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After writing the Mayflower Declaration in 1968, Charles Curran set about a scholarly agenda of showing how and why the pope’s condemnation was, from a theological point of view, problematic. This agenda led directly to Curran’s dismissal from the faculty of the Catholic University of America, an action that closed down the university and was front-page news across the United States, being itself widely perceived as the first distinctively Catholic debate over academic freedom in a Catholic institution. The protests that followed this dismissal (“the Curran Affair”) represented the first true Catholic protest of the 1960s; parallels are drawn with the Berkeley free speech protests, the antiwar protests at Columbia University, and others.

This chapter presents the historical background for recent extensive revisioning of Catholicism and highlights the impact of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). It singles out five contributions as crucial for our own time. In view of the history of the Catholic Church during the modern period, it explains that theology must make two crucial judgments: “modernity has not been all wrong … and the Church has not been all right.” It suggests that Catholic colleges and universities, rather than secular universities, now provide the most promising arena for the exploration of the meaning of Catholicism in the modern age.

Catholic Studies is an interdisciplinary program that includes, but is not limited to, theology, history, literature, political science, economics, sociology, fine arts, music, and social work. Catholic Studies courses enable students to explore the myriad ways in which Catholicism has informed people's lives and the world in which they live. Catholic Studies programs can be found at Catholic colleges and universities throughout the United States, and a growing number of Catholic and non-Catholic universities have raised money for endowed chairs in this field. English, economics, political science, and sociology are all potential vehicles for informing undergraduates about Catholic teachings, life, and culture; in other words, Catholicism is taught across the curriculum. Recently, Catholic Studies courses have become a part of the curriculum of non-Catholic colleges and universities. Catholic Studies chairs at non-Catholic universities serve as a reminder of other issues that will need to be addressed as this emerging discipline finds its place in academia.

This chapter addresses the foundational question of the place of justice education within the Catholic university. Here, John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University links the discriminatory oppression of Irish Catholics in his day to their historical exclusion from British higher education. Knowledge for its own sake is knowledge for the sake of the student, especially those historically marginalized, and through them for the world and its justice. Pope John Paul II makes a similar argument in Ex Corde Ecclesiae. This chapter also traces Ignatius of Loyola's educational pilgrimage through the best universities of sixteenth-century Europe and the establishment by the newly founded Society of Jesus of the world's first school system, making the saint the world's first “superintendent of schools.” An exploration of the origins and purposes of those schools reveals that Catholic social learning in higher education is nothing new.

John Henry Newman set off for Dublin on February 7, 1854 to start up the Catholic University of Ireland. His objective was to tour Ireland and visit the bishops to make enquiries on the state of the colleges and schools, at the same time advertising the University to potential students and teachers. The Catholic University of Ireland was formally set up on May 18, 1854. The university was established to propagate true learning in Irish Catholics. Newman was eventually installed as Rector by Archbishop Paul Cullen. Newman realised from the beginning that it was important that the professors should be distinguished and well known. This would later transcend in the establishment of a medical school which turned out to be the most successful institution in the University.

On April 15, 1851, Archbishop Paul Cullen of Armagh wrote to Newman for his advice on the appointment of staff for the new Catholic University of Ireland, and also to ask if he “could spare time to give a few lectures on education”. Newman's initial response was non-committal. The origins of the new university started when Sir Robert Peel successfully moved his bill to establish a secular and non-denominational “Queen's University of Ireland”. This would provide an alternative to Anglican Trinity College in Dublin. Only a minority of the Irish bishops approved of the plan for such “mixed-education”. Rome forbade the Irish Church to pursue such a university and insisted on using Louvain in Belgium as the model for establishing a Catholic university. Newman, in turn, proposed that this would be the Catholic University of the English tongue.

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 examines the educational ideals of John Henry Newman in relation to the humanities model that was later put in place by the Irish Universities Act of 1908. Newman is regarded today as the “founder” of Ireland’s largest university, UCD, however the later college of the National College departed quite radically from the programme for education that Newman described at the founding of the Catholic University in 1854. This chapter also examines reaction to the 1908 Act and Padraig Pearse’s ideas on university education.

