The Development of Catholic Studies Programs in American Catholic Universities

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In the mid-1960s, Sr. Jacqueline Grennan (1968), president of Webster College, called for the education of Catholics, but not in Catholic schools. Her mantra, there is no such thing as a Catholic physics, became an invitation for Catholics to become a part of the mainstream of the American academy. She viewed the need for Catholic professional associations as passe, and recommended that Catholic academics take their rightful place. Forty years later, Grennan’s Webster College has become a secular, private university, where Catholic infl uence effectively has been extinguished. Frederick Erb III (2002), an independent scholar active in the American Maritain Association, has opined that the wisdom of the Catholic worldview has been shunned by a secular American academy, steeped in postmodernism and unwilling to envision or engage a worldview other than its own. However, Erb believes that the Catholic-scholastic-philosophical tradition has a potential opening at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century with the promotion of Catholic Studies programs at non-Catholic higher education institutions. In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, the hegemony of scholastic philosophy in seminary education, and more widely in Catholic higher education, was secured with the promulgation of Pope Pius X’s (1907) encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which condemned modernism, a compilation of heresies that embraced such varied errors as agnosticism, immanentism, and evolutionism. This encyclical mandated the study of scholastic philosophy and theology in seminaries and a rigid adherence to scholastic principles. Effectively, Pascendi Dominici Gregis opened the door for the fl owering of the neo-scholasticism of such authors as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, and provided Catholic higher education with a continued common core during the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Within the next fi fty years, the Catholic intellectual tradition, expressed not only in scholastic philosophy, but also in literature, history, music, and art, had dissipated (Gleason, 1995). The Catholic sector, which had long weathered the cultural vicissitudes of American life, was swept into the mainstream in the 1960s. Catholic higher