A Brief History of Catholic Higher Education

Introduction: Small Beginnings to Big Business and Back

In his encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II declared, “Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic University is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the University as an institution.” Whatever they are doing and wherever they are headed now, all modern Western universities trace their origins back to the medieval Catholic universities, beginning with Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salerno in the eleventh century. After the Reformation, universities divided along confessional lines. Eventually, universities were founded by secular entities such as the modern state or other smaller local governments.

Though the United States was born at a time when these divergences were taking place, and though Catholics have adapted to and sometimes thriven within non-Catholic institutions, the beginnings of Catholic higher education in the United States were characterized by the desire for a truly Catholic university. As the nation grew, such institutions were built, adjustments were made, and there was great success—particularly during the Neo-Thomist Renaissance. (While this essay focuses on Catholic universities and colleges, prudent figures saw that Catholics were not all going to attend—nor would they have even fit into—these growing institutions and would need truly Catholic intellectual and spiritual formation to go with what they were getting at secular and non-Catholic institutions—at, for example, Newman Centers.)

The inflection point for these institutions was, as for the world, the optimistic and turbulent 1960s, when many Catholic-university leaders decided that “independence” from the Church (though not from the State) was the watchword. What has happened since then has been largely a tale of divergence. Many of the institutions have lost their way entirely, some have revived, and others have been born anew, like the early ones, from the heart of the Church. Like the story of the Catholic Church throughout history, the tale of Catholic higher education is one of birth, death, and resurrection.

John Carroll and Beginnings

The first American Catholic university started the same year as the U.S. Constitution. While conspiratorially minded thinkers might think it too convenient, Georgetown University was established in 1789 by the Society of Jesus at the behest of the first American bishop, John Carroll. While Jesuits had operated schools briefly in Maryland and even Pennsylvania (taking advantage of Quaker tolerance to do so) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was no Catholic university present in the colonies. Instead, when they could, Jesuits trained young men and sent them off for seminary preparation at St. Omer in France or to some other university in Europe if possible—some of the colonies had legal restrictions on sending children to the continent.

In May 1789, however, John Carroll and the priests of Baltimore put together a prospectus outlining a school that would be Catholic but open to non-Catholics. The statement included clear aims for the kind of institution they conceived:

It will therefore receive Pupils as soon as they have learned the first Elements of Letters, and will conduct them through the several Branches of Classical Learning to that Stage of Education from which they may proceed with Advantage to the Study of higher Sciences in the University of this or those of the neighboring States. Thus it will be calculated for every Class of Citizens;—as Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, the earlier Branches of the Mathematics, and the Grammar of our native Tongue, will be attended to no less than the learned Languages.

What became known as Georgetown College was thus born, though it did not admit students until 1791, and its capacity for advanced studies took longer to develop than that. But the prospectus above, with its focus on what might be called secondary education, tells us much about the nature of the first century of American Catholic higher education.

John Carroll was educated by Jesuits and became a Jesuit until the order was suppressed in 1773. This was significant. As Philip Gleason points out in Contending With Modernity, his history of the Catholic university in the twentieth century, most colleges and universities had some form of secondary education attached in the form of local schools. Catholics were different, however. They thought not of two “different levels,” Gleason writes, “with the college being properly confined to strictly post-secondary work,” but, instead, of “the Continental tradition in which the college functioned as a combined secondary-collegiate institution whose course of studies lasted for six years or so and was followed (for the few who continued their education) by specialized professional studies at the university level.”

The particular version of Continental European tradition that was embraced at Georgetown and, for the most part, throughout the new Catholic institutions over the next century was that of the Jesuits, whose 1599 Ratio Studiorum (or plan of studies) set out three stages of education—humanistic, philosophical, and theological—to be accomplished in order. Gleason writes that this plan was kept in its broad outlines but adapted to this new country that was (and is) more practical than theological:

The third was the culminating stage toward which the other two were oriented, but it is not relevant here since the Jesuit college in this country developed from the humanistic cycle and a shortened version of the three years of philosophy prescribed by the Ratio. The goal of the humanistic cycle was eloquentia perfecta, the ability to speak Latin fluently and with persuasive power. Greek, too, was studied, but much less intensively than Latin, mastery of which was a practical necessity for advancement in lay, as well as clerical, careers after the humanists of the Renaissance introduced this kind of educational program. While it concentrated on language study that was thoroughly vocational in one sense, the humanistic cycle simultaneously achieved much broader educational goals. For in mastering the intricacies of language and expression the student was also analyzing subtleties of thought and acquiring refinement of taste.

Though one might see this as a portent of secularization, it was probably mitigated by the fact that most institutions took in students who were preparing for priesthood.

The first free-standing Catholic seminary was St. Mary’s in Baltimore, which meant that Georgetown did not need to accommodate men heading to clerical life. Yet this was not true of most of the new institutions. The “mixed” education of students preparing for secular and priestly life was of benefit to all. As Gleason observes, “the lay students supported the institution as a whole; informal theological study could be provided for aspirants to the priesthood, and they in turn served as instructors and proctors for the college.” It was only in the late 1800s that the modern seminary was really operative. The Third Council of Baltimore in 1884 set out a plan for Catholic education that included priestly formation in a different vein.

