Research at a Catholic University

John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation Ex Corde Ecclesiae, in this its thirty-fifth anniversary year, remains the most thorough and most sophisticated reflection on the Catholic university in the literature of the teaching authority of the Church (the “magisterium”). In celebration of that anniversary, I would like to quote the opening paragraph in full. It could be heard as the mission statement of a particular Catholic university, even though, of course, it is intended to be taken generally:

Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic university is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the university as an institution. It has always been recognized as an incomparable center of creativity and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity. By vocation, the Universitas magistrorum et scholarium is dedicated to research, to teaching and to the education of students who freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge. With every other university it shares that gaudium de veritate, so precious to Saint Augustine, which is that joy of searching for, discovering, and communicating truth in every field of knowledge. A Catholic university’s privileged task is “to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth” (§1).

There are many layers in this “mission statement,” but for now let us notice these essentials:

1. It asserts that the mission of a university, per se, not just the Catholic university, is the pursuit of truth, and even more particularly, “the joy of searching for, discovering, and communicating truth in every field of knowledge.”

2. The distinctiveness of the Catholic university is the seeming paradox that (a) it participates in the search for truth that is common (as the statement imagines) to all universities, even as it (b) has the “certainty of already knowing the fount of truth,” which, we find out later, is “the supreme truth, who is God” (§4).

One can be forgiven for wondering if the second point—about the certainty of already knowing the truth—ipso facto negates the first point, namely that it is the mission of the university to seek truth.[1] Is this not a little like having your cake and eating it too? Are we reduced to the conundrum, “Q. When is a university not a university? A. When it is a Catholic university?” This also has bearing on the question of research at a Catholic university. In terms of this “mission statement,” research participates in the search for truth, “the searching for, discovering, and communicating truth in every field of knowledge.” But if you already know the answer, can it really be research? Here too, can you have your cake and eat it too? Or rather, at a Catholic university, is research, if it is expressed precisely as a function of the distinctiveness of a Catholic university’s “privileged task,” also ultimately an illusion, a simulacrum of the real thing, a search whose script is already written, whose deck is already stacked, whose possibilities are constrained by Truth with a capital “T”?

Of course, I would not be offering these reflections if I thought that were the case. In fact, if I thought that were the case, I would find another job, maybe one at a real university, a secular school that does not suffer from “have your cake and eat it too” delusions. And yet it was during my putative job search at highly ranked secular schools that I was convinced that the “privileged task” of a Catholic university, what makes it distinctive, is not a self-defeating contradiction in terms. For, to take an example, I discovered that not one of the Ivy League schools uses the phrase “search for truth,” or even the word “truth,” in their mission statements, despite traditional mottos such as “Lux et Veritas” (Yale) or simply “Veritas” (Harvard). Here is Yale’s mission statement:

Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.[2]

Looking through the Ivy League mission statements made me wonder if the absence of the language of “search for truth,” and indeed of “truth” altogether, was not linked in some way to the absence of any reference to the conviction that there exists Truth with a capital “T,” “truth itself,” “the fount of truth.” That somehow without the “certainty of knowing the fount of truth,” the language of “pursuit of truth” loses purchase and even meaning. The paradox here is that without the “certainty of knowing the fount of truth,” the language of pursuit of truth loses its bearings and is left behind, and that means that in some sense the mission and identity of a university, qua university, is left behind, at least if our “mission statement” from Ex Corde is any indication.

For the purposes of comparison to Yale’s mission statement, here is MIT’s, or at least its key section:

The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.

