Q: The Holy Father, with the heart of a teacher, addressed Catholic college and university presidents. What did you think of his address to them?
Novak: A Catholic college president judged the Pope’s talk to be a very good mixture of the encouragement, “You are doing a lot of good,” and of quiet, indirect accusation: “Look, you have to take the faith seriously.” The Pope seemed to be saying: If you are a Catholic school, then your first task is to provide for all who live and study there an experience of the living God. You have to live up to what “Catholic” means.
The Pope has a quite wonderful teaching method. He speaks the harsh truth, and then turns you in a hopeful direction. Which really is the whole meaning of Christianity, to take evil and transform it into good.
The Pope used this method with the university presidents, saying roughly: “There are some bad things to call attention to, and we have to do better than that. Meanwhile, I want to encourage you and strengthen you because what you are doing — in your more than 200 Catholic universities — is unparalleled in the world, and you do so many things well. Be encouraged, be hopeful.”
Like with the Anglican Communion’s conservatives in the Episcopal row (trying to stop the Episcopalians teaching that same-sex sex is not a sin and getting blown off) some sound and fury signifying nothing. Since 1967 American RC colleges have been independent of the bishops (I think a reason was to get government money); they’re only ‘RC’ because they say they are. They’re private schools that can do whatever they want, which seems to be me-too but culturally non-Anglo-Saxon mainline Protestantism. Political correctness but possibly with some token anti-abortion stuff.
Would that they had the honesty to do what Marist College in upstate New York did: even though they’re still loosely associated with the order that started them (a few old Marists are on the board) a few years ago they and the diocese said they’re no longer ‘a Catholic school’.
http://aconservativesiteforpeace.info