Catholic Bishops OK New Academic Freedom Rules

Six years after Pope John Paul II directed them to rein in errant theologians at Catholic colleges and universities, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops Wednesday approved a landmark document that moderates the order that had frightened many Catholic educators.

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ resolution--the most important action of their annual fall meeting here--preserves academic freedom but gives local bishops a new mandate to participate in resolving controversies over what theologians teach at 235 Catholic colleges and universities across the United States.

The bishops stopped short of including a controversial provision that would have required faculty members at the Catholic institutions to be licensed by the local bishop.

In a move designed to avoid a divisive floor debate and assuage the concerns of conservative Catholics--including some ranking bishops--the conference agreed to continue studying how that provision, Canon 812, might be adopted in the future.

The compromise document enjoys wide support among the nation’s Catholic colleges and universities, which was hardly the case with early drafts.

“They were almost in revolt against it,” Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York told the bishops. “With successive meetings and successive drafts, I have found increasing enthusiasm. This latest draft has inspired almost all-out enthusiasm.”

Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, who in June accused the drafting committee of evading the pope’s directive that local bishops license theologians, was one of the first Wednesday to endorse the plan, citing the promise to further study Canon 812.

Bevilacqua’s support was a signal to the 230 bishops gathered that the compromise was on its way to approval. Although it must still be endorsed by the Vatican, several bishops indicated that the gathering would not have adopted the plan without some informal signal from Rome that it was acceptable.

The plan also drew important backing from Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, who as an archbishop in 1986 acted at the Vatican’s direction to fire Father Charles Curran from the Catholic University of America in Washington.

Curran had dissented from the church’s teaching on birth control, homosexuality and abortion. And the Vatican could easily get him fired because Catholic University of America, unlike most church schools, is a “pontifical” institution chartered by the pope himself.

“I say it’s a great document. Let’s go with it. Let’s support it,” Hickey told the bishops Wednesday.

The near unanimous approval--the vote was 224 to 6--was in marked contrast to the bitter divisions prompted by the issue for decades in the United States.

Hickey recounted the “climate of suspicion” over the past 28 years as the church and its universities grappled with how to balance academic freedom so valued in America with the desire to remain faithful to Catholic teachings.

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Two years after Curran was fired, the U.S. bishops were on the verge of approving guidelines to resolve disagreements between themselves and theologians. But the Vatican intervened hours before they opened their conference, putting off any action.

“I think we’ve achieved an excellent meeting of the minds,” Hickey said Wednesday.

Father Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University who closely monitors the bishops, said the agreement would enable theologians to make the church relevant into the 21st century.

“You have to take modern science and thought and articulate it with[in] the Catholic faith,” Reese said. “It has to be understandable to the people of the 21st century instead of repeating the formulas of the 13th century. That’s why we want religion in academia.”

Reese said church officials recognize that academic freedom encourages theological creativity, but that there will be times that a theologian--from their perspective--will say “dumb things.”

The bishops did approve an amendment stating that Catholic colleges and universities should make it clear when hiring theologians that it expects them to be “respectful of” Catholic tradition and adhere to “authentic Catholic teaching.”

But the document establishes due process procedures to protect the rights of the theologian--and the church--when there is a dispute over whether the theology being taught is authentic.

“When this process started, the academic community was in fear and trembling that the bishops were going to be coming down and imposing marshal law on theology departments,” Reese said. “But it’s clear from this document that what happened to Charlie Curran could not happen to a Catholic theologian and a Catholic college. . . . A bishop cannot fire someone he considers unorthodox.”

Father Thomas Rausch, chairman of the theology department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said the fear in Catholic academia was that bishops suddenly would be the ones to judge who is academically qualified to teach theology.

Rausch said there still may be some concern because the bishops will continue studying the issue. There is no deadline to resolve the issue, and the bishops seemed in no hurry to push the matter.

The bishops said they were particularly pleased that the document calls for an ongoing dialogue between themselves and institutions of higher learning in their dioceses.

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“What is being proposed . . . is that people listen to one another,” said Father Terrance Toland, who oversaw committee meetings that led to the drafting of the document.

Not everyone approved of putting off giving bishops the right to license theologians.

Helen Hull Hitchcock, president of the St. Louis-based Women for Faith and Family, criticized the vote as an attempt to water down the 1990 papal directive. “It just hoses off any features that it might have until it’s unrecognizable,” she said.

“If I send my children to a Catholic university, I want them to be taught Catholic teaching. The experience of a lot of parents in the last generation is that if you send your kids to a Catholic university, they lose their faith.”

Also objecting was the conservative Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. The question is not outside interference in a university’s curriculum, the group said, but whether the university wants to be truly Catholic.

“It would seem that the refusal of an institution to accept these legitimate church conditions and requirements really amounts to a practical declaration on the institution’s part that it does not really wish to be Catholic,” the group wrote in a critique.

Almost lost in the attention paid to academic freedom was the document’s other thrust--to maintain the Catholic identity of the universities that educate 660,000 students nationwide.

Bishops and others have made it clear that they want Catholic universities and colleges to avoid the fate of many Protestant institutions of higher learning that at first became interdenominational and then secular, a list that includes the likes of Harvard and Yale.

“I think most Roman Catholics felt the document was quite good in calling for a clear religious and Catholic identity in institutions of higher education,” Rausch said.