It’s been said that a Catholic university is an oxymoron.
Progressives sling this quip as an attack against the stodgy,
narrow-minded Church imposing orthodoxy on that bastion of free
thinking, the university. Those with a stronger grip on history
understand that the university, as a home of scholars intentionally
pursuing Truth, is inherently Catholic. Heck, the Catholic Church
invented the university. Catholicism and higher education
only became an oxymoron when trendy liberalism took the upper hand,
imposing its secular orthodoxy and demanding that Catholic schools
retain Catholic “identity” but not Catholic teaching.
In the last week, two young priest-presidents took bold steps
toward cleaning up the mess at their colleges. Fr. Brian Shanley,
O.P., president of Providence College, and Fr. John I. Jenkins,
C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame, declared that
on-campus stage productions of The Vagina Monologues are
not appropriate at Catholic schools. Shanley banned the play outright last Wednesday; Jenkins
demoted it from stage to classrooms and barred ticket sales. On
Monday, Jenkins began a campus dialogue about the play and a Queer
Film Festival, apparently headed toward banning both.
The decisions may well represent a sea change in Catholic higher
education. Notre Dame and Providence aren’t on the super-orthodox
(Thomas Aquinas College, Steubenville) or Catholic in Name Only
(Georgetown and many other Jesuit institutions) margins — they’re
representative of largely faithful, occasionally nutty Catholic
schools. I speak from the experience of recently attending
Providence and encountering a vibrant spiritual life, a strong
clerical presence, and mostly excellent professors in the Catholic
education tradition. As for Notre Dame, the campus is home to over
100 Masses each week as well as great scholars like Alasdair
MacIntyre, Ralph McInerny, and Gerald Bradley, among many others.
The schools are solid if imperfect.
The same couldn’t always be said of their leadership. Before
Shanley and Jenkins took their respective offices last summer, Fr.
A. Philip Smith at Providence and Fr. Edward Malloy at Notre Dame
had allowed on-campus productions of The Vagina Monologues
since 2002. Malloy never discussed his decision publicly despite drawing
criticism from the local bishop. The Providence College
administration tried to straddle permission and condemnation,
announcing that while it disapproved of the
message, as “a prudential decision” it would allow the
production.
Admittedly, though Smith and Malloy were wobbly, they could have
been worse. At least they didn’t defend the Monologues as
the Jesuit president of Loyola University of New Orleans did. In
his letter defending the production, Fr. Kevin
Wildes displayed a strikingly subjective morality: “To exclude the
play from a Catholic campus is to say, either that these women are
wrong, or that their experience has nothing important to say to
us.” By these lights, what matters most is not the quality or
content of an idea or show, but the depth of liberal outrage
fueling it.
But it’s a new day for Catholic higher education, at least under
the Golden Dome and on Smith Hill. In his address to faculty Monday, Fr. Jenkins argued
that certain activities outside the classroom are not acceptable at
a Catholic college, such as a play that reduces women to their
sexual organs and glorifies homosexuality, masturbation, and an
adult woman seducing a girl. If the play were only discussed in a
classroom setting, it would be one thing, Fr. Jenkins said. But
Notre Dame apparently sponsoring an event “which either is or
appears to be in name or content clearly and egregiously contrary
to or inconsistent with the fundamental values of a Catholic
university’ — that’s another thing altogether and “should not be
allowed at Notre Dame.”
Jenkins hasn’t banned the events just yet, but he seems to be
leading the campus intellectually and politically into his camp.
Students quoted by the South Bend
Tribune after Tuesday’s forum were generally opposed to the
play. And even faculty who disagreed with Jenkins appreciated the discussion. After campus
liberals are disarmed of their default criticism (“There was no
dialogue!”), Jenkins will make the final decision: “I will not lead
by consensus, nor by majority vote, nor in response to the
pressures that individuals or groups inside or outside the
university may bring to bear.”
While Jenkins seemed timid at times, stressing the appearance of
a Catholic university hosting The Vagina Monologues and
the “problematic” suggestion that the school “endorses certain
themes in the play,” Providence’s Shanley did not hesitate to
condemn the play and affirm Catholic theology of the body.
Far from celebrating the complexity and mystery of
female sexuality, The Vagina Monologues simplifies and
demystifies it by reducing it to the vagina. In contrast, Roman
Catholic teaching sees female sexuality as ordered toward a loving
giving of self to another in a union of body, mind, and soul that
is ordered to the procreation of new life. The deeper complexity
and mystery lies in the capacity of human sexuality, both male and
female, to sacramentalize the love of God in marriage. Any
depiction of female sexuality that neglects its unitive and
procreative dimensions diminishes its complexity, its mystery, and
its dignity.
Who needs dialogue when students can chew on a letter that reads
like a page from Karol Woltyla’s Love and Responsibility
or Pope Benedict XVI’s just-released Deus Caritas Est.
Hopefully both men are leading the way in Catholic higher
education, treating Catholic teaching as the Truth through which
other claims should be considered, not one truth among many. Now
that liberalism’s flames are cooled, Catholic colleges face a
fundamental question: Will they descend fully into secularism, as
Marymount Manhattan did last year, or will they
reclaim their Catholic heritage? Fr. Shanley understood that an
institution cannot have it both ways, writing, “Any institution
which sanctioned works of art that undermined its deepest values
would be inauthentic, irresponsible, and ultimately
self-destructive.” As Notre Dame and Providence College learned, an
authentically Catholic college cannot succumb to the secular
version of the university. Catholic schools, especially the
others permitting the Monologues, have
some soul-searching to do.
