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Revised Draft, 15/1/ 001
RESEARCHING CATHOLICITY AT ACU
1/In the wake of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), the Catholicity of Church-sponsored tertiary institutes has, of course, been a hot topic, in the USA above all.[1] A survey of 3000 faculty in 235 such institutions led to the following cautiously expressed findings:
1. Though faculty felt personally connected to the Catholic mission of their institute, they moderately disagreed that the faculty as a whole in their school felt connected to its Catholic mission.
2. They disagreed that students should be required to take more theology and philosophy courses.
3. They moderately agreed that more diversity of courses (Eg., gender studies, peace and justice) should be required.
4. Moderately agreed that teachers should try to make a connection between their personal religious faith and their teaching and research.[2]
2/Nothing surprising there. The real problem seems to be that what had been taken for granted for years had suddenly become a sensitive and intractable problem, not helped by hostility between various factions, the fear of a new conservativism, and the possibility of dealing with a non-marketable entity in the fierce arena of academic competition. Arguments veer between those trying to prove that being Catholic makes no difference to the academic status of the University, and those asserting that it should.
3/Whilst we at ACU can profitably eavesdrop on the North American discussion, our situation is notably idiosyncratic– a very young institution; Catholic, but part of the national system, with no precise parallel in the US at all. In this extended reflection, I intend to solve no problem, but to tease out the context in which it might be approached in the years ahead. Appropriately, our first section deals with the complexity of the issue.
I. THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SITUATION
4/Charles Péguy considered, ‘Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics’. In the case of ACU the situation was different. It began with politics, or at least with that particular political assault in the Dawkins era on the established universities, leaving our University with the problem of defining its mystique, and of integrating its ‘mystical’ inheritance into the educational fabric of the national system. The situation is of course never simple. It surfaces in questions related to the Catholic nature of our institute: that promises a lot of mysticism and a lot of politics, in the historical round of the mystical first asserting itself against the political, and then by asserting itself through politics to protect and enhance its identity in different cultural and social situations.
5/Life, any life, personal or institutional, has its visionary and political aspects. There is a time for everything under heaven, as the sage of old allowed. There is no ultimate synthesis in which everything will be held in harmonious equilibrium. A mission statement is followed by a strategic plan. The expanding curriculum must meet the restraints of contracting budget. An exalted sense of ‘ethos’ must carry over into particular directions for research and teaching, and into the processes of appointment of faculty and the renewal of contracts. For the University to identify itself within the Catholic tradition involves its necessarily with those who are recognised by that tradition as its authentic interpreters, namely the Pope and the bishops. At a mystical moment, we might frame the Catholicity question, for instance, as, What is the theology, implicit or otherwise, of ACU? In a more political emphasis, we might ask, What should be the role and place of theology within the University, and how is it related to the teaching and mission of the Church, and to the pastoral responsibility of local bishops?
6/How can the Catholicity of our University be best researched? That question must go deeper: How can such Catholicity be best identified? The hope, throughout, is invite all concerned parties into a conversation on how such Catholicity, identified and researched, can be, not a divisive or reactionary dimension of ACU, but a bracing and creative force. I, along with others, am not convinced that these considerations are susceptible to clearly measurable outcomes for reasons that I hope will be made clear. I don’t mean that Catholicity defies all attempts at quality control, e.g., the number and mode of appointment of faculty and staff, and the properly authenticated development of a curriculum that has a recognisable affinity with Catholic faith and values. Nonetheless, what we call the ‘Catholic ethos’ is something far more pervasive, subtle and profound. I am not saying it is purely subjective, for there are most certainly objective criteria. It has historical shape, a communion of churches headed by bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome – the Church in its articulated ecclesiastical sense, the oldest institution in what we call “Western Civilisation”. There are sacred scriptures, liturgical rituals, defined doctrines, recognised authorities, canonised saints, mystics, martyrs, doctors and confessors, reformers and founders– and all the rest of that billion of us who find ourselves in, or who have found our way to, the Catholic Church. There is therefore, in purely historical and cultural terms, an immense, to some, an overwhelming objectivity about ‘the Catholic thing’ as Rosemary Haughton called it,[3] emerging out of an experience of two millennia of history. Not to recognise that would reduce this ‘Catholic thing’ to a bunch of propositions or to endless discussions on who best articulates them. I doubt that current amnesiac tendencies in educational curricula are favourable to any understanding of Catholicity. When the culture as a whole seems to be exhibiting the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Syndrome, it is hard to speak of anything requiring a long-term memory, and the long haul and long view of hope itself. But even if this were a time of thriving historical studies, the meaning of all this can never be fully objectified.
