Should the Pope take U.S. Catholic educators to school?

The Associated Press

Pope Benedict XVI is set to visit the United States next month.

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Should the Pope take U.S. Catholic educators to school?

Are American Catholic schools more American than Catholic? Or are they just independent? After years of Vatican frustration over what it views as the failure of many U.S. Catholic colleges to adhere to church teachings, school leaders are expecting a rebuke from Pope Benedict XVI during his American visit next month.

The pope is scheduled to meet with more than 200 top Catholic school officials from across the country. The gathering will come amid debate over teachings and campus activities that bishops have slammed as violating Catholic doctrine, such as a Georgetown University theologian's questioning whether Jesus offers the only road to salvation and a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" at Notre Dame.

Should U.S. Catholic schools be more catholic? Or should academic freedom trump religion, even at religious schools?

Ben likes: The problem at Notre Dame

John Mark Reynolds/Scriptorum Daily

Must one allow sin, blasphemy and the celebration of the unholy, to live the examined life? Aquinas did not think so. Socrates did not either. What does the President of Notre Dame know that they did not?

If she wants to engender controversy, Notre Dame could refuse the trendy for the traditional. She could be an alternative place where men and women freely choose chastity, modesty, and dignity. In short, she could be a place where the archaic values of the culture of Catholics in 1963 would receive a hearing, even more radical would be to become a place where Pope Benedict’s ideas and world view were the norm for academic study.

Joel likes: Theologians at risk?

Richard P. O'Brien/Academe

Is there not perhaps a middle course between the imposition of, and acquiescence in, mandates, on the one hand, and outright indifference or open defiance by faculty and administration alike, on the other? There is, and it is being followed already in such leading Catholic universities as Notre Dame and Boston College and in so many other Catholic institutions like them.

Catholic higher education in the United States has not been a failure, and it is not in danger of becoming so. Nor is it in danger of losing its Catholic soul. It has produced the best educated laity in the entire history of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church in the United States is a more spiritually vibrant and faith-full church because of this high level and quality of education.