American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967-1990

1995 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 881
Author(s):  
Donald E. Frey ◽  
Alice Gallin
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Catholic Higher Education ◽  
American Catholic

Catholic Colleges, the Courts, and the Constitution: A Tale of Two Cases

1989 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Richard Preville
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Catholic Higher Education ◽  
Catholic Colleges ◽  
Government Aid ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Direct Government ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Impact

Of the forces that have shaped contemporary American Catholic higher education, few have been more generative or influential than the proceedings of two court cases which tested the constitutionality of direct government aid to sectarian and church-related colleges and universities. These two court cases were Horace Mann League v. Board of Public Works (1966) and Tilton v. Richardson (1971). The impact of these judicial rulings over the radical transformation and substantive reform of American Catholic higher education during the past quarter of a century is the subject of this article.

The End of an Era

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
New Left ◽  
Catholic Higher Education ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Catholic Colleges ◽  
Tectonic Plates ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
American Catholic

The coming together of the racial crisis, bitter internal divisions over the Vietnam War, campus upheavals, political radicalism associated with the New Left, the growth of the counterculture, and the emergence of new forms of feminism made the 1960s an epoch of revolutionary change for all Americans. But for American Catholics the profound religious reorientation associated with the Second Vatican Council multiplied the disruptive effect of all the other forces of change. This clashing of the tectonic plates of culture produced nothing less than a spiritual earthquake in the American church. Although the dust has still not fully settled, it was clear from an early date that the old ideological structure of Catholic higher education, which was already under severe strain, had been swept away entirely. As institutions, most Catholic colleges and universities weathered the storm. But institutional survival in the midst of ideological collapse left them uncertain of their identity. That situation still prevails. To explore it fully would require another book. Our task now is to review the emergence of the problem, sketch its general outlines, and point out why it marks the end of an era in the history of Catholic higher education. For a number of reasons, freedom became the central theme in American Catholic higher education in the early 1960s. As the most basic of American values, it was, of course, immensely attractive to the socially assimilated generation of younger Catholics for whom John F. Kennedy’s election and Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento vindicated the hopes of the earlier Americanists, whose travails Catholic historians had so recently explored. Moreover, the contemporaneous demand by African Americans for “Freedom Now” linked freedom to the religious idealism of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent crusade for civil rights. Freedom was, in addition, the polar opposite of the rigidity, formalism, and authoritarianism that had become so distasteful to American Catholic intellectuals; by contrast, it meshed beautifully with their growing insistence on the importance of individual subjectivity.

The Intellectual Context

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Catholic Higher Education ◽  
Catholic Colleges ◽  
Precise Relationship ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Medieval Universities ◽  
The University

Central to the intellectual revival that dominated Catholic higher education between World War I and the Second Vatican Council was the recovery of Scholastic philosophy and theology, particularly that of St. Thomas Aquinas. The “Scholastic Revival,” as it was called, began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and was officially endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. Although its influence was felt earlier, especially in seminaries, it did not affect American Catholic higher education in a really pervasive way until the 1920s. By the end of that decade, however, Neoscholasticism had become a “school philosophy” that served for Catholic colleges very much the same functions that Scottish common sense philosophy and Baconianism served for Protestant colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century. To understand how this came about, we must review the earlier phases of the revival and highlight the main features of Neoscholasticism as a system of thought, before attempting to link its popularization with other events and movements of the 1920s. The term Scholasticism refers broadly to the teaching and method of the “schoolmen,” that is, the philosophers and theologians who propounded their views at the medieval universities, especially at the University of Paris. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) is generally regarded as the outstanding figure among the Scholastics, and the revival of the nineteenth century aimed primarily at recovering his ideas and drawing upon them to establish Catholic teaching on a solid intellectual foundation. This effort involved a process of gradual clarification because the full richness of Thomas’s thought emerged only in the course of the historical investigations set off by the revival. The same is true of its relation to the thinking of other schoolmen and of later commentators, especially post-Reformation Scholastics like the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, who died in 1617. The virtually interchangeable use of the terms “Neothomism” and “Neoscholasticism” reflected the ambiguity that persisted well into the twentieth century as to the precise relationship between the thought of St. Thomas himself and that of the larger school of which he was the acknowledged master.

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