Catholic collegiate officials were relieved this week...

Catholic collegiate officials were relieved this week when Pope John Paul II issued a document on Catholic universities that appears to respect academic freedom even as it challenges them to adhere to church teachings.

“I’m delighted,” said Sister Magdalen Coughlin, provost of Mt. St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles and for many years its president. “The language tends to be non-legal, non-judgmental. It seems to be a responsive and responsible document.”

American Catholic university presidents had reacted strongly against the first draft produced in 1985, saying they felt that the U.S. traditions of academic freedom and autonomy from church interference were endangered.

Coughlin was one of 18 U.S. delegates who conferred in April, 1989, in Rome with Vatican officials on the document. The changes suggested by delegates from various countries were well-received at the time, she said.

“Whereas the original draft had spelled out hundreds of norms, now there are only seven,” she said.

The 11,000-word work is titled “Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities.”

Jesuit Father Thomas Rausch, professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, cautioned that the constitution’s statement guaranteeing academic freedom for members of the university was qualified by the phrase “within the confines of truth,” a phrase he said was not in last year’s draft.

“A theologian would want to raise the question of who determines what is truth, especially in theology. That is the area of recent controversies on dissent and Catholic scholarship,” Rausch said. He added that much depends on how key sentences are interpreted.

However, Rausch indicated he was pleased with the document’s “vagueness” on a debated question of whether theologians at all Catholic universities need to have formal, licensed mandates from Rome. Most in this country do not, although such a procedure is required by the church’s canon law.

Rausch said the papal writing also shows the enthusiasm for Catholic education that might be expected from a former university professor. Rausch also said he was pleased by the “ecumenical sensitivity” in the constitution’s respect for the religious rights and beliefs of many non-Catholics teaching at Catholic institutions.

AUTHOR

Father Joseph F. Girzone, a retired priest whose self-published “Joshua” and its sequel, “Joshua and the Children,” have together sold 1 million copies, will speak at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church in Laguna Niguel at 7:15 p.m. Sunday and 7 p.m. Monday. “The Shepherd,” a third novel in the Joshua series by the Altamont, N.Y., author, will be published by Macmillan Publishing Co. next month. In the story, Joshua, a Jesuslike figure, befriends a young bishop who is challenging his diocese on matters of celibacy, married priests and the ordination of women.

MEETINGS

Auxiliary Bishop Sylvester Ryan of Los Angeles will address as many as 2,000 people expected to attend the 43rd annual conference of the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Council of Women on Monday, starting at 8:30 a.m., at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.

More than 3,300 members of the Worldwide Church of God will convene Wednesday evening at Ambassador Auditorium for the fall festival of the Pasadena-based church body. Through a television satellite link, members celebrating in 50 other countries will simultaneously hear an address the next day by Joseph W. Tkach, pastor general of the denomination founded by the late Herbert W. Armstrong.