NAPA, California, July 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — Catholic institutions can preserve their identity by ensuring “a majority” of their faculty are Catholic, the president of The Catholic University of America (CUA) said last week.
Speaking at the annual Napa Institute Conference, CUA President John Garvey said, “Building a Catholic university is not a complicated thing.”
“The plan was laid out in 1990 by St. John Paul in the apostolic constitution ‘Ex Corde Ecclesiae,’ a document that runs about 50 pages,” he continued. “But the kernel of the argument is in four short lines near the end. St. John Paul says for a university to be Catholic a majority of its faculty must be Catholic.”
Maintaining an institution’s Catholic identity this way isn’t incompatible with academic freedom, Garvey said. He noted that history has shown intentional Catholic communities have the potential to be “distinctive and wonderful.”
Pope St. John Paul II’s advice to hire Catholics is a basic blueprint for universities, Garvey said.
“If the university follows it, the university will be Catholic,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it won’t.”
Since becoming president of CUA in 2010, Garvey has earned praise for his efforts to strengthen the university’s Catholic identity and his vocal opposition to government threats to religious freedom.
Changes “ushered in since 1998 during the presidencies of Bishop David O’Connell and John Garvey” have greatly benefited CUA’s Catholic identity and academic prowess, according to the Cardinal Newman Society, which recommends the school.
“Building a Catholic university … is a recognition that in order to create a distinctive Catholic intellectual culture we need to build an intellectual community that is committed to our Catholic worldview,” Garvey said. “A shared commitment to Catholic ideas about creation, and providence of human beings, and human beings made in the image of God will spur creativity and the development of a culture that expresses those ideas.”
In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope St. John Paul II wrote:
… all the basic academic activities of a Catholic University are connected with and in harmony with the evangelizing mission of the Church: research carried out in the light of the Christian message which puts new human discoveries at the service of individuals and society; education offered in a faith-context that forms men and women capable of rational and critical judgment and conscious of the transcendent dignity of the human person; professional training that incorporates ethical values and a sense of service to individuals and to society; the dialogue with culture that makes the faith better understood, and the theological research that translates the faith into contemporary language.