The two statements are actually very similar in their emphasis on research and the purpose of research, which is to “improve the world,” or to bring the “knowledge” generated “to bear on the world’s great challenges.” Shorn of the “search for truth,” Yale’s mission statement looks more like that of a technical institute than that of a university strictly speaking, since the emphasis is on the value of knowledge for its instrumental application. Other mission statements echo these, especially in their use of the language of knowledge acquisition with phrases like “advancing the frontiers of knowledge” (Harvard), “to create and share knowledge” (Stanford), “to produce innovative research” by “pursu[ing], enhanc[ing], and disseminat[ing] knowledge (UPenn.), “discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge” (Cornell), “to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world” (Columbia), “discovering, communicating and preserving knowledge and understanding” (Brown), etc. Most often the production of knowledge is connected with a practical aim such as generating leadership for the world, or, as Johns Hopkins’s statement puts it, “to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world,” or, more succinctly, University of Cambridge, “to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.”

These are noble-sounding aspirations and there is much to admire in these statements, not least their idealism and dedication to research. However, it is still curious that none of them even mention “truth.” From the point of view of a Catholic university as envisioned by Ex Corde, they do not go far enough, and I do not mean because Catholic Universities are concerned, as they should be, with ethics and moral formation. Most of the secular schools include forthright statements about their dedication to ethics and justice and the like. This in no way distinguishes a Catholic university from the aspirations of their secular counterparts.

We can find the deficiency if we look a little more closely at Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The opening paragraph cited above does call the Catholic university “an incomparable center of creativity and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity,” echoing the secular mission statements we have seen. Later, this point is developed: “The basic mission of a university is a continuous quest for truth through its research, and the preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society,” with the addition that, “A Catholic university participates in this mission with its own specific characteristics and purposes” (ECE §30). Note that the “continuous quest for truth” that constitutes research is conceptually distinct, separated (by the conjunction “and”) from the “preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society.” This is an indication of the distinctiveness of a Catholic university, of the “specific characteristics and purposes” with which the Catholic university embodies its mission.

Ex Corde doubles down throughout on its commitment to the search for truth antecedent to the possible instrumentality of the knowledge it may produce, calling attention to the “ardent search for truth and its unselfish transmission to youth and all those learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better” (§2). Here it is the search for truth, without the intermediary of “knowledge” mentioned, that connects directly to the university’s formation of students to act rightly and to serve humanity better. The rationale is given as follows:

It is the honor and responsibility of a Catholic university to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has “an intimate conviction that truth is its real ally . . . and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith.” Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic university is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God. The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished. By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic university is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme truth, who is God (§4).

In this passage it is not the utility of the knowledge which research may have generated that is the utility of the Catholic university, but rather first and foremost the “consecration” of the university “without reserve to the cause of truth.” It makes it clear that this is not in any way meant to set aside “the acquisition of useful knowledge,” thus also distinguishing the primary utility of the Catholic university from the possible utility of the knowledge its research acquires. What “distinguishes” research and scholarship at a Catholic university from a technical institute and from secular schools whose mission statements have come to resemble those of a technical institute like MIT, is “its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God,” where it is not so much even the inclusion of “God” that is the distinguishing feature, though that is one element, but rather the phrase “the whole truth.” This is specified further to indicate that the principal service of research at a Catholic university in our time is “proclaiming the meaning of truth,” truth having been identified as the basic or “fundamental value” without which “freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished.”

Apparently, a lot is at stake in the search for truth. Values such as freedom and justice (though not so much human dignity) are frequently proclaimed as seemingly self-standing and self-evident, fundamental values in the mission statements of the secular schools we have looked at, but this statement focuses on truth as even more fundamental. One more passage will help us understand why:

In the world today, characterized by such rapid developments in science and technology, the tasks of a Catholic university assume an ever greater importance and urgency. Scientific and technological discoveries create an enormous economic and industrial growth, but they also inescapably require the correspondingly necessary search for meaning in order to guarantee that the new discoveries be used for the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole. If it is the responsibility of every university to search for such meaning, a Catholic university is called in a particular way to respond to this need: its Christian inspiration enables it to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in its research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person (§7).

