Posted on 04/11/2006 7:23:31 AM PDT by Unam Sanctam
Dear Dionysiusdecordealcis,
"But Notre Dame could become a good Catholic college again. I'm not holding my breath, indeed, I don't hold out a lot of hope."
I'm a little more hopeful than you, maybe. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor at a Catholic school, and he seems to be in the know about what's up at Notre Dame. His view is that the less-than-orthodox are in the generation that is passing away, while the those for whom orthodoxy is the touchstone are all the younger folks. He says the same phenomenon is at work where he teaches (although he says that where he teaches, the theology department is still mostly vipers).
sitetest
I hear that at ND too -- that the old lefties are passing away, and that the students roll their eyes when they blow off. Hahaha. Encouraging words. It will not happen in an instant.
You can throw DePaul on that list of universities deserving to be anathematized...
No, I think I get it. What you still don't seem to get is that I was responding to your post primarily as one might intend to respond to an unwarranted personal attack. Everyone knows that there are gradations of deviancy from orthodoxy in Catholic colleges. Are you now implying that I lead so sheltered a life as to not know this? I don't have time to humor you on fine distinctions in issues that don't pertain to my original post, yet you insist on bringing up. Accordingly, the either/or type of contrast with TAC should have sufficed to show that ND isn't near the top of the heap, and that was sufficient for me in response to your charge that I am a mere "uninformed traditionalist."
But I'm not keenly absorbed with making such fine distinctions. Notre Dame has made its way in the world letting-on that it is a fine "Catholic" institution. This is false advertizing. The Catholic applicants and their parents have every right to suppose that it *is* entirely orthodox when shelling-out their hard earned $100,000+ for the tuition bill over the four years they'll attend there. That ND may not be as bad as some other Catholic colleges is besides the point. From the standpoint of parents getting what they think they're paying for, students learning the Faith more fully as a bulwark for the likelihood of their salvation, and society as it profits from Catholic morality and philosophy making its way into the world from Catholic schools, nuancing levels of infidelity makes little sense. Either a college purporting to be Catholic is, in fact, Catholic, or it isn't. If it isn't, decades after the wheels started coming off the rails, then who is ultimately at fault but the school itself.
Fr. Jenkins *might* mean well overall. But his actions here are limp-wristed in the extreme. If he feels compelled to mollify the student body and faculty with the cave-in he made to the VM, it bellows the supposition that the entire campus is so "un-Catholic" that it is beyond hope. Were it otherwise, he could have stood his ground with relative impunity. The students and faculty not only would have supported such a decision, they probably wouldn't have put him in this position to begin with, as they would see that the VM has no business being shown on a Catholic campus. What is being taught (or, perhaps that should be *not* taught) at Notre Dame that such a palpably hedonistic worldview needs to be appeased by Fr. Jenkins? His appeal to the concept that the show can at least teach the young women to respect their bodies is most touching, and most instructive for us out here. Yes, even for us uninformed traditionalists!
Fr. Jenkins may not discipline Fr. Miscamble or make his life difficult. Or maybe he will. I don't know and neither do you. I'm sure Fr. Miscamble is angling for a change of mind and nothing more. But, if no change is forthcoming, do you suppose that Fr. Miscamble may soldier-on in his crusade for integrity? Given his sincerity of tone and earnestness of purpose, it's a fair assumption he will. At what point does Fr. Jenkins do "something" to put a stop to it? Tenure means nothing. A persons life can be made miserable enough that he will eventually leave any tenured position just to have some peace. From the position of someone like a Fr. Jenkins in such a scenario, that's just as good as a firing.
The long-suffering Catholics of America have coddled these types long enough. The spiritual, societal and financial (for the parents paying tuition bills) stakes are too high to fool around any longer. If Notre Dame cannot or will not get back on the rails quasi-immediately, it has no reason to exist as a Catholic institution. Have *all* of the professors in the relevant departments taken the oath of fidelity yet? I dare say not. Then Catholics need to call ND to task for this publicly. They have no excuses, they're years behind schedule. And we're tired of footing the bill for promises not kept and services not delivered. Fr. Jenkins needs to understand that, for he has more to fear from disaffected alumni and parents of potential students than he ever will from the likes of a few dozen harpies from the women's studies department, their hangers-on, and their facilitators.
While I have supported the Cardinal Newman Society from its inception, on occasion its spokesmen have said some foolish things. Sometimes they have undertaken well-intended campaigns in unwise ways. For instance, their effort to attack individual faculty by name for theological error was guaranteed to backfire if one knows something about university culture. The faculty thus attacked took an attack from CNS as a badge of honor that proved their scholarly academic credentials. CNS would have been far better off to work with alumni, board members, selected movers and shakers in the dioceses etc. I fully support their goal, I questioned their strategy.
They have been unfairly and falsely villified as extremists by some. In the case you refer to, I think Cavadini was right and CNS overstated its case, as you yourself note. One has to be careful not to give one's enemies ammunition. When any group overstates its case or lacks sufficient evidence to support its case, it makes it easier for its opponents to avoid engaging the issues and to dismiss its critics as extremists. CNS has, unfortunately, overstated things often enough to make the (false) claim that they are extremists more credible that it otherwise would be among the people who count--administrators and board members and faculty in the middle.
I repeat, the "Miscamble will be exiled" statement was out of place. The letter itself makes that clear.
If you read what I wrote you will have noticed that I do not hold out a lot of hope for Notre Dame. However I am sick and tired of those who make no distinctions between Notre Dame and Boston College, for instance. You don't have to be an insider. All you have to do is pay attention. At least there is a genuine conversation going on at Notre Dame and a vibrant though small faithful Catholic representation on campus. That does not exist at the other schools to the same degree (there is a very miniscule such group at BC but no real conversation--the critics are successfully marginalized as kooks--that simply is not the case at Notre Dame) and to equate all of these schools undermines your goal of reforming Catholic universities. The first step in curing anything is accurate diagnosis. The presence of a small but vocal and committed faithfully Catholic body of students and faculty at Notre Dame gives a starting point that is not present at some other schools.
But if it makes you feel better say what you wish.
If your goal is to "call Notre Dame to task," which is an admirable goal, you would do well not to employ the broadside "Miscamble will be eliminated" sort of denunciation. If you wish to call Notre Dame to task you ought to take the time to find out just who the faithful teachers are there and find out how you can help them. Lobbing bombshells at the whole school neither fazes the heretics nor strengthens the faithful teachers there. And there are dozens of the latter struggling mightily for renewal.
This is true some places but at others (including my own) the 1960s-1970s feminist-cum-anti-capitalist-cum Call-to-Action cadres are still controlling hiring so there is no younger generation even visible on the horizon. Those are the schools for which I hold out no hope whatsoever. Others are turning around right as we speak and still others have potential for turning around, in varying degrees. Notre Dame has potential but only potential, at this point. Ten years from now things will be clearer.
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