The Case for Catholic Higher Education

Many Catholic colleges and universities, like much of higher education in the United States, appear to be in a precipitous state of decline. As of the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 1,700 private, nonprofit, accredited colleges were operating in the United States, and over half of them (849) were religiously affiliated. Of those, the largest denomination by far was Catholic colleges, comprising over 240 institutions and 640,000 students. Yet that number is steadily dwindling. Over eighty colleges have closed or merged in the last five years, over half of them religiously affiliated and more than twenty specifically Catholic. On a conservative estimate, over the last seventy-five years, around one hundred Catholic colleges have merged or closed, meaning that more Catholic colleges have closed than there are currently existing Methodist or Baptist colleges (the denominations with the largest number of affiliated colleges after the Catholic Church). Since some firms estimate that as many as 370 private colleges will close in the next decade, the majority of them small, regionally based, tuition-driven private colleges, Catholic schools are likely to be especially hard hit. The number of closed or merged Catholic colleges could double.

Driving these closures are the forces behind the broader structural contraction of the U.S. higher-education system: the American demographic decline and consequent drop in the number of high-school graduates, the increasingly high overhead costs of postsecondary institutions, and the stark decline in the public’s valuation of a college degree. Yet it is precisely in this environment that the case for authentic, robust Catholic higher education must be made and so reverse a decades-old trend.

In 1956, after the initial largesse of the original GI Bill came to an end, many private colleges were facing financial pressures. Several state governments, looking to the costly influx into public systems that would follow the closure of private colleges, offered substantial grants to those institutions. The federal government similarly increased research grants and created the student-loan and Pell grant systems. Salvation through public monies was on the way, but, during the late 1960s, some officials initially denied those funds to Catholic colleges. While, in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court would eventually rule that sectarian schools were offering a direct service to civil society and so were eligible for public funds, in those early years that decision was not at all certain. Facing severe financial pressures, Catholic colleges, following lawyerly advice, decreased the marks of their Catholic identity by removing ecclesial controls, deemphasizing sectarian language in their self-descriptions, eliminating religious-staffing requirements, removing obligatory sectarian courses, et cetera.

Alongside the pressing need for government money, most Catholic colleges believed that, to compete with other exceptional academic institutions, they needed to deemphasize their faith identity and focus on scholarly excellence. The zeitgeist held that one could have devout Catholic faculty or great academics but not both. This desire to compete in the marketplace of prestige for a limited number of students, coupled with impending financial fears and hopes for government funding, led Catholic universities to deemphasize previously distinctive features of their academics and cultures. Instead, they became increasingly indistinguishable from the general mass of increasingly homogenized and utilitarian degree programs, often serving as secular research institutes with mission statements that offered a nod to Christian tradition but were otherwise indistinguishable from their secular peers.

The decline and fall of so many Catholic colleges, however, is only a partial story. Key institutions and pontiffs have stood in the breach, offering a vision of Catholic higher education as a self-defined, identifiable partner in the wider academic community, one that aims to provide a prophetic voice to civil society and, in the midst of questions about the future of education and technology, a witness to another and better model for higher education. Since 1956, at least twenty-four new Catholic institutes of higher education have opened in America, and the vast majority of those have opted for a more robust approach to their Catholic educational identity than did many of the now-closed institutions. Several more institutions have reformed themselves contrary to the secularizing tendencies of the 1960s. It is these new and reformed institutions that generally offer the strongest case for Catholic higher education, even while serving only a small fraction of the total higher-education population. While non-Catholic institutions of higher education may have wonderful campus ministry programs, or even embedded centers for Catholic studies, authentic Catholic institutions have the opportunity to provide a model for colleges and universities as a whole and to witness by their very structure to important truths about the nature of education—and so to serve an essential good for civil society.

Victorian Oxford don John Henry Newman, the recently named doctor of the Church and patron saint of Catholic education, argued that Catholic education was especially characterized by three marks: its view of the human person derived from its monastic roots, its integrative vision, and the prudence for civic activity that flowed from it. As much of higher education merely mirrors the fragmented, ideologically driven, and digitized world in which we are enmeshed, Catholic higher education, in taking up those three marks, can now best give the witness that it should have offered sixty years ago.

The Catholic-education project takes its roots in the monastic vision of the Church, and from those roots it recognizes Christian anthropology as the basis of an educational style that, in the words of Leo XIV, “promotes respect, personalized accompaniment, discernment and the development of all the human dimensions.” The Catholic Church is interested in education because of the dignity of those whom she teaches. She professes that humans are destined to contemplate the truths that God inscribed into creation and revealed in Christ. While education may well bear a social utility (and the success of the graduates of Catholic higher education testifies to this), the fundamental goal is not utilitarian. Catholic education seeks to initiate souls into contemplation for its own sake; humans are made to rejoice in the beauty of truth. They do not need further justification for such a delight; it is their birthright.

