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This chapter explores the concept of “tradition,” a key term in negotiations to position Catholic Studies as an interdisciplinary field embedded in the spaces between well-established discourses of religious studies and theology. The relatively recent phenomenon that finds privately endowed positions in Catholic Studies ensconced in both public and private non-Catholic universities has created an unprecedented opportunity and challenge. This chapter suggests that Catholic Studies scholars at secular universities will inhabit a variety of stances in relationship to Catholic tradition. Students in turn will bring their own convictions, from religious doubt to ardent desires that coursework enhance personal faith formation along with intellectual growth. The author herself avows a preferential option for exploring the meanings invested in religious traditions over judging claims made in their name, a practice that might flourish as one among a compelling variety of approaches embraced by scholars in Catholic Studies. Catholic universities are related in some way to the Catholic Church and, thus, are positioned within the Catholic tradition.

This chapter explores the concept of natural law, turning first to the Protestant milieu. Alterity—what would in the seventeenth century come to be theorized, and problematized, as “sociability”—is the dominant mood of the humanist and Protestant handling of natural law. It is there even in Thomas Hobbes, whose natural law coincides with moral philosophy and concerns the sphere of one's actions in respect of others. However, the Catholic scholastic tradition presents a very different framing of natural law, one that centers on individual agency and regulates the behavior of individual agents in their aspect as beings of a particular kind. While authors in this tradition grapple equally with the question of animal behavior in relation to law, they do not do so from the social perspective that characterizes Protestant humanist Aristotelians and jurists.

This chapter investigates the treatment of luxury by Ferdinando Paoletti, who was influenced by the issue of economic stagnation, peasant ministry, and improvement of the countryside. It explains that Paoletti argues that luxury detracts from efforts to make agriculture profitable and that the inspiration that he drew from physiocratic writings was visible enough. It discusses how the pragmatic tradition of Tuscan thought together with the powerful influence of French economic thinking had substantially altered the discussion. It stresses that even the enlightened Catholic tradition had to accept the vocabulary and the concepts of the pragmatic school in order to say their moral concerns.

This chapter examines the issue of distinguishing between Tradition and traditions of the Catholic Church. It first considers the views of Cardinal Albert Gregory Meyer, Joseph Ratzinger, and Karl Rahner as well as the report of the World Council of Churches's Faith and Order Commission about Tradition and traditions. It then considers the question of how one can be sure that particular traditions are authentic embodiments of the Tradition and presents two examples of Catholic traditions that have become obsolete in the course of time: slavery and religious liberty. It also discusses the position of Avery Cardinal Dulles in a review of Judge John T. Noonan's book, A Church That Can and Cannot Change.

This chapter examines the Catholic tradition in the works of American writer Annie Dillard. In her essay “Expedition to the Pole”, Dillard describes her experience in attending a Catholic Mass and her eventual conversion to Catholicism. It states that in attending a Second Sunday of Advent, Dillard was caught up in one of her literary themes: the relentless flow of time. The hallmark feature of her writing is that one cannot summarize much more than a brief portion before breaking off to provide background and establish a working chronology.

This chapter uses the biblical exhortation, “love your enemies”, to illustrate John Courtney Murray's spiritual and intellectual journey. It shows how Murray grew deeper in his Catholic tradition before having to transcend and transform the limitations of that tradition in order to enter genuine dialogue with the world. The chapter notes that “while Murray never wrote much on loving one's enemies, he did have a clearly identifiable enemies list”. It takes us through Murray's list—the idea of Americanism, the professors and administrators at the Catholic University of America (who helped to silence him), American Protestants in general, and atheists in particular. The chapter describes Murray's “hatred” toward Protestants and atheists, how his own Catholic tradition consciously and unconsciously fostered that hatred, and how he found hidden in that tradition a way to “bear the cross” of others and come to love his enemies.

Catholic “threnodists” lament the state of the contemporary pagan (i.e., nonaffiliated with Christian or Jewish tradition) university; “spoliasts” look for and find the goods evident there, eager to discover resources that permit the Church to arrive at a fuller understanding of revelation. Pagan universities can inculcate intellectual virtues and certain moral habits, but they cannot offer students or represent to faculty any shared unitary idea of what intellectual work is or what it is for, because there is no agreement on such an idea. Catholic intellectual tradition can give an account of intellectual life and of how its various specialties relate one to another. Practitioners of Catholic intellectual tradition within the pagan university should celebrate and expropriate—spoliate—the genuine goods that are there.

This chapter treats the corporatization of higher education in the United States. In particular, the chapter contends that corporatized higher education has imported individualistic practices and models from the business world, modern economics, and more broadly neoliberal capitalism into higher education. A vision of the human person as selfish, hypercompetitive, solipsistic, and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good (homo economicus) undergirds these models and practices. The chapter discusses the so-called Dickeson model and Responsibility Centered Management (RCM) to illustrate the kinds of practices that flow from this anthropology. It also advances the argument that harmful “symptoms” of the corporatization of higher education such as the casualization of the academic workforce (known as “adjunctification”) have been accepted, at least partially, as a result this flawed understanding of human person. The second half of the essay turns to the Catholic social tradition to prescribe some possible “cures” to the “disease” in corporatized higher education.

The chapter opens with discussion of the restoration of San Rafael in La Cueva as an illustration of how a few committed mayordomos (church caretakers) are struggling to save churches that have little parish and archdiocese support. Several interviewed mayordomos comment on the topic and explain the reasons for their commitment. The following section discusses the relations of church restoration to tradition, to community identity, and to social bonding, among other factors. The chapter also explores parish and archdiocese attitudes toward historic village churches in the context of depopulation and reduced congregations. Obsolescence of the churches is being accelerated by centralization of masses and sacraments, and by displacement of the cost of mission maintenance and insurance to the villages. The chapter concludes with a visiting guide.