This past summer I did a column congratulating Boston College for initiating new graduate-level programs to assist priests, sisters and lay people to better manage and administer our parishes and organizations.
The Boston Globe reported that the three-year program offers a joint Master's degree in business administration and pastoral ministry, while the new two-year program offers a Master's degree in pastoral ministry with a concentration in church management (July 1). For either degree, students will take classes in both religious subjects and management and participate in a colloquium on the integration of religion and business.
I pointed out in a column the following month that, while Notre Dame is likely to regain its dominance over Boston College in football, it may "soon be eating Boston College's dust in this far more important challenge facing Catholic universities and colleges everywhere."
I should not have been surprised that there was a bit of a reaction here on my home turf --- defensive, yes, but not without merit.
At the same time, I've been writing this column now for over 40 years (since July 8, 1966) and have been at Notre Dame since August 1980. One might also have expected an occasional reaction to the many positive columns written about Notre Dame (there have been at least 25 on our former president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, alone --- all laudatory). To be sure, we tend to complain when something doesn't hit us right, and not to notice the rest.
Given the summer schedules of diocesan papers, the column in question did not even appear in some of my subscribing publications. However, I am returning here to its central plot-line because of an important address to the faculty that Notre Dame's president, Father John Jenkins, delivered at the end of September.
Most of the talk was devoted to Notre Dame's Catholic character and mission. True to Father Hesburgh's own core agenda throughout his 35 years as president, Father Jenkins assured the faculty that he is committed to maintain and enhance the Catholic identity of the university while working just as hard to make it a premier teaching-and-research institution.
As Father Hesburgh often insisted, you cannot have a great "Catholic" university unless you also have a great "university."
One may wonder how Boston College will take Father Jenkins' implied point that Notre Dame is the leading Catholic university today, and, in quoting an unnamed Harvard professor, that if Notre Dame should somehow fail in its distinctive mission, no other Catholic university could take its place.
Parenthetically, perhaps when B.C. finally confers an honorary degree on Father Hesburgh, one of only a handful of Catholic institutions not to do so, his legion of admirers here and abroad may be more inclined to listen.
Father Jenkins identified three dimensions of Notre Dame's Catholic mission. First, an education consisting not only of knowledge and certain technical and professional skills, but also in the formation of moral character.
Second, placing special emphasis on certain areas of research and on contributing to the intellectual life of the wider culture. "In an academic world where one often detects an axiomatic secularism and a selective moral neutrality," Father Jenkins said, "we strive to offer another perspective."
Third, service to the Catholic Church. And this is where my August column comes in. In praising Boston College's new initiative on church administration and management, I noted that it raised the bar for the rest of us in Catholic higher education, including Notre Dame, which is inclined, often with good reason, to present itself as the lead horse in the Catholic Derby.
In the interest of balance, I wish to highlight here some of the items that Father Jenkins cited in his address as evidence of Notre Dame's multiple services to the Catholic Church: our "superb theology department," the Institute for Church Life, the Satellite Theological Education Program, a distance learning program for pastoral ministers and other adult Catholics, the Kroc Peace Institute's co-founding with Catholic Relief Services of The Catholic Peace-building Network, the Alliance for Catholic Education, which prepares young people to teach in under-staffed Catholic schools, and our College of Business' Master in Non-Profit Administration, a program that Father Hesburgh established over 50 years ago and which is similar to the new program at Boston College but apparently with less theological content. I regret that I did not at least mention that program in the previous column, notwithstanding space-constraints.
Notre Dame's defenders also need to remember, however, that the percentage of Catholic faculty here dropped from 86 percent when Father Hesburgh retired in 1987 to a hair over 50 percent today. To his credit, Father Jenkins is determined to address that problem. Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
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