II. THE VITAL ROLE OF ‘TRADITION’
7/True, any tradition can often be confused with its dead shell, its exhausted patterns, or with the bitter grief of those who mourn what they see as its passing. But there Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most commanding moral philosophers of the day, and himself increasingly appreciative of Catholic inheritance to the point of embracing it, brings out the fact that a healthy tradition presupposes ongoing critical examination:
...when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to the tradition its particular point and purpose.[4]
8/He is speaking in a general way about the role of tradition. Note, however, his inclusion of a university in the examples he gives:
So when an institution –a university, say, or a farm or a hospital– is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming or good medicine is. Traditions when vital embody continuities of conflict (206).
9/In his view, to the degree a tradition is simply opposed to intellectual exploration or so insists on uniformity that discourages healthy argument, that tradition is already dying or already dead.[5] For him ‘A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute the tradition’.[6] He asks, therefore, given that ‘traditions decay, disintegrate, disappear’, What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?
The answer in key part is: the exercise or lack of exercise of the relevant virtues. The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context. Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of relevant intellectual virtues– these corrupt traditions, just as they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiments.[7]
10/His awareness of vulnerability of a tradition to decay or forgetfulness causes him to single out a special virtue:
To recognise this of course is to recognise the existence of an additional virtue, one of whose importance is perhaps most obvious when it is least present, the virtue of having an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs or which confront one. This virtue is not to be confused with any sense of conservative antiquarianism... It is rather the case that an adequate sense of the tradition manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative confront a future whose determinate and determinable character, so far as it possesses any, derives from the past.[8]
11/What is he getting at? I would interpret him in the present context in this way: unless we cultivate a habit of mind and heart that enables us both to appreciate and yet to critically examine the deep narrative structuring our sense of God, ourselves and the universe, we are in fact closing ourselves to the future, and the manifold creativity required to move on in a hopeful positive spirit.[9] Hence the necessity of exercises such as this. To focus the general in the particular, let us move on to the next point, the three components in the name, AustralianCatholicUniversity.
III. AUSTRALIAN–CATHOLIC– UNIVERSITY
12/ACU, because of the tripartite significance of its name, is involved in big questions which, in many ways, are shared by colleagues in other tertiary institutions agonising over the corruption of once great intellectual ideals. The German poet, Hölderin, referred to ‘the conversation that we are’ ( Das Gespräch wir sind) – a phrase that can serve as a working description of our own small, scattered and under-resourced, but by no means dispirited, University. Inherent in that conversation which engages all of us one way or another, and despite preoccupations proper to economic survival, a range of immense issues are lie beneath the surface: what is it to be Australian? Catholic? A University?
13/Australian: Whither Australia – given our regional and national responsibilities, and the opportunities and limitations of the culture of our country today? The danger is that our vast land with its many natural and personal resources and great potential is getting its direction from small souls. Matthew Arnold foresaw what now confronts us, and his words can be fittingly applied to our own national situation:
We went after blind guides and followed the false direction, and the actual civilisation of England and America are the result. A civilisation with many virtues, but without lucidity of mind and largeness of temper. And now we English, at any rate, have to acquire them, and to learn the necessity for us, ‘to live (as Emerson says) from a greater depth of being’ (Preface to Irish Essays (1882)).
