Burtchaell, James Tunstead

English

Loyola Marymount University

Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiryand PracticeVolume 3 | Issue 2 Article 1212-1-1999Response to James Heft, SM, Jeffrey Gros, FSC, andJames MaddenJames Tunstead BurtchaellFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/ceThis Book Review is brought to you for free with open access by the School of Education at Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount University andLoyola Law School. It has been accepted for publication in Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice by the journal's editorial board andhas been published on the web by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. Formore information about Digital Commons, please contact digitalcommons@lmu.edu. To contact the editorial board of Catholic Education: A Journalof Inquiry and Practice, please email CatholicEdJournal@lmu.edu.Recommended CitationBurtchaell, J. T. (1999). Response to James Heft, SM, Jeffrey Gros, FSC, and James Madden. Journal of Catholic Education, 3 (2).http://dx.doi.org/10.15365/joce.0302122013256 Catholic £"rfwca//o/i/December 1999RESPONSE TO JAMES HEFT, S.M., JEFFREY GROS, FSC,AND JAMES MADDENJames Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C.These three reviews are both diverse and complementary, and rather thanreply to the full array of their observations, I shall respond to what I con-sider their most important challenge.James Madden, an Englishman concluding his visit to our Catholic edu-cational establishment, puts it most modestly. Commenting upon only theCatholic chapter in my book (3 of my 17 case studies), he is not persuadedby my finding that shifts of personnel, policy, and practice in the past halfcentury have gone far to enervate the Catholic character of our colleges anduniversities. My "tone of unrelieved despondency" is at odds with hisimpression: The "current healthy situation in so many Catholic universitiesacross the United States suggests that overall the quality of the piloting hasbeen pretty skillful.... The colleges are proven guilty of no more than havingchanged, altered, adapted, and developed in the interests of survival."Brother Jeffrey Gros would also prefer a more appreciative study: "todocument the struggle entailed, successfully, to maintain and promoteChristian identity in an academic and ecclesiastical culture not always adeptor even receptive to Christian higher education."Father Heft, however, puts their shared grievance more sharply andtherefore more helpfully. As one of the few reviewers anywhere who credi-bly claims to have read the entire study before reviewing it, he faults me forbasic dishonesty. "The process of secularization is neither as advanced nor asinevitable as he presents it.... Burtchaell has chosen to study only those [insti-tutions] that demonstrate his thesis...[and] been selective in the informationhe has highlighted, leaving aside whatever would complicate or underminehis thesis."For a theologian who works historically, dishonesty is the rough equiva-lent of Murder One. It corresponds to embezzlement for an administrator,adultery for a spouse, treason for a military officer. Such an accusation con-centrates the mind wonderfully. So let me reply as best I can.My book is not a selective chronicle of defections, in either purpose oroutcome. The two case studies of evangelical institutions offer evidence andmy appraisal that they are threatened by infidelity, but the outcome has yet tobe seen. The story lines of Concordia and Saint Olaf seem to be similarlyunresolved, though the gravitational pulls toward secularization are forcefuland will require a more deliberate resistance than their leaderships propose.BOOK REVIEWS 257Leaving aside the Catholics for the moment, the evidence makes it reason-ably clear that the remaining colleges and universities studied do not wish tobe considered linked to their founding denominations by anything more thanhistorical reminiscence (and, in several instances, token subsidy). Someresent or even forbid inclusion on denominational lists.My curiosity and inquiry in those case studies was not to prove that thecolleges and universities studied were no longer in any efficacious wayCongregational or Presbyterian or Baptist or whatever. I had expected to findmore diversity. But in most instances the clean conclusion from the evidencewas that their religious associations had been effectively ended. Not that theassociations had ever been that dynamic. The adhesions between churchesand colleges in their early days comprised some financial support, church-persons on boards, clergy or members of religious orders as the main sourceof teachers, and the denominational youth as the primary target populationfor enrollment. This overlap of personnel provided the motive and characterfor worship on campuses and to some degree the expected student decorum.It had, however, little play in the intellectual pursuits of the campuses.With the passage of time and the shift of circumstance, as Christian col-lege finances eventually became stable and then comfortable, and studentenrollment and faculty recruitment diversified, the original attachments nolonger tied church to college as previously. The colleges no longer expectedsignificant subsidy, or elected communicants or clergy to their boards, orrecruited clergy or communicants to teach, or counted the church as a signif-icant source of students. At this comfortable juncture the college sensibilitiesunderstandably treated the church more perfunctorily, yet politely. In thequiet further growth of intellectual aspirations that then ensued, however—an aspect of education to which the churches had never contributed verymuch—something further changed. Church claims upon college loyaltiesbegan to elicit increasingly hostile responses, ranging from annoyance tochagrin to rebuff. The educators finally told church authorities their biddingwas no longer welcome. Some insisted that the college name be removedfrom the church rolls. The old partnership had dissolved. These partings ofthe ways had Lutheran and Methodist and other variants, but what fascinat-ed me in the evidence were the dynamics typical of them all.In most of my reports it did not occur to me to offer evidence and argu-ment that the breach had taken place. That was a reality so open to view thatthere seemed no need to persuade, only to recount. My