The generation of knowledge is an obvious good. But the service of the university is not only in application of the knowledge to problem-solving as is commonly mentioned in the mission statements of the secular schools above, but also the relation of such knowledge to “the meaning of truth.” The truth of the knowledge discovered is acknowledged, but distinct from that are the implications of that truth for meaning, for example, the meaning of nature and of the human being, and of both in relation to God. To put it most powerfully, “What is at stake is the very meaning of scientific and technological research, of social life and of culture, but, on an even more profound level, what is at stake is the very meaning of the human person” (§7). The use of the word “meaning” implies a prior institutional commitment to the existence of meaning in the world, not simply observable order, but a world in which meaning exists independent of our construction of it, in which truth exists not ultimately as a shifting construction reflecting vested interests and the changing dynamics of power, but objectively and inalienably as a constitutive feature of reality and of human beings as part of reality.

Perhaps it is to avoid this a priori assumption that top secular schools rarely, if ever, use the word “truth” in their mission statements. Ironically it is the claim on the existence, objectively, of truth and meaning in reality that, Ex Corde claims, allows one’s research to have the possibility of being disinterested. Speaking of the need for continuous renewal of the Catholic university, Ex Corde notes: “Such renewal requires a clear awareness that, by its Catholic character, a university is made more capable of conducting an impartial search for truth, a search that is neither subordinated to nor conditioned by particular interests of any kind” (§7). It is implied that impartiality cannot be guaranteed if there is no truth for which to search nor any meaning of truth, because then one is indeed left with an in-effect intellectual commitment to power as the dominant value, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Well, what is the meaning of truth, apart from the meaning of any particular truths? Ex Corde develops and articulates this very carefully.

It is in the context of the impartial search for truth that the relationship between faith and reason is brought to light and meaning. The invitation of Saint Augustine, “Intellege ut credas; crede ut intellegas,“ is relevant to Catholic Universities that are called to explore courageously the riches of Revelation and of nature so that the united endeavor of intelligence and faith will enable people to come to the full measure of their humanity, created in the image and likeness of God, renewed even more marvelously, after sin, in Christ, and called to shine forth in the light of the Spirit (§5).

The ultimate meaning of truth comes from revelation. In other words, the use of reason at a Catholic university is ultimately ordered to something that does not and cannot come from unaided reason, namely, revelation. What is revealed in the mysteries of the “Catholic faith that comes to us from the Apostles” is what ECE §1 spoke of as the “fount of truth.” But knowing the fount of truth, and thus the ultimate meaning of truth, though it does not come from unaided reason, does not cancel the use of reason. Received in faith, revelation widens the horizon of reason. It awakens into a universe whose intrinsic wonder and awe, available to reason alone as it comes ever more fully to perceive the order in the cosmos, can now be seen as only a sign of an even more ultimate and inexhaustible wonder, the wonder of love, a love sumptuous enough to be the very origin of intelligibility, such that the ultimate logic of the cosmos, its meaning, is fully disclosed only in that love, which itself remains irreducibly a glorious, luminous mystery.

But not just any love. “Dedicating itself to every path of knowledge,” the Catholic university is “aware of being preceded by him who is the Way, the truth, and the Life (John 14:6), the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger” (ECE §4). He who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” is the Logos, the “Word” or the “Reason” that suffuses the world with intelligibility. But it is specifically of the Word Incarnate that the phrase the Way, the Truth, and the Life is said. The meaning of truth as proclaimed to faith by revelation is that the Logos, the Word and Wisdom that is the source of all intelligibility in the world, became flesh (John 1:14).

As expressed in Philippians 2:5-8, the Incarnation is an extravagant act of “self-emptying”:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of
God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men . . . And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

This means that the ultimate intelligibility of the world was revealed in an act of divestiture in which there can be no trace of self-interest, a self-imposed stripping of privilege, prestige, and status, for there is nothing higher to grasp at than the “form of God” and so nothing to gain in the expropriation, as it were, of this status, the highest of all. It is love revealed as a self-emptying which was also an impoverishment: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor 8:9). We see in the Incarnation and on the Cross above all, and not just in Genesis, the mystery of creation revealed as a mystery and function of this love, poured out in the blood of the Word—the Logos or Intelligibility of the world—Incarnate. The ultimate intelligibility of creation is revealed in the price of its redemption, the precious blood of Christ, the love which his blood poured out reveals and effects.

