Earlier this year, Catholic sociologist Christian Smith took to the pages of First Things to say goodbye to his longtime employer. “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame,” a 5,300-word lament, duly rocketed around the internet, leaving contrails at which those interested in Catholic higher ed could, at first, only gape. To be sure, Smith was by no means the first Christian in history to complain that his Christian employer’s faith was nominal. Nevertheless, his essay disturbed the atmosphere. When the coiner of “moralistic therapeutic deism” addresses religiosity, one listens.
To read Smith’s article was to be brought into a state of significant agitation. Notre Dame “is a disappointment,” Smith wrote, and “hasn’t seriously tried” to reach its potential. Yes, “sustained engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition happens in pockets” on campus, “but leaders avoid the institutional efforts that would make this engagement consistent and integrated.”
Smith was by no means the first Christian in history to complain that his Christian employer’s faith was nominal. Nevertheless, his essay disturbed the atmosphere.
As a conservative Presbyterian with a cynical streak (but I repeat myself), I had always assumed that Notre Dame was woke, worldly, and wobbly, no more or less faithful to its founding mission than Harvard Divinity School or the United Methodists. Here, it seemed, was proof. If a hugely successful endowed chair was willing to state publicly that Notre Dame is “equivocal about [its] Catholic mission and make[s] decisions and pursue[s] practices that undermine it,” then surely no persuasive counterargument could be mounted.
Others were not so easily convinced. Writing in the National Catholic Reporter some weeks later, Notre Dame alumnus Chris Damian argued that Smith had “misse[d] many of the fundamental issues at hand” and that “his parting gift to his colleagues [was] a dump of despondency.” An authentic “Catholic university education,” Damian suggested, was still possible at Notre Dame if one “[sought] it out actively.”
Cathleen Kaveny and Robin Darling Young’s response in Commonweal gave even less quarter to Smith’s polemic. Declaring cheekily that Smith had “nailed his ninety-five theses to the doors of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart,” Kaveny and Young insisted that “Smith’s bitter critique of Notre Dame’s problems betray[ed] a fundamental misunderstanding of its reality.” While not without merit, the sociologist’s desire for “purity” in Catholic higher ed revealed a failure to appreciate that “nothing human is outside the reach and understanding of the Church.”
Notre Dame’s independent student newspaper, The Irish Rover, published a similarly dismissive roundup of faculty responses to Smith’s claims. According to Fr. Bill Miscamble, professor emeritus of history, “some of what Smith mention[ed] badly misse[d] the mark,” in large part by ignoring “the contributions of so many [professors] who labor to forge a distinctive Catholic university here.” Walter Nicgorski, professor emeritus of the program of liberal studies and political science, contended, simply, “I am not done with Notre Dame because God is not done with Notre Dame.”
Held in common by many of the responses to Smith’s piece was the observation that the sociologist had broken no new ground in his complaints. (Damian: “The failings [Smith] highlights … are not new to his tenure and are not unique to Notre Dame.”) Indeed, arguments about spiritual fidelity on Catholic campuses are at least as old as the 1967 “Land O’Lakes Statement,” produced at the request of Notre Dame’s then-president Father Theodore Hesburgh. Described by the Cardinal Newman Society as a “declaration of the independence of Catholic universities” (and characterized by the society as “appalling”), the statement renounced any “authority[,] lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Though Pope John Paul II would go on to repudiate Hesburgh’s work in 1990, the damage was already done. As the Cardinal Newman Society wearily notes, “many Catholic colleges and universities weakened their core curricula in favor of the Harvard model of electives and specialization.” Moreover, they “largely abandoned the project of forming young people for Christ outside the classroom.”
In a sense, we have been having the same argument for the last sixty years. Smith’s First Things outburst is merely the latest provocation. Among the twentieth century’s variations on the theme was James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light (1998), which considered in part (and deplored) the wave of secularization sweeping Catholic higher ed. Books such as Massimo Faggioli’s Theology and Catholic Higher Education (2024) have attempted to split the difference, condemning both the “neo-conservative ideologization of Catholicism” and the progressive inclination to see Catholic “tradition as wholly oppressive.”
One could spend days and weeks reading the polemics produced online:
- Stephen G. Adubato’s Substack lamenting “the shift of the Catholic university from a mission-minded institution … to a bureaucratic corporation moving commodities (students) along an assembly line in order to reach their bottom line”;
- David Trotter’s “Universities Adrift,” which argues that “Catholic colleges and universities are adrift, far away from their religious foundations in both word and practice”;
- George Weigel’s “A Catholic Fix for American Higher Education?,” a plea that “Catholic institutions of higher learning can lead the reform of college and university life: if they refuse to indulge the fashionable skepticism that has led to the corruption of so many campuses”;
- Gregory Kalscheur’s “Key Task for Catholic Higher Ed,” contending that “the Catholic intellectual tradition … is a living tradition, not a static traditionalism”;
- Jessica Swoboda’s explicitly leftist reflection on her Catholic education (“I had ceased to agree with the Church’s positions on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, gender and sexuality, premarital sex, and cohabitation before marriage”);
- William Donohue’s take on the Susan Ostermann affair;
- and many, many others.
Is all of this merely illustrative of Robert Conquest’s second law of politics, “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing”? No and yes. As Kaveny and Young imply in the Commonweal essay linked to above, Catholicism transcends contemporary political divides and cannot exclude progressivism to the extent that the Left’s prescriptions align with Church teaching. But also: a lot of Catholic universities have gotten really woke! Faithful donors, alumni, and faculty are not wrong to point out that fact and oppose it.
In the meantime, expect the long argument to continue. The question of what Catholic higher education is and is for will be with us as long as the Church and the university system endure. My take: The former should feed the latter … without being devoured by it.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and of From the Academy.
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