Is Boston College still Catholic? 70% of students and over half the professors claim to be. We have Jesuits, Masses, and a campus ministry. If this doesn’t make a school Catholic, what would?
Believing in Catholicism would be a good start. If you asked students and professors if they believe 1.) Christ is God risen from the dead, and 2.) The Catholic Church is the church He founded, a vanishingly small proportion would affirm this. Boston College is rapidly becoming a secular university with a Catholic subculture.
How did things get this way? At some point, we lost confidence in Christ and His Church. It is not that we apostatized, but somewhere along the line we doubted that God could have the school succeed if we maintained our Catholic identity. Then the compromises began.
We engaged in a great sleight of hand, swapping “Catholic University” for “University founded in the Ignatian tradition,” safely burying anything objectionable in the past. We talk about the Jesuit values of service, while conveniently sweeping aside the Catholic call to holiness. I suspect that for many leaders in our school, this is not a bug, but a feature.
Nowhere is this more visible than in our admissions department, which practically has the policy of downplaying the faith. I have overheard many of our tour guides explain to prospective students how faith “won’t be pushed on you” at Boston College.
To speak plainly, if Christ is real then what purpose does this university have but to help introduce students to that truth? What is the point of having a theology core? Why bother with a perspectives program? A core curriculum only makes sense on the supposition that the university has wisdom the student lacks, and therefore bears the responsibility to introduce them to it and force them to grapple with it. Our souls will be judged according to how well we carry out this mission (Js. 3:1).
Steve Jobs once wrote that, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” That is the exact idea behind the Core and behind being a Catholic university in the first place. Between philosophy and theology the university has 12 credit hours to make its case for the Catholic tradition. Most students hate the commitment at first, but most people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
If we want to save our Catholic identity, what we need to do as a university is commit to getting these four classes right. No more hiring atheists to teach theology. No more teaching freshmen that the Bible is a myth and that those who believe otherwise, “aren’t the brightest bulbs” (I heard a nun teach this). The world is awash in relativism and is in a desert of meaning. Here we are holding the answers to that crisis but refusing to share them with the students because we “don’t want to force anything on them.” My math professor didn’t have any problem forcing Pythagoras on me; if we believe Christ is real then we should teach so. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” If we teach them what the Church really stands for and give them meaning and truth, students will respond to that.
Concretely, here is how we can fix the core, bring students to Christ, and preserve our Catholic identity: fix our hiring. There are thousands of educated and passionate Catholic graduates in philosophy, theology, and the humanities who love the Catholic faith but cannot find work. Instead, BC hires people who hate everything it stands for and can hardly bear to work in a room with a crucifix. Stop hiring these people. We don’t have to engage in unpopular layoffs. Rather, each time a professor leaves, replace them with a passionate Catholic. Most of the adjuncts responsible for the core could be replaced in a matter of years without causing a stir or ending up in the news.
US News and World Report probably wouldn’t notice, but I guarantee the students would. We would finally start to see conversions, and potentially prevent hundreds of deconversions. Humanities majors would expand, which cost the school a fraction of the money. In time, Boston College could gain a reputation for its life-changing core and Catholic approach to the humanities, bringing in a whole class of students who currently overlook BC.
Nick Letts is a former “radical atheist” who converted to Protestantism as a senior in High School, and then converted to Catholicism as a Junior in college. He studies philosophy in the Morrissey College, and loves nothing more than to curl up with a good book. He is engaged to his lovely fiancée Katherine Brown.
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