The fraud that is "Catholic" education has been the subject of numerous articles of mine in the past thirty years. As one who has experienced the horrors of Catholic higher education first-hand as a student and as a professor, I can attest to the simple, undeniable fact that souls have been and continue to be aborted as a result of the institutionalization of programs and policies that are designed to undermine the truths of the Catholic Faith.
Christ the King College, for example, was started two years ago to serve as an antidote to the poisons that have been spreading in the souls of unsuspecting young Catholics as a result of the unchecked Modernism that characterizes institutions that label themselves, at least in some form or another, as "Catholic." It should not be the case at all that a layman, of all people, has to start a college to present the perennial truths of the Faith. Said truths should be available without any hint of corruption or compromise in every course in every classroom in every Catholic educational institution (elementary, secondary, collegiate, graduate, seminary, professional, post-graduate). I should be a tenured professor of political science in a Catholic college or university, not the founder of an effort to present the very truths to which every Catholic is entitled to receive handed down to him by his shepherds in perfect fidelity to the Church's invisible Head, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Alas, we are faced today with the spectacle in one Catholic college and university after another of the promotion of the very thing, sin, that caused Our Lord to suffer cruelly in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death. Such was the case two weeks ago at my own Master's alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, when one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance was celebrated unrepentantly. Such is the case, however, every day on the campus of all but a handful of "Catholic" educational institutions. What has been happening for three straight years in the second week of February at the University of Notre Dame is the fruit of a long process of the systematic de-Catholicization of Catholic higher education.
Catholic universities and colleges once taught the Faith reasonably well. Catholic scholars were trained in a framework of orthodoxy during most of the Nineteenth Century. They were trained in Thomistic philosophy and theology, schooled in Patristics, well-groomed in dogmatic and moral theology, and trained to love the Mass of the ages and the Mother of God. Oh, elements of Americanism were present at Georgetown College from its inception.Modernist elements began to seep into some universities and colleges by the end of the Nineteenth Century, which is one of the reasons Pope Saint Pius X required an oath to be taken against the errors of Modernism. He saw the dangers posed to the life of the Faith in Europe and in the United States by the rampant spread of Modernism, especially in the realm of Biblical scholarship (with the advent of the German Protestant school of exegesis) and in the realm of philosophy (where the "process thought" of Hegelianism, which emphasized the belief that truths evolve over time and can change, was being taught quite openly in some places). Pope Saint Pius X believed it was essential to safeguard doctrinal integrity in seminaries and colleges and universities, especially since it was the case that only those who were genuinely equipped for serious intellectual work were the ones who attended Catholic colleges and universities (unlike the case in our own era of egalitarianism, which asserts that everyone is equally as able as everyone else to perform well in college).
Over the course of time, therefore, the foxes began to invade the henhouse at at Catholic colleges and universities. In the United States, for instance, the Americanist ethos of academic freedom became such a clarion call among some Catholic intellectuals in the 1940's and 1950's that there began to be murmurings against any and all Church interference in the life of professional scholars. Others, such as University of Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh, believed that Catholic colleges and universities had been ghettoized because of their strict adherence to Catholic theology and philosophy, that our institutions of higher learning would never be taken seriously by the world if they were not open to the hiring of non-Catholic faculty, people who would bring a "diversity of opinion" into the academic marketplace of ideas. Also uppermost in the mind of Hesburgh was his belief that graduates of Catholic colleges and universities would not be able to achieve prominence in the economic, scientific, legal, and political realms if they were viewed as graduates of second-rate institutions which were closed-minded about the great issues of the day.
A major turning point in the de-Catholicization of Catholic universities and colleges occurred from 1965-1967 when seventy-five of some 500 professors at my own bachelor's alma mater, Saint John's University (New York), went on strike. Although the University's president at the time, Father Joseph Cahill, C.M., tried valiantly to maintain the right of the central administration to maintain control over the hiring and promotion and tenure of professors to assure their adherence to the Faith, the result was that the faculty won one of their central points: the devolution of personnel decisions to the level of personnel and budget committees in the individual academic departments. Dissenting Catholics and non-Catholics were hired in droves from that point on, resulting in the eventual re-casting of a once proud Catholic institution of higher education into a self-professed "multicultural" center of "urban" education. The battle at Saint John's University set the stage for the infamous meeting of Catholic college administrators at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, in 1967.
