For the Doubting Student

Spiritually speaking, the Roman Catholic student at Notre Dame or Georgetown has it made. His campus is studded with chapels; hundreds of priests are available to hear his confession or try to resolve his doubts over a cup of coffee after class. In contrast, for thousands of Catholic students on secular campuses, the only source of spiritual help is likely to be the overworked chaplain of the school's Newman Club, an institution better known for tea dances than theology.

A promising third way is being explored in Pittsburgh. There the 8,000 Catholic students who attend Pitt, Carnegie Tech and all-girl Chatham College are served by what the city's theology-minded Bishop John J. Wright calls "a Newman Club in depth." This is the two-year-old Pittsburgh Oratory, a highbrow study center staffed by priests who follow the rule of prayer and discipline laid down by Florence's St. Philip Neri in the 16th century.

Located midway between the Pitt and Carnegie Tech campuses, the Oratory, unlike most Newman Clubs, makes no pretense of trying to keep students Catholic by promoting a score of social activities. It offers only spiritual and intellectual help. Mass is celebrated daily at Carnegie Tech and at Pitt's handsomely Gothic Heinz Memorial Chapel. At least one of the Oratory's four priests--Bishop Wright hopes eventually to build a staff of twelve clerical specialists in different intellectual fields--is available 24 hours daily to handle any student questions that arise--on morality, eschatology, or obedience.

Every evening the Oratory offers a class or seminar on such subjects as modern Biblical criticism or the psychology of religious experience, often using texts by avant-garde theologians--Austria's Karl Rahner, or France's Henri de Lubac. The creditless courses are well attended, do much to resolve conflicts between dogma and science for students. One Oratory student recalls how he was stunned by his discovery of experiments in modern genetics that offer man the distant prospect of creating life. "But I consulted one of the priests here," he says, "and I discovered that there is no dogmatic denial of the possibility of spontaneous generation of life."

Helping students make these discoveries is precisely what the Oratory hopes to do. "Our job," says the center's director, Father Philip Walsh, "is to see that faith, far from shackling reason, actually frees it, opening up new dimensions of reality which reason unaided by faith is incapable of knowing."

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