Catholic Colleges Define Down Their Catholic Identity
September 19, 2016 Anne Hendershott 1 Comment
In an essay on Catholic higher education published in First Things before his death in 2009, Fr. Richard Neuhaus wrote: “When a school is haggling over its mission statement, it is a sure sign that it has already lost its way.” While Fr. Neuhaus never taught on a Catholic campus, he understood that debating over the mission statement was just the start of the defining down of the Catholic identity itself.
Identifying the strategies that some Catholic colleges have used to redefine themselves, Fr. Neuhaus wrote that describing themselves as having been “shaped” by their “Catholic heritage,” or their “historic Catholic tradition,” was a sign that the institutions were distancing themselves from the Church. And, he noted that some referred only to the name of the founding religious order rather than the Church itself.
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/09/catholic-colleges-define-down-their-catholic-identity/
