Pursuing Jesuit, Catholic Identity and Mission at U.S. Jesuit Colleges and Universities

Abstract

Discussion on just what makes a university Catholic, and how a Catholic university should relate to the Church and the local bishop, date long before Ex corde Ecclesiae, and indeed go back to the early universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, including St. Thomas Aquinas and his troubles with the Archbishop of Paris. More recently, we can cite 1949 and the establishment of the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU), in collaboration with the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education (Gallin, 1992, 1996; Gleason, 1995; Leahy, 1991; O’Brien, 1994; O’Keefe, 1997). Under the leadership of Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., and with the support of Pope Paul VI, IFCU evolved into an organization increasingly independent of the Congregation. This foreshadowed the tensions accompanying the development of Ex corde Ecclesiae. Meeting in Tokyo in 1965, IFCU decided to develop a document on the distinctive character of a Catholic university in the context of the recently published Vatican Council II (1965) document The Church in the Modern World. Prior to the 1968 IFCU meeting, a number of delegates met at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, to develop the Land O’Lakes Statement: The Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University (as cited in O’Keefe, 1997). This statement helped frame the issues that have been the basis for tensions between Church authorities and American Catholic higher education for over 40 years, especially its insistence that