Our youngest daughter (rising senior in high school) wanted to go to Fordham and we visited recently. This is very disappointing news about the Jesuits. She really liked Fordham. It is out of our price range anyway, but how awful this is.
Thank you for your work defending the Oepration Rescue defendants.
This is the same order that raised up saints such as Bellarmine and Jogues - this is very upsetting news.
St. Ignatius Loyola ora pro nobis
Oepration = Operation sorry for typo
My criteria for an acceptable higher education would be three: cost, size of endowment (including libraries, laboratories, ability to provide substantial financial aid, etc.), quality of faculty. I would also be concerned about safety.
If your daughter qualifies at a high level, start by looking at the Ivy League schools which have all agreed to look at academic credentials (SATs, ACTs, Achievement tests, transcripts of grades) first and only after they have decided who they want, do they look at financial need (need blind admissions as it is called). They have all agreed that if your daughter qualifies, and your family income is less than a certain amount ($60,000 when last I heard), her education is free. Room board, tuition, etc., all free of charge.
It may seem a strange that I would recommend the notoriously heathen Ivies, but my wife arrived at Yale as effectively an agnostic and a leftist and, by graduation, despite hanging out with right wing atheist libertarians, she had become a Tridentine (verrry traditionalist Latin Mass) Catholic and she was not alone by any means.
For those not as traditional but conservatively Catholic, Opus Dei (the real thing not the movie horror group) makes regular visits to challenge and convert students to the Faith. Fr. John McCloskey who also works DC power types (the late Robert Novak, KS Governor Sam Brownback, NYer Lew Lehrman for three examples) also works the Ivies regularly and, in his spare time, runs retreats on Cape Cod. There is one downtown New Haven parish (St. Stanislaus run by Polish Vincentians) which has at least weekly Tridentine Masses. St. Mary's in downtown New Haven (where the Knights of Columbus was founded) is a conservatively inclined Dominican Order Parish practically on the Yale campus.
An ironic practical advantage of the Ivies is that you learn to fight. Anne Coulter (Cornell), Laura Ingraham (Dartmouth), Dinesh D'Souza (Dartmouth), and many people less famous but just as important to the conservative movement. Yale also features a permanent sixty year old Party of the Right of the Yale Political Union and a William F. Buckley Memorial Speakers' program with its own nearby but off campus headquarters. Dartmouth has the Dartmouth Review. I am not as familiar with the other Ivies' conservative groups but I know they have them.
There are other worthy venues for higher education. My middle daughter graduated from Hillsdale College, It is not Catholic but it is not hostile either, It is the single best conservative education available in our country. A steady stream of major conservative speakers and others with unique insights who are not yet as well known. Very high quality faculty. Very well endowed. Southern Michigan may be a bit out of the way but you will never regret checking out Hillsdale or sending your youngest daughter there.
My youngest enrolled at Texas A and M and it appears to be quite challenging academically with a verrrry conservative campus culture. Check out a program there called "The Corps" which gives military training, military discipline and an esprit de corps found nowhere else. The main campus is at College Station. My daughter is spending time working in Texas to qualify for substantial cost reduction as a state resident. She and my eldest daughter will never leave Texas.
As to specifically "Catholic" colleges to AVOID at all costs: Notre Shame University, any and all Jesuit Colleges and Universities but, most of all, Boston College, Georgetown University, Fordham University, University of San Francisco and anything named Loyola, no matter where. Non Jesuit schools: Ave Maria in Florida means well but hasn't gotten there yet. Christendom College: meagerly endowed but great faculty. There is just not a lot out there.
The last great Jesuit Superior General (1915-1942) was Wlodomir Ledochowski of Austria. Great Catholic, great Jesuit and magnificent example to the entire Church and a great witness to the world. His successors, Jean Baptiste Janssens, Pedro Arrupe, Pieter Hans Kolvenbach and Adolfo Nicolas are quite the opposite of Fr. Ledochowski and the results show in the degeneracy of the Order into an amoral anti-Catholic "social justice" collection of heretics, near heretics, liberation theologians," and other Marxist revolutionaries.
May God bless you and yours and guide you and your daughter in the challenging search for an appropriate higher education venue.
Two years ago, I was in the same position as you are now — looking for a Catholic college that was actually Catholic.
As others have mentioned, there’s not much out there. Hell would literally have tor freeze over before I sent my kid to Fordham or ANY Jesuit college. Notre Dame was out, too.
We applied to several schools that appeared in The Newman Guide (Ave Maria, Steubenville, Belmont Abbey, Mount St. Mary, and Christendom), as well as several other secular schools. Our boy got in everywhere, and everybody offered scholarships, except for Christendom. They don’t have a bunch of money to hand out, but the academics are solid, and there is NO QUESTION that they uphold authentic Catholic teaching. In addition, their tuition is much lower than most colleges, so the fact that we did not qualify for aid didn’t hurt that much. (We wouldn’t have gotten aid from anywhere, anyway.)
So even though Billy won merit $$$ from the larger schools, their starting tuitions were higher and it all worked out the same in the end. We went with Christendom.
Good luck to you and your daughter. It’s tough finding somewhere that doesn’t actively work against all the teachings you’ve tried to impart to your children. Look carefully. Don’t forget to look for information in odd places: If you want to see what the social (party) life is like at a school, check out what the students are posting on YouTube, for example. A little stroll through that website can be quite the eye-opener.
Again, good luck.
Regards,