Intellectual and Spiritual Care for the Immigrants

That emphasis on the humanistic and philosophical for Catholic institutions was driven by the fact that the Catholic Church was exploding in size. If Catholics were few and mostly relegated to Maryland and its environs at the Founding, by the mid-nineteenth century there were far more American Catholics across the country, and many hailed from Catholic countries or Catholic parts of countries in Europe. After Georgetown’s founding, Catholics began starting colleges and universities, beginning in Maryland with Mount St. Mary’s in 1808; Nazareth around Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1814; and St. Louis University in 1818. Religious orders often founded these universities. St. Louis University was founded by the Jesuits, while Nazareth was founded by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. The latter eventually changed its name to Spalding University to honor Mother Catherine Spalding, who founded the order.

The most famous of the American Catholic universities was also founded by a religious order. Fr. Edward Sorin, a priest of the French Congregation of the Holy Cross (CSC), was sent by the order’s founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, to northern Indiana in the early 1840s with $310 and a mandate to start an institution of higher learning. He worked with the first priest to be ordained in America, Fr. Stephen Badin, who was busy ministering to the local Potawotami Indians, to establish a college near the south bend of the St. Joseph River. Arriving at a pleasant spot by two lakes—which the snow cover tricked him into thinking was one, he named the institution L’Université de Notre Dame du Lac—the University of Our Lady of the Lake, known as Notre Dame.

While the early years of this institution, still on frontier territory in many ways, were difficult, the institution grew steadily, taking in growing numbers of young men of German, Irish, Polish, and other heritages. As Michael T. Rizzi has written, Catholic institutions took in non-Catholic students for “survival” and also because they were often the only educational institutions in a given area. Notre Dame’s famous later motto, “God, Country, Notre Dame,” represents how the institution, like most other Catholic colleges, though founded by foreign priests became fully American very quickly. During the Civil War, Notre Dame students fought (some on the Confederate side), and Holy Cross priests served as chaplains.

A Research University in the Capital, Professional Universities, and the Catholic Women’s College

Already mentioned is the impetus for a different model of seminary-college relationship arising from the Third Baltimore Council’s agenda. Yet the Council also responded to a different problem. Another pressure on Catholic colleges in the second half of the nineteenth century was the growth of new universities funded by the 1862 Morrill Act and the change in existing universities to mimic the European (specifically, the German) research university.

The “land-grant universities” were funded by the federal government’s Morrill Act, not only to bulk up educational opportunities in general but, specifically, to provide education in scientific and technological studies to benefit the nation. The names of universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (Florida A&M), signaled their focus. Latin and Greek were downgraded; engineering, agriculture, and mechanics were elevated. Research by faculty was emphasized in these as well as other new, private universities founded on the newer European model. In 1876, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore became the first American research university, but its integration of teaching and scientific research was gradually to become the beau ideal of even many of the small colleges started on the Ratio Studiorum.

These institutions put not only practical but also ideological pressures on Catholic colleges. Far from just requiring Catholic schools to add more technological subjects, the intellectual currents emanating from the technical universities included scientific and other ideas that many thought challenged Catholic teaching. The response to such pressures was the 1889 founding of the Catholic University of America (CUA), which was, as Gleason put it, “intended from the beginning to operate on a different and higher academic plane than the existing colleges (including those that called themselves universities), and it became the chief center from which the research-oriented ideal that marks the modern university diffused itself outward into the world of Catholic higher education.” Being at the epicenter of such intellectual questions and having research faculty in many fields meant CUA was to become a lightning rod for the divisions about how to integrate modern science and biblical scholarship into doctrinal understanding, which happened during what became known as the Modernist Crisis.

If CUA was the first, it was not the last. A plethora of Catholic universities, many of them run by Jesuits, began to imitate the research model and add to it professional education over the first quarter of the twentieth century. Medical and dental, law, business and commerce, music, engineering, agriculture, library science, education, and various other professional schools “sprang up like mushrooms,” according to Gleason. In the nation’s capital, Georgetown began its famous foreign-service school, and CUA began its school of public service.

Adding to the luster of these schools was, of course, big-time sports success—particularly at Notre Dame, where Knute Rockne, a Catholic convert and former ND laboratory assistant, built a legendary college-football program. During his 1930 visiting professorship in South Bend, G.K. Chesterton observed that the school had many successes in areas such as medieval philosophy, but “the world is interested in football, and because a school excels in that sport the world gives no other credit.”

In the same period, women began to enter American universities. While the first Catholic college explicitly for women (Ohio’s Ursuline College) was chartered in 1850, it was not until 1895 that the College of Notre Dame in Maryland was able to offer women four-year bachelor’s degrees. All in all, about 225 Catholic women’s colleges were founded, mostly by women’s religious orders. Most of these colleges, like many of the men’s colleges that preceded them, grew up out of existing academies for secondary education. The schools added more levels of education until they had full undergraduate programs. These colleges were often founded as a kind of paired institution with men’s colleges, the most famous example being St. Mary’s College down the road from Notre Dame. The women’s schools particularly provided a host of teachers for the growing primary and secondary schools that had been called into existence by that Baltimore Council. They also provided training that would satisfy the public schools where many Catholics found work.

