Posted on 09/22/2003 3:33:03 PM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
The new face of Roman Catholic higher education looks like Sean McNally, who is majoring in European history and literature at tiny Ave Maria College here.
Mr. McNally, 19, lives in Gabriel Hall, a residence for young men considering the priesthood. He regards himself as far more conservative than most of his elders.
"I went to a Catholic high school where I had to defend my faith to my professors," he says. "My principal was a lesbian living with her partner, and the priest [at the school] was a lunatic."
And that new face of Catholic colleges also looks like Arwen Mosher, 20, who after two years at the University of Michigan gave up a $6,000 engineering scholarship to take up theology studies at Ave Maria in January.
Not the most typical student -- she married at 19 rather than cohabit with her boyfriend -- she chose Ave Maria after checking out the University of Notre Dame.
"The students I stayed with didn't even believe in God," Mrs. Mosher says of Notre Dame. "There was a hostility to Catholicism."
At Michigan, she adds, "the faculty actively push students away from anything related to God and objective truth."
Conservative Catholic schools, along with evangelical Protestant colleges, are flourishing amid a U.S. enrollment surge as more baby boomers opt for values-based higher education for their children.
Increasing numbers of parents among the nation's 63 million Catholics are turning their backs on the traditional powerhouse Catholic universities. They are gravitating toward a new breed of college that aims to attract students who place God's truth, moral absolutes and loyalty to Pope John Paul II above parties, sexual hookups and winning football programs.
The trend has not gone unnoticed among orthodox Catholic groups with the wherewithal to found their own schools. All five Catholic colleges that opened in the past five years, or are set to do so by next year, are quite conservative, says Michael James, associate executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU).
"The startup institutions," he says, "have all aligned themselves [with] what they'd term fidelity to the magisterium [teachings] of the Catholic Church."
Students at these schools, and their instructors, wouldn't be caught dead attending Jesuit-founded Georgetown University, where a cardinal who briefly criticized homosexuality during a graduation speech in May drew protests from 70 faculty members. "Beyond the pale" is how one professor terms the venerable Washington institution, which opened in 1789.
Neither do these more-traditional students and professors honor Jesuit-founded Boston College, which has a support group for homosexuals and a "queer resources directory" on its Web site.
The "new conservative" student abhors the permissive, sometimes raunchy fare on other Catholic campuses: birth control and emergency contraception dispensed by health centers, liberal commencement speakers, theology professors who don't adhere to doctrine, tolerance of heavy drinking and premarital sex, even the countenancing of the X-rated play "The Vagina Monologues."
Patrick Reilly, founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, a campus-watchdog group in Reston, Va., identifies what he calls a fundamental challenge.
"[I]n the 10 years we've been working on this," he says, "we've not been able to [convince] Catholic educators to admit these things are problems that need to be addressed. Until they admit that, we do not expect significant changes."
Mr. Reilly's organization in March issued a study of graduating seniors at 38 Catholic colleges that showed higher approval or acceptance of abortion, casual sex and homosexuality compared with the attitudes of entering freshmen. The ACCU contested the methodology of the study, which also found that 9 percent of seniors had left the Catholic faith and a third said they don't pray.
Does the antidote mean a return to traditions and rites such as Lenten fasts, holy days and daily Mass?
Definitely, say administrators at Thomas Aquinas College, on 130 acres of eucalyptus trees and mustard fields just outside the dusty California town of Santa Paula. Nestled against the Los Padres National Forest 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the school's Spanish-mission revival architecture breathes tradition and stability.
Student life at Thomas Aquinas includes three Masses a day, nightly recitations of the Rosary and grace said before classes and meals. Processions on campus mark holidays honoring the Virgin Mary.
The 330 students bask in the disciplines of a place that does not allow T-shirts, jeans or sandals to be worn in class, where everyone also is addressed as "Miss," "Mrs." or "Mr."
The freshman classes of 102 students both this fall and last are the largest in the college's 32-year history. Twelve percent of graduates become priests, monks or nuns.
The curriculum at this "great-books school" centers on the most influential works of Western civilization. Amid math, philosophy and Latin tutorials, freshmen cut their teeth on the ancient Greeks who conceptualized democracy and Western thought: Euclid, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Plutarch, Thucydides, Aristophanes and Euripides.
Sophomore year tackles Rome's most-praised writers, among them Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus, along with patristic and medieval Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Dante and Chaucer. No electives or lectures here, simply class discussions in groups of 17, led by a professor.
"Great-books schools" -- there are only a relative few in the United States -- come under routine criticism for not providing specialized training. Thomas Aquinas College, however, promises to offer something far more valuable: grounding in logic and wisdom.
"We want to make people think," Aquinas President Thomas Dillon says. "We want them to dig to find reasons and causes. Students will ask each other to give an accounting for what they think, plus they carry on this interior dialectic."
The mission obviously resonates with some. Mark Belnick, in-house lawyer for Tyco International Ltd., donated much of a $2 million bonus to Aquinas in 2000.
Pia de Solenni, a fellow at the Family Research Council in her late 20s, says Aquinas was the only school her father agreed to pay for. He was disenchanted with his alma mater, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
"He told me, 'If Loyola were truly Catholic, Los Angeles would be a different place,' " she says.
Somewhat reluctantly, she enrolled at Aquinas.
"Truth was not opposed to the faith there," she says. "It's the first time you see that living the faith and being a reasonable person is the same thing. If it were not for Thomas Aquinas, I'd not be a practicing Catholic today."
Administrators at new-breed Catholic colleges interviewed by The Washington Times describe their role as similar to that of the monasteries of the Dark Ages: trying to maintain vestiges of civilization in the face of the barbarians of modernity.
In a time menaced by radical Islam and creeping secular humanism, these Catholic school administrators see their schools as outposts of the great ideals that formed Western civilization.
Exactly right. Sadly, the barbarians own and operate many of the schools faithful Catholics paid for long ago. One of my sons went to Georgetown, and he had to practically beg a resident priest to intervene to save a freshman roommate who was trying to kill himself. The official line was that "in loco parentis" no longer applied. As the years went on, that fact was increasingly evident--in curriculum as well as campus life.
Catholic parents today are torn between "value based" education (once) offered by catholic schools or the "gub'ment" institutions where radicals like GLSEN run rampant. Apparently, the only difference is that the catholic school charges big bucks for the privilege of teaching dissenting doctrine.
Ave Maria College is an up and rapidly growing CATHOLIC college, faithful to its heritage and teachings.
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