As the late Monsignor George Kelly pointed out in his massive work, Battle for the American Church, the Land O'Lakes Conference was the forum in which the administrators of ten Catholic colleges and universities believed it was necessary for them to secularize their institutions by divorcing themselves voluntarily from the official control of the Roman Catholic Church in this country. This opened the way for these institutions to take down the Crucifixes from classroom walls, hire a glut of non-Catholics (as well as dissenting, heretical Catholics), and to go about their business as though the salvation of souls of the students entrusted to them did not matter at all. Indeed, if there is no such thing as objective truth which exists in the nature of things and exists definitely in the person of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, Who deposited His teaching in Holy Mother Church, then there is no need to be concerned about educating students in the framework of Christian truth. Catholic education thus became thoroughly Protestantized, concerned about the business of training good apparatchiks who would make a lot of money in the professional world -- and who would therefore donate money back to the institutions which gave them the ability to become successful financially.
The result of this has been to make close to ninety-nine percent of Catholic colleges and universities dangerous places for the temporal and eternal welfare of souls. Personnel decisions have been made to favor most deliberately the hiring and promotion of faculty members who are either non-
Catholics or those deemed to be "progressive" Catholics. Those adjudged to be reactionary "conservatives" found themselves unable to obtain positions in our colleges and universities or they were denied tenure and/or promotions. Many are the horror stories of faithful Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their orthodoxy while teaching in Catholic universities. Naturally, the harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are open-minded and receptive to all people. Catholic college administrators have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of higher learning.
All of this has had a devastating impact on the intellectual and spiritual formation of young Catholics, many of whom now enter a Catholic college or university after having received the relativistic theological training provided them in a Catholic high school. Ironically, these badly catechized young Catholics entering Catholic colleges were taught in high school by the graduated of the very institutions intent on brainwashing them with the same sort of advanced disinformation possessed by their high school teachers. The cycle thus perpetuates itself ad infinitum. Most of the graduates of Catholic colleges and universities have learned nothing that is true about the Faith, coming to believe they can do anything they want as long as their "fundamental option" is for God, including the practice of contraception and the procuring of an abortion. Remember, William Jefferson Blyth Clinton received his undergraduate degree from Jesuit Georgetown University in the direct aftermath of Georgetown's having secularized itself. (Georgetown's sister Jesuit university, Fordham, was the first Catholic institution in the nation to divest itself of official Catholic control and to voluntarily remove Crucifixes from the walls of its classrooms in the Fall of 1966.) And it is no wonder that a large number of the Catholic pro-aborts in public life are graduates of Catholic institutions of higher learning.
Catholic collegiate and university education used to integrate the truths of the Faith into every aspect of their academic programs. While non-Catholics who had a specialty in mathematics or science might have been hired from time to time to teach in their fields of competency, they were expected to familiarize themselves with how the Catholic Faith imbues all fields of knowledge, as Pope Pius XI noted in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. Such scholars were also expected to remember that they were never to place in doubt the truths of the Catholic Faith, never to use their classrooms as a forum to profess that which was contrary to what the Catholic Church held was received teaching of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Catholics who taught in Catholic universities and colleges understood that they had the obligation to scholars who were faithful to the totality of the Deposit of Faith and to see in their students redeemed creatures who were looking to them, the faculty, for a model as to how to live the faith in the midst of one's own professional responsibilities. There was an integrity to the teaching of the Faith which flowed over into all aspects of a college or university.
Pope Pius XI noted the following in Divini Illius Magistri:
This norm of a just freedom in things scientific, serves also as an inviolable norm of a just freedom in things didactic, or for rightly understood liberty in teaching; it should be observed therefore in whatever instruction is imparted to others. Its obligation is all the more binding in justice when there is question of instructing youth. For in this work the teacher, whether public or private, has no absolute right of his own, but only such as has been communicated to him by others. Besides every Christian child or youth has a strict right to instruction in harmony with the teaching of the Church, the pillar and ground of truth. And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false.
In fact it must never be forgotten that the subject of Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural, such as right reason and revelation show him to be; man, therefore, fallen from his original estate, but redeemed by Christ and restored to the supernatural condition of adopted son of God, though without the preternatural privileges of bodily immortality or perfect control of appetite. There remain therefore, in human nature the effects of original sin, the chief of which are weakness of will and disorderly inclinations.
