What is a Catholic university? I think the central message of the papal encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesiae can be summarized in two ideas, mission and resource adequacy; in two sentences:
1. A Catholic university is the place where the church intellectually engages the world.
2. To do so, it ought to have at least one faculty person in every department who faithfully integrates questions of faith and field in their research and teaching.
The world and our understanding of it changes in ways that affect every dimension of life. While eternal principles such as the omnipotence and transcendence of God and the dignity of the human person may not change, our understanding of human life, and the best means to live out our principles may.
Consequently, the Church needs places in which real reflection can be made in real time. That is what Catholic universities exist to do. Like every other university, we do research and teaching, but some of that is done as part of the particularly Catholic dimension of directly engaging questions of faith and field.
Further, since changes occur in every discipline, every department ought to have at least one person capable of engaging the world in that area. This minimal requirement is quite practical. On the one hand, intellectual engagement is best done by people in the disciplines who know the field. On the other, this doesn’t require that every, or even most, department members engage in such work.
In many ways, this type of mission is already widely accepted for other types of schools. Howard University strives to have at least one African-American in each department who specializes in questions of race and the field. Wellesley College seeks to have at least one woman in each department who specializes in questions of gender and that discipline. A Catholic university provides a greater consideration of faith than would occur in a typical school, just as Howard and Wellesley provide a place for greater examination of race and gender. And just as state schools devote some of their teaching and research to the needs of the state that funds them, each Catholic university bears some responsibility to the people of God to provide the unique intellectual environment needed to insure the Church can continuously dialogue with the world.
We also owe it to our students. As they go out into the world, they can best live up to the vocations God has given them if we have helped them form a healthy understanding of their discipline. To not provide this integration at all, or to leave it up to the theology department alone, is to imply that such integration cannot be done, and perpetuates the belief that what one learns on Sunday has no relevance to the work one does Monday through Friday.
Some examples from economics may illustrate the many ways such integration could occur. Moral questions regarding markets often fall into two categories: material justice, and the spiritual issue of how markets affect character and society and how character matters for economic behavior. Today these categories are linked more than ever.
In terms of well-being, Nobel winner Robert Fogel argues that in the developed countries material conditions rose so fast in the 20th century that we are now increasingly confronted with the challenge that material well-being is only a poor indicator of overall well-being. At the intersection of psychology and economics, findings that beyond basic goods, additional material gains provide little additional happiness compared to marriage, religious faith and practice, charitable work, or productive activity, have prompted people such as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to propose national well-being accounts beyond mere GDP.
In terms of justice, i.e. the distribution and determination of income and wages, in a world where human capital matters far more than physical capital, human agency matters far more than ever before. The rise of human capital to be 65-75 percent of the productive power of our economy underscores, as John Paul wrote, that the most important resource is people not things. But human capital is not merely knowledge that can be stuffed into people as inputs into machines. It involves capacity to work with others and entrepreneurial vision and creativity. Even knowledge must be something people want to make the effort to learn. As Nobel winner James Heckman shows, people’s willingness to build those capacities is greatly shaped by how much they want to learn and how much effort they want to put into productive efforts and social interaction (including with family). Given this greater role for human agency, Fogel argues that “spiritual resources” (essentially a combination of virtues and worldview) are far more important determinants of both market outcomes and capacity of living a good life. As he writes, “The most serious threats to egalitarian progress-certainly, the most intractable forms of poverty-are related to the unequal distribution of spiritual (immaterial) resources.” Thus efforts to raise well-being will have to be focused on social capital and spiritual resources.
While our current recession probably has less to do with moral failure than with the distortions of regulation, financial complexity, and interest rates kept too low for too long, there is no doubt the term “moral failure’s” older meaning applies here to some extent. Circumstances arose in which some people, from businesses to individual homeowners, took actions that went beyond imprudent to downright greedy. Does that imply the market is uniquely bad in undermining morality? Far from it.
We have had similar bubbles before with similar effects. More importantly, other economic systems have had far worse outcomes on society. Many of the 20th century’s worst horrors were driven by regimes (Communist, Fascist, Nazi) that rejected the classical free-market order specifically to avoid the impacts they thought it would have on social justice and morality. The results were horrendous economically, politically and morally: 100 million dead under communism alone, wars from Nazism and Fascism. Alexander Yakovlev, director of propaganda for the Soviet Union who later rejected Marxism and ultimately became Gorbachev’s intellectual point man in reform, forcefully argued that bad as communism was economically, its worst impact was destroying the moral ethos and social relations.
This last point is especially important for Christians, not to defend markets, but as a defense of the importance of Christian worldview. Proponents of those other systems naively believed that if you simply changed the political/economic arrangements, people would be good and society would function harmoniously. Pope John Paul II, who lived under both systems, knew better. Having seen the human failings induced by communism and capitalism, he argued that if you see the same problems under both systems, the cause must be philosophical, not economic, in origins. Thus he repeatedly emphasized that while economic arrangements matter, the philosophical view of human existence is most critical for society. That is precisely what Christianity and Christian institutions can help to bring to the world.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Spring 2009 edition of Mount Magazine
Copyright © 2009 by John Larrivee. This article may not be reproduced in any form without the author’s express written permission. Posted on A&M Blog with Author’s permission.
John Larrivee
Associate Professor of Economics
Department of Business, Accounting, and Economics
Mount St. Mary’s University
Emmitsburg, MD 21727
301-447-5396 x4066
Will minimum approach of one “faith and field” person per department be adequate for the tasks of engagement?
Well said – the opportunities to incorporate Catholic doctrine into academics are numerous and can be painless for the students. The responsibility lies with university presidents who must place the catholicism of the school on a par with the academics – or the prestige -of the school.
Thanks for your comment Patti. I agree that university presidents have responsibility for promoting Catholic identity within the Catholic university. I think too, though, that individual scholars should share in this responsibility. What about the mandatum? How is that being used now? National Catholic Register at one time offered a ranking of Catholic universities. Here’s a link, but it requires a subscription. http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/7457