EDITORIAL: Catholic colleges would do well to tap the wisdom of the latest doctor of the Church.
The Register’s annual Catholic Identity College Guide provides high-school students and their parents with information to help them choose a faithful Catholic institution that will form them spiritually as well as intellectually, as they prepare to enter adult life.
The stakes are high — for students as well as the schools offering to educate them.
With the dawning of the artificial intelligence era, U.S. Catholic colleges and universities, like all institutions of higher education, must reexamine the capacity of many of their core fields of study to provide graduates with durable jobs, while at the same time continuing the religious formation begun by their parents. While AI has immense potential to serve humanity, it could undermine the value of many academic degrees because of the technology’s capacity to displace workers in numerous professional areas that previously seemed immune from automation.
Complicating matters for these schools is the so-called “demographic cliff,” a steady decline in the number of high-school graduates that is already exerting downward pressure on enrollments.
The Catholic colleges highlighted in our guide must grapple with these realities without compromising their all-important fidelity to the Church’s magisterium. As they rise to meet this challenge, they would do well to tap the wisdom of St. John Henry Newman, the brilliant 19th-century English cardinal and educator who was named a doctor of the Church in July by Pope Leo XIV. The designation will be proclaimed officially on Nov. 1.
In his seminal work The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman explained that the central purpose of a university isn’t to provide its students with future employment opportunities, important though that objective is. Its primary purpose, he asserted, is to expose maturing minds to a broad range of human knowledge, encompassing a variety of intellectual disciplines, and teach them how to think clearly and effectively as they encounter and discuss these significant topics.
Armed by this intellectual foundation, they are now vastly better equipped to engage with whatever professional occupation they pursue. More generally, they have been endowed with an enduring reservoir of knowledge about important matters and empowered with the capacity to reason intelligently about all aspects of life.
But this educational vision can be fully manifested only at a Catholic university, Cardinal Newman argued. That’s because at authentically Catholic colleges, where the love of Jesus is lived out in all aspects of campus life, human reason can be elevated to its highest level, courtesy of its integration with the transcendental truths communicated by the Catholic magisterium.
Right reason, combined with Catholic truth. That is precisely the tool that will be most useful when it comes to sorting out how to respond to the AI challenge and all the other complex issues of contemporary life that will confront the incoming classes of college graduates.
St. John Henry Newman stressed two things as keys to upholding a university’s Catholic identity. The first is the presence of a solid theological faculty, and the second is a strong connection to the institutional Church.
Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”), St. John Paul II’s 1990 apostolic constitution for Catholic higher education, was strongly infused with Cardinal Newman’s thinking. So it’s no surprise that one of its central provisions is the requirement that all theology professors seek a mandatum from their local bishop, acknowledging the professor is teaching “within the full communion of the Catholic Church.”
It goes without saying that all 53 institutions in our Catholic Identity College Guide fulfill the mandatum requirement. But it’s a canard to claim this somehow forces them into an academic straitjacket that invariably constrains what and how they teach.
These colleges are not cookie-cutter institutions. They embody a broad range of educational approaches and offer a striking variety of programs. But they are united collectively by a crucial shared goal: to educate their students to the highest possible educational standards, in a vibrantly Catholic context.
In selecting any one of them, prospective students and their parents can be confident they have made a wise and faith-filled choice.