Given the complex subject of education and the diverse needs of different parts of the world in this area, Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis, specifically sets forth only general principles that are to be adapted later to particular circumstances by the appropriate Congregation. As such, this essay proceeds by first setting forth the contents of GE. In the second place, it then discusses a number of documents from the Congregation of Catholic Education that implement the general norms of GE, including: The Catholic School (1977), Lay Catholics in Schools: Witnesses to the Faith (1982), The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School (1988), and The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium (1997). The last part of the essay focuses on the challenges facing Catholic universities in the United States at the present time in light of GE’s general principles.

Two of the key ways the Chinese Catholic Church sought to develop its identity further were through education and the creation of unique visual images. In the early twentieth century, efforts of Chinese Catholics like Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi to start a Catholic University were supported by the influential Celso Costantini and the Catholic University of Peking (Furen Daxue). Costantini was also instrumental in ensuring that this university had an art department that produced Chinese Catholic images, many of which had Marian devotions as their themes. Chinese Catholic artists like Luke Chen Yuandu emerged from this department.

James Marsh and Anna Brown met with Daniel Berrigan during the summer of 2008 in his New York City apartment. The point of the meeting was to allow Berrigan to have the “final word” in this volume. A further point to the meeting was that since this conversation as published in this volume is the most recent we have a vantage point for reflecting back with Berrigan on the full trajectory of his life and work. Fifty years after Catonsville, how do things look? Topics covered in the conversation include the Catonsville Nine action, the influence of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, the challenge of Berrigan to the Catholic Church and Catholic universities, and the degree to which, in very difficult contemporary times, Christian hope is still possible.

As he neared retirement, Furfey presented himself as moving through three phases: liberal, radical and revolutionary. Scholars of Furfey’s work subsequently present Furfey as the theorist of Catholic radicalism. This chapter suggests that he was not only the theorist of Catholic radicalism but also a scholar who abided liberal and revolutionary impulses in scholarship and activism across his lifetime. Furfey’s contribution to the tradition of Catholic social thought and practice in the United States was more nuanced than the view that prevails in the current literature.

Paul Hanly Furfey was profoundly influenced by the famous Catholic priest psychologist Thomas Verner Moore who taught him how to balance rigorous scientific study with theological and spiritual analysis. Moore also modelled a civically engaged scholarship by opening clinics in the area surrounding the university. Furfey’s training in the seminary was uninspiring while his graduate studies at CUA were stimulating. His professors at CUA and the Sulpicians at St. Mary’s Seminary introduced Furfey to exciting developments in the Catholic Church in the United States, namely the formation of the National Catholic Welfare Council. While Furfey was drawn to the simplicity of the Jesuit lifestyle, he chose to be ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1922.

This chapter argues that self-appropriation, from below, can be fruitfully complimented by a prophetic Berriganian theology of liberation from above. Marsh’s formula to express this relationship is that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion should lead to radical political conversion. To further deepen and enrich the relationship between self-appropriation and liberation, Marxian social theory is used to understand and criticize capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. Marsh further stresses that the events of Catonsville can serve to bring into question an overly comfortable relationship of Catholic universities and Catholic academics to the secular city. In such accommodation, is the academic mission compromised? How freely and comprehensively can the desire to know operate when it is constrained by the goals and practices of empire?

The cycle of radicalization of important segments within European Catholicism, spawned by Vatican II, preceded the hot phase of European student movements by several all-important years. As a result, when European students began to mobilize, Catholic students often agitated in front-line positions and performed important pioneering roles. In fact, with an amazing regularity, some of the very first European universities to engage in militant actions were, indeed, Catholic universities. In this chapter, detailed assessments of the interaction between Catholic and secular student activism focus on highlights in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. A section on the radicalization of the international umbrella organization of Catholic student organizations, the JECI, closes the chapter.

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 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 intellectual life in the United States has primarily been housed in Catholic colleges and universities. These institutions broadened their curricula, research, faculty, and students in the years surrounding Vatican II, while embracing Catholic social teaching as a resource for engagement beyond the Church. The current generation of Catholic students is both less formed by a Catholic subculture and less inclined toward intellectual life. How, then, will Catholic intellectual life be sustained? Expanding the horizon of Catholic social engagement and spirituality beyond the United States is a promising way to engage young adults and renew the American Church. The missionary roots of American Catholic globalization, as seen in the history of religious orders such as Maryknoll, have been succeeded by a generation of students and young people committed to a discourse of global justice. This new generation’s experience may help reinvigorate theology, Catholic intellectual life, and the Church itself.