Pope Sets Standards for Catholic Colleges : Vatican: Academic freedom and autonomy are guaranteed. Fidelity to church teaching is demanded.

Yielding to American pressure, Pope John Paul II on Tuesday proclaimed new international standards for Roman Catholic colleges and universities, standards that demand fidelity to church teaching but guarantee academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

The apostolic constitution for the world’s 935 Catholic institutions of higher learning, published Tuesday after more than a decade of internal debate, acknowledges the concerns of American Catholic educators chary of tight Vatican rein.

“There are no surprises,” Sister Alice Gallin, executive director of the Assn. of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said by phone from New York. “We were not anxiously looking for any document, but if there had to be one, this is as good as we could get.”

She said that observance of the new norms will call for little change in the present operation of Catholic universities in the United States.

The 11,000-word constitution affirms that a Catholic university owes “institutional fidelity” to the church, including “recognition of and adherence to the teaching authority of the church in matters of faith and morals.”

Reasserting longstanding insistence that Catholic theologians adhere to church teachings, the document tells local bishops to “watch over the preservation and strengthening of the Catholic character” of the universities. Where local conditions allow, at least half the faculty of Catholic universities should be Catholics, it says.

“All Catholic teachers are to be faithful to, and all other teachers are to respect, Catholic doctrine and morals in their research and teaching,” it says, but it adds that this should not limit academic freedom or the essential role of the university as a place of dialogue between faith and reason.

“Freedom in research and teaching is recognized according to the principles and methods of each individual discipline, so long as the rights of the individual and of the community are preserved within the confines of the truth and the common good,” it says.

Stressing the sensitivity of scientific research, the constitution says that scientific advances should be aimed at “the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole.” The Vatican forbids research into techniques of artificial procreation, including in- vitro fertilization, in Catholic institutions.

The church has operated universities for nine centuries, but Tuesday’s document is the first constitution for Catholic higher education around the world--a “magna carta,” John Paul called it. It becomes law at all Catholic institutions of higher learning with the start of the 1991 academic year.

“The constitution insists on the Catholic identity of the universities but emphasizes that the adjective Catholic does not diminish the academic-scientific character and the specific aims of the university,” said Archbishop Pio Laghi, sub-prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, in presenting the document to reporters here Tuesday.

Early drafts of the constitution alarmed Catholic educators in the United States, where there are 235 Catholic colleges and universities with more than half a million students.

In 1985, Sister Gallin said, the presidents of 110 American Catholic colleges warned that Vatican proposals for tighter control, including juridical direction by local bishops, would decimate the world’s largest network of Catholic institutions of higher learning.

Last year, Catholic educators from around the world expressed their reservations about early drafts and suggested changes that broadened the norms. The liberalizing proposals were largely incorporated into the constitution that was published Tuesday, Gallin said.