finding that most col-leges and universities begun under mainline Protestant auspices had emergedfrom that relation and become fully and determinedly secular was, for somereaders, an unwelcome admission, but not really a controvertible one.What proved fascinating and worthy of scrutiny, however, was the evi-dence about the process whereby the break typically and paradoxicallybecame final just at the moment when the colleges and universities had the258 Catholic Education/DQCtmb&T 1999resources within their sight and grasp that might have permitted them, for thefirst time, to offer an education that would allow Christian insights, sensibil-ities, and queries to play a significant role in the intellectual interchangebetween senior and junior scholars within their shared communion of faithand scholarship. How was it that the first hopeful foretaste of a long-retard-ed mutual success so swiftly soured the desire to accomplish it?It was in pursuing that question that I discovered a phenomenon commonto virtually all these case studies. At the most critical season of their change,when the old ties were still formally in place but becoming perfunctory andawkward, the colleges and universities were moving to the edge of theirchurches' gravity fields and feeling the rival pull of the secular academy.That academy itself had moved from an originally casual familiarity withreligious belief and expression to an increasingly cautionary fear thatChristianity was intellectually disreputable. As the academics on the origi-nally Christian campuses I studied began to draw away from their churchestoward the secular academy, they generated a remarkably uniform sort ofnervous, self-assuring rhetoric which repetitiously affirmed solidarity withthe community of faith while simultaneously disowning any sense of thatfaith's scholarly worth. After reading hundreds and then thousands of pagesof this strangely self-assuring discourse, I do confess that its dishonestybecame both tedious and fascinating.After I had completed all the 12 mainline Protestant case studies, I set towork on the three Catholic institutions. As their histories emerged and provedsignificantly parallel to those of the Protestant experience, and led toward thesame default though at a later date, it became clear that among Catholics theestrangement of their colleges and universities from their church was not anaccepted fact. It was a highly unwelcome one, anxiously denied.Yet the Catholic stories do walk along the path of the mainline Protestantstories, which is why it is so important for Catholics to read those earlier sto-ries and be instructed by them. We Catholics are more to blame than our pre-decessors in infidelity, for their stories allow us no claim to innocent igno-rance. So one can hardly avoid being vexed at Catholic academics who readthese older stories of colleges and universities which had so clearly lost thefaith before we were even much tempted to do so, and will not notice howclearly we tread on their heels. How can we read through this repetitiverecord of so many communal losses of faith enabled by disingenuous rhetoricand not recognize there the characteristic patterns of disaffection and alien-ated outcome into which we Catholics have been drawn? The multiple andmanifest parallels between our present defecting and these older others,which I have randomly chosen and fairly reported, would seem to me torequire that attention must be paid. The Catholic educators, however, sufferfrom attention deficit disorder.BOOK REVIEWS 259My reviewers question my attention to the anaesthetic rhetoric of thedefecting educators and some of their ecclesial co-dependents. They havecomplained of the "withering criticism," "condescension," "saeva indigna-tio," "nonscientific, sarcastic dismissal," and worse, which I have visitedupon the egregious trustee statements, presidential blather, and vision andmission statements that distracted all these academics from what they weredoing long enough for it to be completed without their looking it in the face.Educators and ecclesiastics have often shared this mischievous inclination tosmarmy, self-assuring rhetoric. We can hardly read the earlier stories, thenreflect honestly upon our own, and end with observations that "The processof secularization is neither as advanced nor as inevitable as [Burtchaell finds]it" (Heft). "What if there is the odd bit of turbulence to be endured?"(Madden). "[Someone should] demonstrate the positive contribution ofChristian higher education to ecclesial renewal" (Gros).Those who speak for the many institutions that have been claiming theCatholic name with increasing equivocation now say (indeed, with bewilder-ing prolixity) that they do not—repeated: do not!—wish to forgo a vital con-nection with the Catholic Church. But they revealingly refuse to be answer-able in any serious way to the Church for the fidelity of their "Catholic" edu-cational endeavors. Word and deed do not concur. It is the old story. A sadstory, I think.As for the charge of dishonest choice and treatment of institutional sto-ries: As I carefully explained at the outset of my book, I studied only institu-tions with which I had no prior familiarity, and I chose them by denomina-tion and demography. I began with some hunches but did not originally havea "thesis" to defend. As the data accumulated the hunches were revised con-siderably. The story lines which emerged surprised me by their congruence.They are what generated the thesis. The final chapter could never have beenwritten before the others were completed.The reviewers believe, as do I, that the controversy attending the apos-tolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae brings to light much of what is at stakein this matter. I thought that struggle too undeveloped then to include in mybook. In July my understanding of it was simultaneously published in twoperiodicals, the Joumal of College and University Law, and Crisis, under thetitle, "The Heartburn of the Church."James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C., former provost of the University of Notre Dame, is a researcher andwriter in Princeton, New Jersey.

Response to James Heft, SM, Jeffrey Gros, FSC, and James Madden

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&amp;context=ce

Response to James Heft, SM, Jeffrey Gros, FSC, and James Madden

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