A Coherent (and Thomistic) Reality

Chesterton accurately gauged the nation’s comparative interest in football over medieval philosophy, but philosophical developments were crucial to understanding the nature of Catholic higher education in the period after World War I. Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris is usually credited with restarting the study of the medieval schoolmen—and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular—after a couple of centuries of ignoring them. That isn’t quite true, as a movement to retrieve St. Thomas and scholastic methods of argument had been operating for several decades already, even in American circles! Yet, when he studied in Rome after entering the Catholic Church in 1845, St. John Henry Newman was shocked to find that the philosophy he learned was largely Cartesian. A century later, however, the movement known as “Neoscholasticism” or “Neothomism” was in full swing. And it had captured the hearts and minds of many scholars—particularly those of the authorities in charge of seminary and university education.

Gleason summarizes the advantages of this movement as providing: 1) a coherent understanding of the relationship between faith and reason; 2) a confidence in the ability of reason itself to reach knowledge of God without special revelation; and 3) an understanding of scholastic philosophy as a way of life. Gleason quotes a 1932 Jesuit document urging professors to “bring out clearly how Scholastic Philosophy is a stable, universal and certain system of thought, a real philosophy of life, something to which [students] can anchor all their views and thoughts and knowledge.”

The reality is that it largely succeeded in spectacular ways. From the 1930s until the 1960s, countless students came out of Catholic institutions with professional skills, a coherent Catholic worldview, and the confidence that Catholic teaching could explain and revolutionize the world. As Protestant historian Mark Noll wrote in a review of Gleason’s history, “A shorthand indication of the power of the Neo-Thomist synthesis is to note that it undergirded not only the social radicalism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, but also the popular apologetics of Bishop Fulton Sheen, as well as the profound reflections of John Courtney Murray, S.J., on church and state in the modern world.”

But problems lurked.

John Tracy Ellis, Land O’ Lakes, and the Search for Respect

While the period leading up to and including the 1960s included tremendous triumphs, there was dissatisfaction under the surface. Some academics resented what they considered the ham-handed approach to questions by some Neothomist scholars. Those in the camp itself were aware of the internecine battles between different camps whose interpretations of how Thomas should be taught conflicted. Was one a River Forest or a Laval Thomist? Did one favor Maritain or Gilson? Some lamented that there was not enough focus on academic excellence that would be recognized in the modern world. Historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis’s famous 1955 essay, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” lamented the “self-imposed ghetto mentality,” “their lack of industry and the habits of work,” and the aping of the generally anti-intellectual cast of American society as a whole.

Ellis’s lament that American Catholics were not as involved in the currents of American thought as they should be was eagerly received by many clerical and lay professors and academics. As the 1960s dawned, many of those who had chafed at the dogmatic teaching of the Church and the Neoscholastic atmosphere of the schools soon became convinced that the answer to all of Ellis’s problems was the former’s adjustment and the latter’s abandonment. Because the broader Catholic theological currents in the world were downplaying Thomas Aquinas, so too did Americans. Gone was the conviction that Thomas Aquinas’s thought was, as later said, the hardware that could run any software.

In 1967, after the Second Vatican Council, a group of Catholic university presidents, mostly Jesuit but led by Notre Dame’s then-president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, met in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, to formulate a statement about Catholic education. The resulting Land O’Lakes Statement declared that the truly “Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Of course, what this meant was that universities were to be autonomous with reference to the Catholic Church herself. Most Catholic universities were, over the next several decades, handed over from the religious orders and dioceses that had founded them to independent corporations that would have no obligations to the Church.

Conclusion: Small and Faithful vs. Large and Ambiguous (at Best)

Post-1960s Catholic education has been a story of decline and new beginnings. Co-education meant the closure or merging of many of the women’s colleges. Dumping Thomism as the intellectual framework for thought and legally separating from the Catholic Church meant that most Catholic universities lost their intellectual center and wandered away from a coherent Catholic identity.

Of all the large national Catholic universities in the U.S., the two that have retained the strongest Catholic identity are CUA, which, as a Pontifical University, remains officially Catholic (not just, as many institutions say, “in the Catholic Tradition”), and Notre Dame, which is independent of the Holy Cross order that founded it but still a draw for Catholic students and scholars despite institutional inconsistency.

The future of serious Catholic higher education will most likely involve these universities. Above all, it will involve those small schools, few in number, on the Newman Guide to faithful Catholic educational institutions. Some schools on the list were founded before the 1960s (University of St. Thomas in Houston) and some after (Thomas Aquinas). While they have different emphases and curricula, they all seek to have a relationship of some sort with the visible Church and take seriously the connection between authentic Catholic teaching and intellectual excellence.

David P. Deavel is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, a senior contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, and co-editor of  Solzhenitsyn and American Culture (Notre Dame, 2020).