Even though most Catholic institutions began with a focus on such contemplative study, necessity often forced Catholic colleges and universities in America to expand into vocational studies and business degrees. The renewal in much of Catholic higher education, however, is bound up with the renewal of liberal-arts studies. Newman described such studies as an apprenticeship in the arts of civilization:

Civilization too has its common principles, and views, and teaching, and especially its books, which have … ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education which the civilized orbis terrarum has adopted. […] We are but reiterating an old tradition, and carrying on those august methods of enlarging the mind, and cultivating the intellect, and refining the feelings, in which the process of civilization has ever consisted.

Focus on the intrinsic goods of education necessarily involves a retreat from the distractions of the utilitarian world, and Catholic higher education has long practiced this approach. The University of Notre Dame was founded in log cabins, when South Bend had around one thousand citizens. While only a few Catholic colleges continue to be quite so physically remote (although for those that are it remains a badge of honor), Pope Leo XIV has recently emphasized that all Catholic education needs to provide some form of fast from the ubiquity of digital noise. As he wrote in his letter on Catholic education, “Hyper-digitalization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire. Yet, it is precisely here that Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation, and prophetic witness.”

The distractions of social media is clearly an issue that every serious educator must face. Precisely what stance to take may not be clear in every circumstance, but that one must have a deliberate stance is unmistakable. Catholic colleges following the encouragement of the pontiff will increasingly be recognized for creating islands of humanity in a digital sea. As Leo writes, “No algorithm can replace what makes education human: poetry, irony, love, art, imagination, the joy of discovery, as an opportunity for growth. The decisive point is not technology but the use we make of it.”

As their monastic forbears filled the wilderness with rich spiritual experience, so Catholic colleges see the space created by their retreat as an opportunity to immerse their students in reality. As Pope Leo has noted, the cultivation of the whole human person directs students to immersion in and contemplation of the created world. Sometimes this immersion is quite literal: Until 2014, the University of Notre Dame required all freshmen to pass a swim test in very cold water; Wyoming Catholic College sends its students into the back country for three weeks. In other cases, however, immersion is a bit more metaphorical, coming with an emphasis on the Catholic imagination, the esteem for the created world, and the sacramental meaning that that world provides. By immersing students in a sacramental atmosphere of liturgy and sacred art and music, Catholic colleges cultivate this sacramental imagination, facilitating a more profound encounter with our cultural inheritance of literature and art, both in the classroom and in the campus culture.

The campus culture is of special importance for Catholic colleges. As John Paul II noted:

A Catholic university pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. The source of its unity springs from a common dedication to the truth, a common vision of the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, the person and message of Christ which gives the Institution its distinctive character.

The community becomes not just a place of education but an instrument of the education itself. Catholic higher education is characterized by small communities, with over thirty Catholic colleges having fewer than one thousand students. These small communities, to the extent that they are united in faith, a vision of the created world, and a contemplative spirit, offer an antidote to the bloated directionlessness and lonely existence found on so many secular college campuses.

John Henry Newman highlights the philosophical, or integrative, habit of mind as the second mark of Catholic education. Catholic higher education has a unique ability to witness to humanity’s potential to come to know the full truth about reality. As Pope John Paul II wrote:

It is the honor and responsibility of a Catholic university to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has an intimate conviction that truth is [its] real ally and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith. […] A Catholic university is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God.

By treating the question of God and his relation to the world as worthy of intense academic study, Catholic higher education claims both that there is a God and that theological study cannot be excluded from the universal desire to know. Humanity cannot fully understand the world and themselves without understanding the God who made both. As Pope Benedict XVI said in an address to American educators, “Set against personal struggles, moral confusion and fragmentation of knowledge, the noble goals of scholarship and education, founded on the unity of truth and in service of the person and the community, become an especially powerful instrument of hope.”

The Catholic tradition does not see faith and reason as silos or as ideas in opposition; rather, faith itself is a path to understanding that complements and works with reason. As Pope Francis wrote, “Faith awakens the critical sense by preventing research from being satisfied with its own formulae and helps it to realize that nature is always greater. By stimulating wonder before the profound mystery of creation, faith broadens the horizons of reason to shed greater light on the world which discloses itself to scientific investigation.” It is the same point made by Newman over a century prior: “Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.”

Rational study, in turn, leads to and supports faith, opening new perspectives and enriching its own self-understanding as it unfolds the truth of the created world. Thus, as John Paul II wrote, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

Catholic higher education at its best incarnates this view, allowing for a disciplined study of theology amidst a rich engagement with mathematics, science, philosophy, literature, history, music, and art. The faculty’s scholarship and teaching embody and evidence the mutual interpenetration and enrichment of faith and reason. Unlike campus ministry programs where religion is a side program, at Catholic colleges theology is a peer department for faculty, with the various disciplines of human and divine science all being integrated structurally and in the thought of the faculty, providing an education that engages all levels of reality and assembles them into a coherent worldview.

