Catholic Universities and Truth in Advertising

Human Events ^ | 5/17/05 | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

[CathNY]

The poet Robert Frost once described a liberal as someone who refuses to take his own side in an argument. He could have been speaking about all too many Catholic universities today, where you’d have about as much chance of hearing a commencement address delivered by a prominent Catholic who loves the traditional faith as you would Ted Nugent doing a public service announcement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

For decades, Catholics have wondered why, on truth-in-advertising grounds alone, such institutions continue to be permitted to identify themselves as Catholic.

Last week, the Archdiocese of New York finally withdrew the Catholic designation from Marymount Manhattan College, which refused to rescind its invitation to New York Senator Hillary Clinton to deliver its Commencement address and receive an honorary degree. It was Senator Clinton’s support for abortion that brought down the archdiocese’s ire, though of course her entire ideology renders her completely unfit to address a Catholic institution.

The Catholic left is consistently apologetic in its interaction with the secular world, and eager to show that they share that world’s impatience and disgust with some of the Church’s teachings. Far from attracting non-Catholics to the Church, these genuflections to the world only make them wonder what the point is in belonging to a Church whose entire tradition is evidently so worthy of contempt. As one writer puts it, “I would rather belong to a Church that is 500 years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to change, than I would to a Church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.”

What, after all, is there to be so ashamed of in being a Catholic? Why the timid deference to a secular world whose culture delights in vulgarity for its own sake, that considers itself bold and cheeky for reality television that ridicules the marital bond, and that has given us, in place of the Gothic cathedral and the Pietà, a bunch of insufferable nobodies passing off piles of junk as “art”?

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, built Western civilization as we know it. The university system, a unique contribution of the West to the world, grew out of the Church. The modern idea of international law developed from the work of Fr. Francisco de Vitoria and other sixteenth-century priest-professors in Spanish universities. No longer do historians of economic thought date the origins of the “dismal science” to Adam Smith and the eighteenth century; more and more it is sixteenth-century Catholic philosophers who are being called “the founders of modern scientific economics” (in the words of the great economist Joseph Schumpeter).

We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, such that the mainstream view is now that the Church played an important role in the development of modern science. Some scholars, like Stanley Jaki, even say that it was certain aspects of the Christian worldview that account for the unique success of science in the Western world.

How many people know that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was a priest, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli? Or that the man who discovered the diffraction of light, and gave the phenomenon its name, was another priest, Fr. Francesco Grimaldi? Or that to this day the American Geophysical Union honors exceptional young geophysicists with an annual medal named after yet another priest, the great seismologist Fr. J.B. Macelwane?

Likewise, how many people know that 35 craters on the moon are named after Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians, or that it was the Jesuits who spread Western science to places ranging from India and China to Ecuador and the Philippines?

Modern scholars like Brian Tierney are now saying that even the idea of individual rights, one of the distinguishing features of Western culture, can be traced back to Church lawyers of the twelfth century!

Then there is Catholic charity. Catholic charity did not simply surpass the charitable work of the ancient world, though of course it did. It totally transformed the world’s outlook on helping the poor. No longer, as in ancient Greece and Rome, was charity dispensed in order to call attention to oneself or to place others in your debt. With the Church’s emphasis on the sacredness of human life came the idea of serving the poor with a cheerful heart, expecting nothing in return.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of what we as Westerners owe to the Catholic Church.

Now why, when you are part of a tradition as rich and extraordinary as this, would you feel it necessary to look outside that tradition for a commencement speaker – and to decide upon, of all people, Hillary Clinton? Why not instead explore and plumb the depths of this beautiful tradition, and spare your hapless students another tissue of platitudes from a liberal mediocrity who would have merited the contempt of any generation but our own?

How Marymount Manhattan’s administration would answer this question I do not know. What I do know is that the Archdiocese of New York was absolutely right to pose another question: why do you still wish to associate yourself with the Church if you are utterly contemptuous of everything she stands for?

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery, 2005).

[Steve_Seattle]

The new pope has already shown he's serious about insisting that Catholic schools maintain their Catholic identity, and I think it's quite possible that in the next few years several American colleges will either renounce their Catholic affiliation or have it stripped from them. Georgetown and Boston College come to mind.

[Stoigo]

Excellent article! And you can add Brother Gregor Mendel to the list - his work was instrumental in the understanding of genetics.

[RexBeach]

Good piece by Mr. Woods.

It also reminds us all of the old axiom that "No good deed goes unpunished."

