Theology and Catholic Higher Education: Beyond Our Identity Crisis

This book addresses the dismantling of Vatican II in our Catholic universities, the functional anti-Catholicism that now reigns in even "Catholic" higher education, and the loss of distinctive identity of what it means to be a Catholic thinker today.

There is a crisis in American Catholic higher education and it reflects an unease among those who used to identify as Catholic thinkers. Our problem is bigger than the collapse of ecclesial credibility and the behavior of the bishops, and it can't be blamed solely on politics. This book scrutinizes this crisis in detail.

Student enrollment is trending down for a variety of reasons--from perceptions about academic competitiveness and future employability to economic conditions related to the pandemic. But in seeking to address these challenges, many schools have put their Catholic identity at risk--namely, by positioning and marketing themselves as part of the mainstream liberal-progressive realm of higher education.

Of course, some conservative Catholic institutions have doubled down on Catholic identity, even if in ways that can be concerning. But these schools have a strong natural affinity with certain kinds of Catholics, as well as a supportive institutional partner in the clerical establishment. You could say that liberal-progressive Catholic higher education has no such "core strengths," and that may be partly its own doing. It has embraced deconstruction of the neo-Scholastic hegemony since Vatican II so fully that it's now suspicious of Catholic institutionalism of any kind. It has been too accommodating of the identity politics that have taken root since the 1960s.

Massimo Faggioli argues that the Catholic understanding of education needs new life. He has been working in the trenches as a teacher and thinker within the Catholic Church for three decades--first in Europe and then in the US--and he despairs that many of his colleagues now believe there is nothing left to the Catholic intellectual tradition--that is everything is now "post-confessional."

Included in Faggioli's argument is a close look at the papacy of Pope Francis. From Laudato si' to Fratelli tutti, it is clear that Francis is leading a movement that rejects Catholic exclusivism and neo-fundamentalism, that critiques neoliberal capitalism, that seeks development of doctrine on the death penalty and the dismantling of a moral rigorism in the service of a bourgeois and conventional Catholicism. This fits well with efforts emphasizing diversity and inclusion as part of a Catholic identity that goes beyond what the canon of Western civilization contains. Yet, the relief brought about by Pope Francis's disavowal of the culture-war agenda can sometimes work as a kind of functional anti-Catholicism, in which Catholicism and Catholic culture are taken seriously only insofar as they support the technocratic paradigm of the contemporary university or one side of the two-party ideological agenda.

Paraphrasing Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, Faggioli says that the university is one of the places where the Church does its thinking, and if we lose the "Catholic" university, we will be left with only a reactionary, non-thinking Church.