Many Catholic institutions offer a robust core curriculum (like that of the University of Dallas, Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, or Christendom College) or even an entirely integrated course of study (like Thomas Aquinas College or Wyoming Catholic College). Many others have a well-developed honors program that strives for the same thing. This ideal of a common, integrated course of study across the entire college leads the student community to embody the integration of the faculty.

The third mark of Catholic education is its zeal for incarnating study in concrete civic action. This is a complement, not a contradiction, to the vision of education for its own sake. Every free society needs men and women who are morally upright, deeply thoughtful, convicted about the truths and moral principles that found a free society, committed to preserving the valuable inheritance of our civilization, and capable of communicating those truths and passing on a rich cultural and moral inheritance to future generations. Such education makes us better in accord with our fundamental human nature. Habits of knowing and contemplating the truth and living as upstanding citizens are not only perfective for the young men and women who acquire them but are meant to be shared. Well-formed men and women share their habits of freedom with the wider society.

Deliberate formation, therefore, both befits the dignity of students and is an existential need for a republic. As Wyoming Catholic College professor Pavlos Papadopoulos writes:

Education ought to cultivate free citizens of a constitutional republic grounded in natural reality. […] By contrast, an education system that renders the next generation lonely and sterile, incompetent and economically dependent, ideologically addled, addicted to unreality, and variously contemptuous toward and ignorant of their national and civilizational inheritance … will produce not citizens of a republic, but rather subjects of an ever-more-despotic administrative state.

Modern Catholic education, Newman argued, was uniquely suited to lead its students to successfully incarnate their intellectual and character formation in service to civic society. Faith’s contemplation leads to loving action directed to one’s neighbor as oneself. Having been educated on campuses truly centered on the common good, Catholic graduates emerge equipped to be principled leaders in business and civic society, focusing on those transcendent goods that orient a community, while being able to incarnate that vision in concrete, mundane realities.

A contemplative, reality-immersed campus culture paired with an integrated and integrating course of studies also offers fertile ground for future professional studies and civic growth. Catholic law schools are consistently among the top-ranked in the country. Top-tier programs such as that at the University of Notre Dame, along with newer schools like Ave Maria Law, are marked by their commitment to forming students for service to civil society, while rooting them in a Catholic culture and integrating their study of law with their life of faith. The Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America explicitly intends to form its students to use technical business savvy as a force for good, building on a campus culture devoted to virtue and a principled commitment to Catholic social teaching while also making use of Catholic liberal-arts studies. The blend of Christian anthropology and an integrated view of faith and reason with principled medical ethics and technical medical savvy mark several exceptional Catholic nursing programs (as at the University of Mary and Franciscan University of Steubenville) and psychiatry programs (as at Divine Mercy University). Emerging Catholic osteopathic schools (such as the projected one at Benedictine College) are responding to a lacuna in medical training and will form doctors to treat the whole person. The human and cultural education that Pope Leo has called Catholic colleges to offer will be a necessary complement to principled and technical thinking and action regarding the AI revolution. Only students rooted in an integrated and holistic anthropology will be able to wisely use the powerful tools we are developing.

I would be remiss to ignore another key civic good at the basis of Catholic higher education: its commitment to generous financial aid. Much has been written about the increasingly exorbitant cost of higher education, with recent polls highlighting the growing conviction that there is not sufficient return on the investment. As a rule, however, Catholic higher education sees its work as a spiritual work of mercy and strives to make tuition accessible even to those with significant financial need. While the size of a school’s endowment is not a sufficient indication of its commitment to meeting need, relatively new Catholic institutions are going to extraordinary lengths to make their educations accessible to those lacking financial means. While at this time only two Catholic colleges do not participate in the federal student-loan and financial-aid programs (Christendom College and Wyoming Catholic College), those, too, remain committed to offering competitive financial aid for their students even without the benefit of federal largesse. Since Catholic higher education is a response to both human dignity and the needs of civil society, it should be no surprise that many of these institutions see it as a matter of their vocation to make their educations as accessible as they can.

America has lost faith in legacy higher education, and a major realignment in that sphere is taking place. Many Catholic higher-education institutions will be casualties of this shakeup. However, we ought not abandon Catholic collegiate education altogether. Great nations need to form their young adults in the excellences proper to a free society, and Catholic higher education plays a distinctive and important role. The education of our future leaders will be complemented by the witness of robust, authentic Catholic education. This education sees human dignity as deserving of education for its own sake, offers some form of retreat from utilitarian and digital distractions, and roots its students in the experience of the created world within intensive small communities of study. In emphasizing the traditional liberal arts, these institutions offer an integrated and integrating view of faith and reason, and this education overflows into civic and professional service. Whatever emerges from the present shakeup, the Catholic colleges and universities that offer this witness need to be preserved.

Fr. Dcn. Kyle Washut, S.Th.D., is president of Wyoming Catholic College.