14/This loss of depth of being is the point at which our culture trembles today. Australia has a chance of being something new; to some degree it realised it; but when challenged by the demands of the future, it is severely tempted to regress to ‘the false direction’ that Arnold lamented. More to the point, is our educational system leading to the ‘greater depth of being’ that the frenzied superficiality of soul-threatened civilisations most need? There is a loss, when the only excellence apparently recognised is in sport, business and entertainment. Still, matters are not decided. Our recent exposure to events in East Timor jolt the country into a reflectiveness that is likely to be intensified. It may well be a time of great promise. A new awareness of Australia’s 50,000 year aboriginal prehistory and the issues of justice and reconciliation that have emerged in our relationship to the Indigenous population have resulted in a certain expansion our cultural consciousness. The dramatic change occurring in the composition of the migrant population brings with it an exposure to new cultures and new religions. The ‘Asianisation’ of the country is a fact, resulting in a more organic sense of the S.E. Asian region as a political, economic, and demographic entity. An intensification of ecological awareness, joined with a new appreciation of aboriginal spirituality tends to make us see the land in terms that border on the religious, as something of a vast ‘sacred site’. While the once coherent and confident Irish church is suffering a huge institutional strain, a widespread interest in spirituality, together with the remarkable ‘spiritual witness’ found in our poetry and literature, in our painting and music, provides data that resist any overly negative judgment. Something is being lost; yet something is being missed; and something is being sought.1[0] The greater depth of being, though elusive, is still felt to be a challenge. Our satirists and humorists certainly have plenty to work on, but they also indicate the presence of a protest. The Church’s recent involvement in consultation on the distribution of wealth and the role of women in society and the Church are unprecedented. The number of people studying theology at a tertiary level must bear results in the long term. A greater depth of being? Perhaps... Of itself, even becoming a republic, while allowing new questions to surface regarding our future and present responsibilities to this region, will not deliver the goods!
15/Catholic: what can that mean? Interestingly, despite the frequent tendency to translate ‘catholic’ as simply as ‘universal’, the early Latin Church chose to use, not the Latin word, universalis, but a Latinised Greek word: Credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. Universalis would have connoted something immense, but boundedand uniform throughout. Catholica implies something different, a living, communing, expanding reality, with the whole in each part, and each part functioning within the living whole, in a communicating plurality of ecclesial expressions. The many rites – 19 by one count– Latin, Ukrainian, Chaldean, Maronite, and so forth, are at least a vestigial witness to a former unity in diversity. Now, this sense of things runs quite counter to the resonance of that most un-Catholic of words, “Catholicism” which, though in currency in the English language from the 17th century, was a key term in the vocabulary of the ultramontane French Traditionalists in the mid-19th century. It represents an attempt to reduce the personal fides catholica or the communal ecclesia catholica to a system of ideas, one more ‘ism’ in a world of then burgeoning ‘isms’. Needless to say, ‘Catholicism’ has never appeared in an official Church document. It is worth making this point, since a “CatholicUniversity” would get off to a bad start if it conceived of itself a “Catholicist” institute, suggesting an intention to promote some form of religious ideology. That distinction is worth bearing in mind as we proceed with this reflection.
16/In the course of this century, there has been a huge demographic shift in the composition of the Catholic Church. At the beginning of the century, 70% of Catholics were in Europe and North America. At its end, that percentage is found in the Southern regions of the world, namely in Africa, South America, Asia, Oceania, Australia. This is to say that most Catholics today belong to the younger, poorer, non-white (or racially mixed), politically unstable, and culturally religious parts of the planet, compared to the rich, secular, economically dominant, aging and secularised populations of Europe. Vatican II, as it began to recognise this shift in the composition of the Catholic communion, inspired a more differentiated and vital understanding of Catholic universality:
This attribute of universality which adorns the People of God is the gift of the Lord whereby the Catholic Church tends efficaciously and constantly to recapitulate the whole of humanity with all its riches, under Christ the head in the unity of the Spirit. In virtue of this catholicity each individual parts brings its particular gifts to the other parts and to the whole Church, so that the whole and the individual parts are enriched by the mutual sharing of gifts and the striving of all for the fullness of unity...” (Lumen Gentium, #13).
17/The council was thus able to present the Church as a diversified unity made up of local and regional churches, each have its own gifts to contribute to the whole. The pope, as Bishop of Rome, was understood to preside over the whole assembly of charity so as to protect legitimate differences and to prevent them from becoming divisive (LG #13). The cooperation of the local churches, under their respective bishops, was viewed as ‘particularly splendid evidence of the undivided Church’ (#23). Such a differentiated Catholicity inspired in turn a new understanding of ecumenical action as ‘reconciled diversity’ in which the uniting churches would retain their distinct traditions and customs and an appropriate measure of autonomy within the Catholic communion of churches (Unitatis Redintegratio, #14-18). Similarly, the Church’s missionary activity was re-shaped by this richer notion of catholicity. In proclaiming the Gospel, the Church, while acting out ‘of the innermost requirements of her own catholicity” (Ad Gentes, #1), ‘perfects its own catholic unity by expanding it’ (#6), to heal, ennoble and to perfect all the authentic values present in the traditions and cultures of various peoples (#9, 22).1[1]