Marquette: 'Unfree to Embrace its Mission'

Patrick McIlheran asks: Is Marquette free to be Catholic?

He details the trend that has marked Catholic universities for decades.

Catholic institutions like Marquette have gone along with what other institutions have been doing, resulting in a transformation of their identity and an abandonment of their commitment to Catholicism.

[Jodi] O'Brien's backers say academic freedom is at risk at Marquette. Yes, but not that of scholars such as Marquette theologian Daniel Maguire, whose 2001 book "Sacred Choices" proclaimed the goodness of abortion. Rather, the freedom at risk is this: That Marquette has made itself unfree to embrace its mission as a center of Catholic understanding.

That's an excellent point.

Certainly, the school messed with O'Brien unjustly. She quit her old job on the strength of Marquette's promises; then Marquette reneged. But it also took its own duty to students and its church too lightly.

The problem isn't simply with O'Brien's work, which does not merely explore homosexual behavior but celebrates it as liberating. "She just doesn't see any use for marriage in society," said sociologist Anne Hendershott, now of King's College and for 15 years on the faculty at the Catholic University of San Diego.

Marquette could find such a scholar "useful as a far-flung pole in a spectrum of opinion," Johnson recently wrote. But it hired her as a dean, with power over hiring and tenure in departments most directly concerned with the Catholic teaching that she rejected.

What would such a hire mean? Probably, a narrowing of inquiry at Marquette. O'Brien's work conforms to the ethos reigning in secular academia, that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, no moral angle that could arise. How, then, could Marquette's other scholars as freely explore whether there is such a moral dimension?

Secular universities theoretically are more circumscribed than Christian ones, sociologist D. Paul Sullins of Catholic University of America wrote recently, because of their undiscussed axioms on what can be studied. Christian universities can admit to both faith and reason as ways of knowing the world. They can, Baylor Unversity historian Thomas Kidd said, admit to there being an overarching purpose to everything. They can speak of God without enclosing him in quotation marks.

And they're within their rights to hire people who forward that mission.

In practice, many do not. If there's a danger to freedom at most Catholic universities, said Hendershott, it's to scholars who doubt homosexuality's rightness. "Getting a lesbian dean gives one status in the upside-down world of Catholic academia," she said. It's a sign of cool. And when, as at her old employer, a professor stages a demonstration of sex toys for some reason or other, it's validation.

"It gives you status when a bishop or a parent complains," she said. "It shows how transgressive you are."

Such pressures, she says, are strongest at Catholic universities as they strive to show how liberated they are from their church's views. But in emphatically adopting the standards of the secular world, they close themselves to re-embracing their unique role as teachers of Catholicism.

Marquette has strayed from its mission.

Embracing the standards of the secular world hasn't expanded Marquette's horizons or made it more relevant. It's actually served to limit academic freedom and narrow perspective.

A Catholic university that shuns its Catholic values isn't liberated. It's lost.