Catholicism is a wonderful religion and the world would be greatly diminished without it.

[HOYA97]

Being a Georgetown Grad, I can tell you the reason that their is not a higher visisbility of the religion is that the school is run by the society of Jesus, AKA the Jesuits. They are viewed as the most liberal element within the church. They have a moniker that has stuck with them for generations; The Black Priests of Rome. They will not give up thier network of American Univerities no matter who is pope.

I can only hope that proper pressure is put to bear on this order to reign them in.

[Pyro7480]

Catholicism is a wonderful religion and the world would be greatly diminished without it.

Thanks for those kind words!

[American Quilter]

Georgetown and Boston College come to mind.

Prof. Mike Adams (UNC-Wilmington) has written several columns about such colleges, including Marquette University and Gonzaga University Law School.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Prof. Mike Adams (UNC-Wilmington) has written several columns about such colleges, including Marquette University and Gonzaga University Law School."

You can also include the Seattle University law school, which is way left. Just the other day an SU prof wrote an op-ed column criticizing Bush's judicial nominees because they don't support abortion and gay marriage.

[Cicero]

This is, of course, true. The fact that western science and technology were born in the middle ages, not the Renaissance, was well documented by Lynn Thorndike many years ago. Crucial inventions were the stirrup, the horse collar (which allows deep plowing and opened up new lands for agriculture which could not be used earlier, and the water mill, which was the only source of mechanical power until the invention of the steam engine. The water mill was developed almost entirely by monks, especially the Cistercian order.

Later inventions such as the printing press also owed a debt to the Church. The first book printed was the Guttenberg Bible, and it was printed in a monastery. I have a 1520 edition of Dante which was also, typically, printed by a monastic press in Venice.

Why did science develop in the west but not elsewhere? Because Christianity urged several crucial principles: 1) The basic rationality and goodness of the universe, created through the agency of the Second Person of the Trinity known in John I:1 as the Logos; 2) Freedom of the will, aided and enabled by grace; 3) The belief that God is fundamentally good, loving, benevolent, and wishes the best for his human creatures. In contrast the pagan world was capricious, dark, magical, unpredictable, and governed by the whims of selfish gods who constantly quarreled with one another, envied man, and refused him freedom. Where it all came from was unknown, since there was no Creator in the Jewish or Christian sense.

[murphE]

Thomas Woods ping

[Salvation]

Thanks for the article.

[Fred Hayek]

Stanley Jaki - now there's a name I have not heard in a long time. Is he still around, if anyone here knows? He spoke at a New York chapter meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, meeting was at the King's College at Briarcliff Manor. At the time he was teaching at Seton Hall University. Had much to say about so-called "scientific socialism" (none of it good, thought the Soviets had good engineers, but politics poisoned the science there. Any scientific achievements there were in spite of the Marxists)

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

The colleges and universities which have slipped under the wacky control of the anti-Catholic liberal lunatic fringe should return the property to the church. The anti-Catholic liberal faculty members should look for jobs elsewhere. They have NO RIGHT to the property, the buildings, or the students. The question that should be directed to them is: "What are you doing at a Catholic college?"

It's an extreme degree of spiritual perversion that they insist on using consecrated ground as the podium to promote their anti-Catholic agenda.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

From the article: Why the timid deference to a secular world whose culture delights in vulgarity for its own sake, that considers itself bold and cheeky for reality television that ridicules the marital bond, and that has given us, in place of the Gothic cathedral and the Pietà, a bunch of insufferable nobodies passing off piles of junk as “art”?

That's great. Puts it in perspective - "insufferable nobodies passing off piles of junk as art." That's the mediocrity of secular modernity in a nutshell. Ugliness, ignorance, vulgarity, and stupidity. Liberal modern barbarism.

[Steve_Seattle]

Belated reply: The Catholic Church is not a unified corporate or economic entity. Each diocese and each religious order owns and controls its own property. So what you suggest couldn't happen, i.e., the apostate colleges don't have their property on loan from the church, they own it themselves.

[SuziQ]

the apostate colleges don't have their property on loan from the church, they own it themselves.

That is true, but in order to publicly bill itself as a CATHOLIC college, they have to insure that their teaching of the faith whether in their Theology Dept. or Religion Dept. fully comports to Church teaching and is free of error. That does not mean that alternate points can't be made in class, but when it comes down to brass tacks, the Catholic Church teaching is made paramount. If a college does not do this, it's right to call itself Catholic can, and SHOULD be revoked.

[SuziQ]

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

I'll have to look for this book!