Pope Pius XI's words are very clear: "And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false." No one is free to lead himself or others into temptation. We pray every day in the Pater Noster that we will not be led into temptation (Et ne nos inducas in tentantionem). There is no "freedom" to deny or to put into question the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith. None. There is no "balancing" of the Faith and "academic freedom," as a spokesman for Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., the President of the University of Notre Dame, noted recently in an article in The New York Times. "All sides" must must not taught as equal to the Faith, as the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, an ardent Americanist and a fierce apologist for the Kennedys, argued during the first controversy involving Father Charles Curran in 1967. Every Catholic must be faithful to the Deposit of Faith at all times. No one must be hired to teach in any Catholic education institution who dissents from even one iota of the truths of the Holy Faith. It is that simple.
What, then, is the Catholic understanding of academic freedom? Again, the answer is simple. A Catholic understanding of academic freedom affords individual professors great latitude in presenting the truths of the Faith in accord with their own personalities and temperaments. We have different communities of religious men and women in the Church. Those communities, at least traditionally until they were infected with Modernism and the blight of perverse moral problems condemned in no uncertain terms by Saint Peter Damian, expressed the truths of the Faith in different ways. Each had different charisms and missions. The Benedictines and the Cistercians and the Carmelites and the Dominicans and the Franciscans and the Jesuits and the Pallotines and the Vincentians and the Redemptorists and the Passionists--and countless others--served the cause of the sanctification and salvation of human souls in many and varied ways. In like manner, you see, two Catholic professors of the same subject matter might teach the same course in very different ways without ever once putting any truths of the Faith into question. That's a legitimate understanding of academic freedom.
For example, one professor might prefer the Socratic method of instruction, peppering his students with questions during class time to get them to discern and to defend the truth. Others, including me, prefer the lecture method of instruction. Neither is received from the hand of God. Both are legitimate forms of instruction.
Similarly, some professors may prefer students to respond at length to essay questions in order to demonstrate a profound grasp of the subject matter, more or less forcing the students to "teach" the reader of their essay about a question as though the reader knew nothing about the subject. Other professors may prefer short-answer essays to cover to variety of topics. Still others might desire students to answer "objective" questions (multiple choice, true-false, fill-in-the-blank, which is one of my own favorite devices to test the breadth of student comprehension). Once again, none of these things are de fide. Professors and teachers should be given the widest latitude in the method of instruction and examination they believe will best inform and then challenge their students.
To be sure, there can be lively intellectual discussions and arguments among students and faculty members even when the Faith is transmitted in all of its purity and integrity. Catholic scholarship does not argue about what is true (no less about whether there is such a thing as truth). Rather, authentic Catholic scholars can and do argue, sometimes quite forcefully, about the application of received teaching in concrete circumstances. What sort of governmental system is most conducive to the establishment of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ? Is the contemporary state by its very definition and composition a threat to the life of the Faith? What particular policies are the best way to protect the primacy of the Divine positive law and the natural law? Did the traditional practice of the Church with respect to seeking the conversion of souls bear more fruit than the errors of ecumenism? How has the Novus Ordo Missae influenced the life of the Faith? These are all legitimate questions which Catholic scholars can argue over in a spirit of mutual respect and true collegiality.
What is inarguable, however, is the fact that the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by our Lord upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and that He has revealed truths which are clear, certain and immutable. Anyone who argues about that is an abject heretic. Anyone who contends that an "opposition" to the Catholic Faith must be presented on equal terms with the Faith, as opposed to examining errors so as to be able to recognize and refute them (which is a necessary part of the educational process), is in league with the devil. No one has to be "fair" to the "opposition," as the instigator of the secularized "Catholic" university, former University of Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh noted recently in The New York Times. Catholics must be faithful to all of the truths of the Faith without giving a moment's credibility to anything that is in opposition to those truths and thus harmful to the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood. Professors need to aspire to the holiness of Saint John Kantius, not the worldliness of our present day.
The late Father John A. Hardon, S.J,. said in a conference given at Saint Ignatius Loyola Church in New York, New York, in August of 1978 that the implantation of doubt in the souls of the young was a crime almost as great as that of killing an unborn child by abortion (whether by chemical or surgical means.) "To cause a young person to doubt the Faith is to help to abort that soul." Father noted, moving his head from side to side, looking straight as his audience for emphasis. Sadly, though, much of Catholic education (including elementary and secondary schools) does precisely this, doing so in the fallacious belief that there can be no true faith without doubt. While it is true that some people may have crises of faith in their own lives from time to time, we are not to encourage doubt. One of the spiritual works of mercy is precisely to counsel the doubting.
