ARTICLES

Everything Accepted but Orthodoxy

SANTA CLARA AND ST. MARY'S EMBRACE SECULARISM, SAY STUDENTS, PROFESSORS

By George Neumayr

Seven years have passed since the publication of Pope John Paul II's encyclical on the nature of a Catholic university, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, yet the crisis in Bay Area Catholic higher education continues, say several professors and students at Santa Clara University and St. Mary's College.

These sources say that the Jesuit university and Christian Brothers college belong less to the heart of the Church than to a modern academic ethos obsessed with pluralism and political correctness.

"The Catholic identity of Santa Clara is a thing of the past. It is false advertising," says a long-time Santa Clara professor. "The secularizing forces are in the ascendant," admits a St. Mary's professor.

According to Santa Clara's public relations department, seven percent of its faculty identifies itself as Catholic. At St. Mary's, the percentage of Catholics on the faculty is unknown, because, according to a St. Mary's public relations officer, "We're a Catholic school so we can't discriminate on the basis of religion."

Catholic theology is now hidden in "religious studies" departments--taught not above but beside other religions. Like a curious but irrelevant artifact, Catholic theology is treated as an optional "branch of anthropology," says a Santa Clara professor. Consequently, students can graduate from the schools without taking a single course in Catholicism. Instead they can take such courses as: "Bible and Ecology," "Chicano Fem. Approach to Religon," "Aids, Religion and American Culture," "Magic, Science, and Religion," "Theology and the Media," and "Psychology and the Sacred."

Brother Michael Meister, the chair of St. Mary's Religious Studies department, defends this pluralistic approach, saying, "If our primary concern was to educate Roman Catholics in the Roman Catholic faith that [policy of not requiring Catholic courses] would be a problem....I don't think the college sees its mission as primarily educating Catholics in the Roman Catholic faith....If all students were required to take courses in Catholic doctrine I think you would have a kind of mess on your hands....I think you would have any number of students who would balk at the idea."

To the extent that Catholicism does exist as these schools, it possesses a predominantly dissenting form, say students.

"It is not much different than a low church Lutheran parish," says a Santa Clara student. "When I got here I was pretty suprised."

"I had a couple of run-ins with a heretical nun," he continues. "This was in the [Santa Clara] RCIA group....I made some mention of our inborn sin and she immediately stopped me and said, 'Excuse me,' and proceeded to inform me that the Church had reworked all that and original sin was no longer a belief in the Roman Catholic Church....And then she proceeded to make light of the fact that when she was a child people would rush as quickly as possible to get their child baptized because they wanted to wash the mark of original sin away."

"I said, 'Sister, well, that's not what the catechism says,' and brought out the catechism and read it to her. And she said, 'I don't care what the catechism says. The catechism wasn't written by theologians.'"

In an Introduction to Christian Traditions course, this Santa Clara student was instructed by his Jesuit professor, "We can read the resurrection as a metaphor." And, after complaining about the habitual omission of the creed at Santa Clara Masses, he was told by a liturgical director that the reason for its absence was "that some priests have theological difficulties with it." Now the student--tired of witnessing abuses like a priest reading the Koran in mass, the use of music from Disney's The Lion King, the inclusion of Gandhi in the Eucharistic prayer, and a female raising the chalice during the doxology--attends mass off campus.

"It is actually very saddening and very distressing when you are there," he says. "A lot of people are disillusioned with this stuff.... People want what they had before."

A conservative, non-Catholic St. Mary's nursing student says that after her experience with the Christian Brothers, "I don't see any reason to convert." In religious studies classes, she found herself taking more Catholic positions than the Christian Brothers: "When I tried to back up my arguments with Vatican II and the catechism, they just sort of laughed me off....It seems everything goes except orthodoxy." Angry, she asked a Christian Brother, "'Do you realize I am arguing for the Catholic faith and I'm not Catholic and you are?' He just laughed. He didn't take it seriously."

But the consequences of this blasé attitude towards Catholic education are serious, learned a St. Mary's professor recently: "I ran an experiment. In a class of 22 students, of whom 21 were nominal Catholics, I simply put to them the question: Give me your account of the following terms, Real Presence. I got two answers that would be consistent with the catechism of the Catholic Church."

TOP