most was preserving
the religious identity of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities
in this country. Jesuits, we knew, would in the future
be fewer in number, and so key to this effort would be the
lay men and women who would be assuming more and more leadership
responsibility. So when I came on as president here,
I knew I'd better walk the talk and look carefully at the whole
question of how we can best ensure Marquette's religious
identity over the long term.
I realized very quickly that to succeed we needed to be
very explicit about our goals and mission. We therefore formulated,
with the help of the university community and Board of Trustees,
a formal mission statement expressing our value commitments
and established an Office
of Mission and Identity to help
oversee
its implementation. These values, excellence (a term encompassing
not only academic excellence but also all the virtues and
values that belong to human excellence broadly understood),
faith,
leadership and service, we talk about constantly, and we
have a consistent, ongoing expectation that every faculty
member,
every university staff member has a contribution to make
in living out and making visible the values enunciated in
this
mission statement.
To explain that a bit more, we seek to
instill in students a passion for pursuing knowledge not
simply for self-betterment
but also so that they are better prepared to serve the
world and its needs. Furthermore, in both the core courses
and
in the specific academic major or majors that our students
choose,
as well as in their experience of campus life apart from
the classroom, we want them to understand better and reflect
upon
the demands, not least ethical demands, that will be placed
on them both in their professional careers and in ordinary
human life.
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Universities
essentially began as gathering places where teachers
and students could come together to share knowledge and to
explore questions
of fundamental human importance. To carry out its proper work
of intellectual inquiry and discovery, a university must be
autonomous and self-governing. Furthermore, it must maintain
and foster academic freedom. Its very nature, that is, demands
that it function as a sort of privileged public square in
which faculty members and students can freely advance ideas
of all sorts, some of great value and others perhaps foolish
or even wrong-headed, subject only to the critical assessment
of their peers.
In many ways, our being a Catholic and
Jesuit university allows for greater academic freedom than
can be
found at state or
nonsectarian private schools where, for example, topics like
religion are ruled out of bounds either by the demands of
the law or more often by a sort of accepted community wisdom
that
such matters are not “scientific” and so do not
belong in a serious way to the education process.
"In
both the core courses and in the specific academic
major or majors that our students choose, as
well as in their experience of campus life
apart from the classroom, we want them to understand
better and reflect upon the demands, not least
ethical demands, that will be placed on them
both in their professional careers and in ordinary
human life." |
A Catholic
institution — and frankly all religiously affiliated
institutions — will disagree with
that sort of restriction. We say religion is a very central
part of human experience and whether you are a believer or
not, as an educated person you should at least have some
understanding of this phenomenon and how it works. And certainly
a university community ought to be able to talk about religion,
about God, about all such matters as a normal part of human
inquiry.
On the other hand,
some think that the emphasis on autonomy and academic freedom
that I just underscored is somehow
contrary to the expectations the Roman Catholic Church has
for Catholic
universities. That most certainly is not the case. To the
contrary, in his foundational statement about the characteristics
of
a genuine Catholic university, a document entitled “Ex
Corde Ecclesiae,” Pope John Paul II affirmed the
necessity for these institutions of both autonomy and academic
freedom. Because Roman Catholicism lays great stress on the
fundamental goodness of creation and views the Incarnation,
God's becoming in Christ Jesus a concrete human being, as
a core doctrine of the faith, it tends to be optimistic about
the ability of human reason to attain the truth. In other
words, because God
created the universe, the universe can be analyzed and understood
by human reason. And when, as in the case of evolution, there
might seem to be an apparent contradiction between faith
and reason, the emerging discoveries made by scientists on
the
basis of this theory will, Catholics believe, ultimately
turn out to be, if verifiable by the methods proper to science,
in harmony with the teachings of our faith.
Throughout history,
Catholic universities have been asked why they would permit
something to be studied or discussed
that
seemingly contradicts accepted church teaching. I can best
respond to that with a story:
Once upon a time there was
a Catholic university and at that university was a certain
theology professor. He was truly
brilliant and he was in touch with all the latest trends
both in theology
and in other relevant academic disciplines. He began
to teach several viewpoints that were unfamiliar to many
contemporary
Catholics, and soon his name came to the attention of
the local bishop. The bishop, disturbed by what he read and
heard,
began
to believe that what this theologian was teaching his
students was at odds with traditional Catholic doctrine.
With that
decided, his duty was clear. He would publicly condemn
these teachings as false, an action that would lead, he presumed,
to the university removing this professor from the faculty
since he was not teaching authentic Catholic doctrine.
And
so the bishop did. But the university faculty, upon receiving
the bishop's decree of condemnation, refused to expel
the theologian from their membership since they were not
convinced
by the
bishop's arguments and believed that decisions about
faculty membership were theirs alone to make. That sounds so much
like what we hear from time to time these days, doesn't it?
But in fact these events took place in
1270; the bishop was the then archbishop of Paris, Étienne
Tempier; the university was the University of Paris; and
the theologian in question was Thomas of Aquino, better known
as
St. Thomas Aquinas.
Ironically, the supposedly heterodox
theologian that Thomas was thought to be, not only by his
archbishop but also by
other contemporary Catholics, became recognized over time
as perhaps the greatest of all Catholic theologians. All
of which
is a helpful reminder that the debates we have about the
Catholicity of our universities are not at all a new thing
in the life
of the church. And it is also a reminder that the principal
work of a university, the discovery of truth, is not a
simple business but proceeds by fits and starts, with some
gaining
insight well before others do.
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