Contemporary Catholic higher education in most instances does more that encourage doubt. No, it actually does much to destroy faith by the promotion of atheist, leftist, collectivist, relativist, statist, redistributionist, feminist, positivist, environmentalist, pantheistic, evolutionist, indifferentist and other ideologies, including those of the New Age ilk. Its participation in the rot of explicit instruction in matters pertaining to personal purity feeds the myth that human beings are beast who are incapable of controlling themselves by means of sanctifying grace. And more that a handful of practicing homosexuals and lesbians have been recruited into a lifestyle of perversity and self-destruction as a result of propaganda in favor of sodomy disseminated on the campuses of Catholic colleges and universities (where openly pro-abortion and sodomite-friendly groups are permitted to meet and to participate in the life of those campuses).
As is the hiring of non-Catholic and heretical Catholic faculty members has not caused enough damage to souls over the last forty years, the messages transmitted by those faculty members in their classrooms is forcefully reinforced by speakers brought in to address students during special events (or at their graduation ceremonies). Workshops are held and retreats are sponsored to brainwash students in the ways of "progressive" Catholicism. Zen meditation rooms are to be found on Catholic college campuses. Some Catholic colleges have even actively recruited a body of non-Catholic students so as to force anyone who might be inclined to speak authentically as a Catholic (whether students or faculty members) to be dissuaded from doing so in order not to offend the sensibilities of multiculturalism and pluralism and diversity. "Liturgies" held at most Catholic colleges and universities are generally the worst offered in the world of the Novus Ordo, and that is putting the matter very, very mildly. This has all been very insidious, very demonic.
The bottom line of this is all really quite simple: a Catholic does not possess the right to deny the received teachings of Christ. No one is free morally to lead people into error. Indeed, the whole secular notion of academic freedom is itself both an exercise in relativism and hypocrisy. It is an exercise in relativism in that it asserts that scholars must be free to distort history and to relativize known truths into meaninglessness, much in the manner promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is an exercise in rank hypocrisy in that those who dissent from the prevailing cultural orthodoxy, no less hold fast to the Church's authentic Tradition, have no freedom at all to teach as they desire in the classroom. In an utter perversion of a right principle, the very people who profess to be the guardians of academic freedom jealously fight off perceived heresies, denying to others the very freedom they extol. The very people who want liberation from the Church, who is our mater and our magister, make themselves into a magisterium which will impose harsh penalties upon those who dissent from its defense of cultural orthodoxy, theological relativism, and liturgical irreverence.
Although the problems that face Catholic education at all levels today antedate the Second Vatican Council, to be sure, the errors of the past forty years have made it possible for the nascent Modernism of the 1940s and 1950s to become institutionalized so as to deform countless numbers of souls. One of those errors that has made it possible for Catholic institutions to maintain something of a Catholic "identity" while divesting themselves of their official, de jure connection ot the Church is the error of episcopal collegiality. The unwillingness of one pope after another, starting with Pope Paul VI, who did not intervene in the matter of Father Charles Curran's open dissent from Humanae Vitae while serving on the theology faculty of The Catholic University of America in 1968, to impose Catholicism in Catholic colleges and universities is the result, at least in part, of the paralysis caused by the unwillingness of the postconciliar popes to be seen to be in the least critical of any of their bishops or institutions. Even Pope John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesia motu proprio, which was meant to require theology professors to seek an episcopal mandate in order to teach in a Catholic university of college or seminary, was opposed vigorously by many bishops, including Bernard Cardinal Law. Souls have thus been lost to the Church--and/or grossly deformed by heretics and infidels, causing incalculable damage to the Church in her human elements and to the right ordering of the world itself, which depends upon rightly ordered Catholics to provide it with the leaven of Our Lord's truth and the assertion of His Social Reign over men and nations.
Pope Pius XI wrote directly in Divini Illius Magistri about the dangers of leading students into temptation. His words have direct application to a play with a gross, indecent title that has become popular in recent years (and has been banned, thankfully, at Providence College in Rhode Island):
It is no less necessary to direct and watch the education of the adolescent, "soft as wax to be moulded into vice,"[58] in whatever other environment he may happen to be, removing occasions of evil and providing occasions for good in his recreations and social intercourse; for "evil communications corrupt good manners."
More than ever nowadays an extended and careful vigilance is necessary, inasmuch as the dangers of moral and religious shipwreck are greater for inexperienced youth. Especially is this true of impious and immoral books, often diabolically circulated at low prices; of the cinema, which multiplies every kind of exhibition; and now also of the radio, which facilitates every kind of communications. These most powerful means of publicity, which can be of great utility for instruction and education when directed by sound principles, are only too often used as an incentive to evil passions and greed for gain. St. Augustine deplored the passion for the shows of the circus which possessed even some Christians of his time, and he dramatically narrates the infatuation for them, fortunately only temporary, of his disciple and friend Alipius. How often today must parents and educators bewail the corruption of youth brought about by the modern theater and the vile book!
