Balancing Minds and Souls

By Susan Tifft

Pearl Bailey sang and basketball star Patrick Ewing reminisced, adding a dash of glamour to an event that was beamed by satellite to 37 cities around the country. But the 3,000 other alumni, dignitaries and Catholic clergy who crowded into Washington's cavernous Constitution Hall on Oct. 1 did not come for the stargazing alone. Their purpose was to kick off a yearlong celebration of the 200th anniversary of Georgetown University, the nation's oldest Catholic institution of higher learning. The festivities were a bit early: Georgetown was actually founded in 1789. But that hardly seemed to matter to Pope John Paul II, who sent along his blessings and a pointed message. Though Georgetown's work "now transcends the interests and needs of Catholics alone," he said, its "special value is rooted in its Catholic identity."

Just what that "Catholic identity" is, or should be, is a matter of intense debate in Rome as well as at the 232 Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. Some 30 years ago, such institutions offered a good, if sometimes narrow, education to children of the Catholic ghetto, few of whom broke away to the wider world of Yale or Radcliffe. Not so today. Following the window-opening influence of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, many Catholic schools broadened their curricula, admitted more non-Catholic students, turned control of their boards -- and sometimes the president's office -- over to laymen and enforced rigorous standards of academic research.

In the wake of these changes came a boom in enrollments, endowments and prestige at Catholic schools. The University of Notre Dame, once known mainly as a football factory, now boasts that 80% of its undergraduates were in the top 10% of their high school class. Georgetown, where 40% of the student body is non-Catholic, can afford to reject more than three-quarters of its applicants. Catholic universities, says Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, are "first-rate and getting better."

The changes were accompanied by a loosening of control over certain aspects of campus life. By and large, required retreats and classroom crucifixes have gone the way of the Latin Mass. Mixed-sex dorms and university-sponsored advice on birth control and abortion are still officially proscribed, but in practice most Catholic schools do not actively police personal behavior. Nor do they turn a blind eye: Georgetown tried unsuccessfully to refuse funding for a gay student group.

The new atmosphere worries Pope John Paul II, who is striving to tighten doctrinal discipline in the church. In 1986 Rome revoked the license of Father Charles Curran to teach theology at the Catholic University of America because of his open questioning of the church's stand on sexual morality. A more sweeping crackdown was hinted at three years ago, when the Vatican proposed a policy that would allow a bishop to strip a school of its Catholic status if it did not meet standards of orthodoxy. The policy, which is expected to be released in final form sometime next year, has drawn fire from Georgetown president Timothy Healy and other prominent U.S. Catholic educators, who say it would destroy academic freedom.

Such protesters feel that the special nature of Catholic colleges resides more in the promotion of spiritual values generally than in strict adherence to papal guidelines. Says Sister Dorothy Ann Kelly, president of the College of New Rochelle, a women's school in New York: "If the religious nature of an institution were had only in a theology course, that would be pretty thin." Sister Dorothy Ann's college, for instance, encourages a commitment to social justice through a variety of volunteer programs and by example: it maintains satellite campuses in Harlem and the South Bronx for older women.

For conservative Catholic educators, however, that is not enough. "A Catholic college should teach what the Catholic Church teaches is true," says Father Michael Scanlan, president of Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. At Franciscan, that means scrutiny of on-campus lecturers and entertainers to ensure that they will not promote "immorality," and evaluation of faculty on the basis of their commitment to Catholic values. The doctrinaire approach has proved to be one of the school's main attractions. Franciscan was about to close when Scanlan assumed office in 1974 but this year took in its biggest entering class ever.

The issue of how Catholic to be promises to take on additional urgency as vocations dwindle and clergy retire. By the year 2000, faculty and administrators at Catholic colleges will consist almost entirely of laymen. Keeping an institution identifiably Catholic under such circumstances could be difficult. But, says Sister Dorothy Ann, "we're already there. Most people just don't recognize it."

With reporting by Michele Donley/Chicago and John E. Gallagher/New York