Book Review: A Contemplative Catholic Education

Higher education has many problems—political correctness, cost, grade inflation—but the authors of this study foreground another drawback: the pace, the rapidity of campus life. They regret “the perilous addiction to speed that characterizes the frenetic university of late modernity” (2), where emails, meetings, social media, bureaucracy, and the mandates of productivity, efficiency, technology, and constant availability afflict teachers and students both. Undergraduates hustle for grades, internships, high positions in clubs, and vibrant social-media profiles, while professors do research, teaching, and service in pursuit of tenure and pay increases. When I recall the tenure file I had to compile in 1995 and compare it with tenure files I’ve reviewed in 2025, the latter are ten times thicker. Everyone’s a gerbil racing on a wheel. Last night I spoke with a former student of mine who’s now in a doctoral program in a large university in the South. “Are they happy?” I asked, referring to the profs and fellow grad students. “Nobody’s happy,” she replied.

I presume everybody reading this review recognizes the problem. Even if students don’t work as hard as they should and professors aren’t as busy as they think they are—or, perhaps, are busy with unnecessary things such as a conference paper that few people will hear—all groups feel the pressure. Authors Franchi and O’Malley have a solution, namely Catholic education, which begins in a contemplative posture, the very opposite of fast labor. The word school derives from the Greek word for leisure, the authors note, which sounds to twenty-first-century ears like recreation, dinner and a movie, or a lazy afternoon, but that’s not what it means here. The authors define it as “a mental and spiritual attitude … a condition of the soul,” which is a pre-modern conception, one altogether contrary to the condition of the “worker” (19). More than any other type of schooling, they continue, Catholic colleges “have the capacity to draw on a classical understanding of leisure” (2), which, in a campus setting, is a process of slowing the mind so that it may examine and ponder and entertain the object with patience, wonder, silence, serenity, and openness.

Catholic education claims a long history of fostering contemplation, starting with the monasteries whose monks preserved in solitude the texts of antiquity, progressing to the monastic universities of high medieval Catholicism, and continuing in the works of John Henry Newman, Josef Pieper, Christopher Dawson, and Pope John Paul II, the sages guiding the proposals in this book. Pope St. John Paul is the theorist of work (Laborem Exercens), Pieper the apostle of leisure, Newman the proponent of “universal knowledge” (education not divvied up by specialties), and Dawson the unifier of religion and culture (a reform he thinks is best carried out by the university). Needless to say, the contemplation these figures extol sets Catholic education immediately at odds with current practices of higher education, which emphasize such practicalities as career readiness, return on investment (ROI), and progressive dispositions (DEI). Contemplation, too, ends with something higher and greater—in the words of John Paul “the Logos as the center of creation and of human history” (quoted p. 8). Franchi and O’Malley call it a “spiritual process” that leads souls toward a better faith. In secular universities, the disciplines slice and dice creation into disciplinary objects and keep them that way. In Catholic institutions, the work of a discipline is an inquiry with two steps, the first confined to the norms and methods of the discipline, the second an integration of the results of the particular inquiry or interpretation into a unified Catholic worldview. At Duke University, what happens in chemistry has nothing to do with what happens in English. At Belmont Abbey, it does.

It’s a compelling vision of higher education—and a countercultural one. Newman demands that a university be both intellectual in its pursuit of truth and moral in its instruction of duty, and the duty he has in mind rests on the “personal piety of students” (53). Universities should be “oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion,” he writes, and devotion requires, once again, a slowdown, a pause in the rush of modern times.

How foreign, however, must such piety sound to the average college leader. I read the authors’ prescriptions and imagined how they would sound in a faculty meeting. Think of all the rules and regulations that run against the proposal, such as the research-productivity requirement imposed on teachers and students. What university will lower it? When it comes to the faculty, surely older professors who earned tenure and promotion by meeting high-quantity demands will bristle at telling junior colleagues that they don’t have to do the same. Not only that, but what dean or provost wants to propose such a standard that might jeopardize the school’s research ranking? Not only that, but, when the research output of the faculty goes down, so does outside funding. As for students, what good does a contemplative habit do for a senior applying to a professional program? How does a personal lifestyle of reading great novels, for instance, stand on a résumé when other applicants pile up community service, summer jobs related to the profession, and participation in extracurricular groups?

In other words, for leisure and contemplation to return, many established incentives will have to go. The authors speak of “an initiation of the entire university into philosophical and theological categories that may be new to such persons” (66). Yes, and not only new, we must add, but off-putting. During my time at Emory, two colleagues left the department to go to a renowned Catholic university in the Midwest, and neither one had a whisper of Catholic commitment (both were good fellows). The authors urge that the curriculum give students time to read “classic primary texts” (69), which would require a thorough revision of general-education requirements in a direction certain departments would see as a threat, because they would lose their own gen-ed courses, whose enrollments obscure the departments’ shaky popularity. The authors also suggest a new “form of academic accompaniment,” whereby small groups of students and tutors meet to discuss “how their studies are having an impact on their wider life” (70), which sounds like a promising exercise—but doesn’t it also add another task to an already busy week? They envision new assessment practices that “could satisfactorily be aligned to a curriculum based on leisure” (69), but their only suggestion is the same as above: “building in opportunities for students to critically reflect on how their studies have effected some change in them”—a suggestion that doesn’t amount to an assessment at all if it doesn’t come with an objective yardstick that distinguishes a good reflection from a bad one.

The reform has greater prospects at Catholic colleges, of course, but many of those institutions in the last forty years have imitated secular schools too much, removing crucifixes and lightening up on doctrines regarding sex and sin. They are the prime candidates for such transformation. We need to conduct an experiment. Let’s find a struggling Catholic college, one on the verge of closing and willing to take a chance on a contemplative undergraduate education. Make the change, broadcast the model widely and boldly, and see what happens. Reform is a numbers game. If you redo the curriculum and applications and matriculations go up, it’s a success. If they go down, no matter how principled the reform, it’s a failure. I would like to see what the authors have proposed tried and tested.

Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine. His most recent book is The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.