Worthy of all praise and encouragement therefore are those educational associations which have for their object to point out to parents and educators, by means of suitable books and periodicals, the dangers to morals and religion that are often cunningly disguised in books and theatrical representations. In their spirit of zeal for the souls of the young, they endeavor at the same time to circulate good literature and to promote plays that are really instructive, going so far as to put up at the cost of great sacrifices, theaters and cinemas, in which virtue will have nothing to suffer and much to gain.
It is clear that most Catholic educational institutions today, the products of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the Church, reject such sage advice as they promote the very things denounced by Pope Pius XI. It is also clear that most Catholic educational institutions today reject the only purpose of Catholic education: to form souls faithfully according to the mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged it solely in the Catholic Church. Once again, the words of Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri are apposite:
The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism, according to the emphatic expression of the Apostle: "My little children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you."[63] For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ: "Christ who is your life,"and display it in all his actions: "That the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh."
For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.
Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose." And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to God what is due to God, as the true Christian does.
The scope and aim of Christian education as here described, appears to the worldly as an abstraction, or rather as something that cannot be attained without the suppression or dwarfing of the natural faculties, and without a renunciation of the activities of the present life, and hence inimical to social life and temporal prosperity, and contrary to all progress in letters, arts and sciences, and all the other elements of civilization. To a like objection raised by the ignorance and the prejudice of even cultured pagans of a former day, and repeated with greater frequency and insistence in modern times, Tertullian has replied as follows:
'We are not strangers to life.We are fully aware of the gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Creator. We reject none of the fruits of His handiwork; we only abstain from their immoderate or unlawful use. We are living in the world with you; we do not shun your forum, your markets, your baths, your shops, your factories, your stables, your places of business and traffic. We take shop with you and we serve in your armies; we are farmers and merchants with you; we interchange skilled labor and display our works in public for your service. How we can seem unprofitable to you with whom we live and of whom we are, I know not.'
The true Christian does not renounce the activities of this life, he does not stunt his natural faculties; but he develops and perfects them, by coordinating them with the supernatural. He thus ennobles what is merely natural in life and secures for it new strength in the material and temporal order, no less then in the spiritual and eternal.
This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day. It stands out conspicuously in the lives of the numerous Saints, whom the Church, and she alone, produces, in whom is perfectly realized the purpose of Christian education, and who have in every way ennobled and benefited human society. Indeed, the Saints have ever been, are, and ever will be the greatest benefactors of society, and perfect models for every class and profession, for every state and condition of life, from the simple and uncultured peasant to the master of sciences and letters, from the humble artisan to the commander of armies, from the father of a family to the ruler of peoples and nations, from simple maidens and matrons of the domestic hearth to queens and empresses. What shall we say of the immense work which has been accomplished even for the temporal well-being of men by missionaries of the Gospel, who have brought and still bring to barbarous tribes the benefits of civilization together with the light of the Faith? What of the founders of so many social and charitable institutions, of the vast numbers of saintly educators, men and women, who have perpetuated and multiplied their life work, by leaving after them prolific institutions of Christian education, in aid of families and for the inestimable advantage of nations?
The literal re-formation of Catholic educational institutions will not be accomplished until and unless some pope actually consecrates Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, thereby restoring the Mass of all ages as normative in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church and restoring right doctrine in all of the Church's educational institutions and parishes. Until that time, however, we must continue to denounce the errors of the present day and seek to protect ourselves and our children from those errors. We will continue our own efforts at Christ the King College to present the truths of the Faith and to call errors by their proper names until that time, at which point our work will be as commonplace in the Age of Mary Immaculate as it was in the time before Modernism began to eclipse the Faith and started to lead souls into temptation.
Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint Ambrose, pray for us.
Saint Augustine, pray for us.
Saint Benedict, pray for us.
Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.
Saint Bonaventure, pray for us.
Saint Dominic, pray for us.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
Saint John Kantius, pray for us.
Saint Charles Borromeo, pray for us.
Saint Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.
Saint Alphonsus Liguori, pray for us.
Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.
Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, pray for us.
Saint John Bosco, pray for us.
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.
Saint Philomena, pray for us.
Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.
Blessed Francisco, pray for us.
Sister Lucia, pray for us.