Faith proclaims that the meaning of truth is revealed as a voluntary divestiture of divine status, wealth, and privilege, not, as Luke so poignantly puts it, in order to recline at table, but to serve at tables. “Who is greater,” Jesus asks. ”Is it not he who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as the One who serves” (Luke 22:27). Next time you are at a restaurant, you can contemplate the meaning of the universe by considering your waiter or waitress! But it is because the meaning of truth is revealed as a divestiture of infinitely great status that “by its Catholic character, a university is made more capable of conducting an impartial search for truth, a search that is neither subordinated to nor conditioned by particular interests of any kind” (ECE §7), because the very Catholic character of the university depends on its “institutional” commitment to a divine act of love that consisted in renouncing attachment to all vested interest. The meaning of truth, it turns out, is not that it is irreducibly a construction of shifting investments of power but rather that it bears perpetual witness against attempts to wrest truth away into disguised investments of power. I think we can agree, then, that “the present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth,” and that indeed truth is “that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished.”

The present age is therefore in urgent need of the distinctive research profile of a Catholic university, which, according to Ex Corde, is “completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme truth, who is God.” This passage mentions research specifically and its connection to truth which is God. That is pretty distinctive! But in Ex Corde the distinctiveness of research names primarily the character of a conversation and is not in the first place a claim on any particular research method. This conversation is usually referred to under its shorthand moniker, the “Catholic Intellectual Tradition.” In Ex Corde, specifying the Catholic Intellectual Tradition without using those words, each academic discipline retains its own methodology, and yet they are brought into a particular kind of conversation or dialogue:

A Catholic university, therefore, is a place of research, where scholars scrutinize reality with the methods proper to each academic discipline, and so contribute to the treasury of human knowledge. Each individual discipline is studied in a systematic manner; moreover, the various disciplines are brought into dialogue for their mutual enhancement (ECE §15).

One can begin to see how just because the meaning of truth is fully available in the proclamation of the mystery of the Incarnation and related mysteries, it does not obviate the search for truth, because no academic discipline, including theology, can claim that it has, by its research, exhausted the meaning of truth. Reading the Bible and receiving its proclamation regarding redemption and creation does not yield the truths constituted by the theory of relativity or string theory. It does not yield the truth of how the universe came into existence in accord with physical laws or of how life evolved from non-life. And yet, as we come to understand, through scientific research, how the universe evolved and how it is still evolving, and how life evolved from non-life, as we arrive at these truths, we could say that their meaning eludes the methodologies used to discover them. The search for truth continues when it is asked, “What do these truths mean? What does this knowledge mean for our understanding of the human person?”

A temptation could be to assume that the “meaning” is in the knowledge itself. For example, because human life evolved from non-life, one could claim that this means it is essentially no different from non-life, even if much more complex. And in some ways this may be true. But, “certain” as it is by “institutional commitment” that it already knows the “fount of truth,” and therefore proclaims the dignity of the human person in light of its faith in the truth of the Incarnation, a Catholic university cannot remain satisfied with asserting that the “meaning” of this knowledge of the truth of human origins is a reductionistic account of the human being such that a human beings are simply “biological machines.”[3] Or as put even more forcefully by Stephen Weinberg, that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more the meaning of what we learn is that the Universe and human life within it seems “pointless.”[4] Ex Corde addresses the situation by putting it this way, namely, that “besides the teaching, research and services common to all Universities, a Catholic university, by institutional commitment, brings to its task the inspiration and light of the Christian message” (ECE §14).

This search for the meaning of knowledge, for truth as meaning, cannot happen within the scientific method that generated the knowledge because the scientific method is not a method for the discovery of meaning but rather is limited to empirical observation and hypotheses that propose the physical order that the empirical measurements imply. The knowledge thus proposed is revisable depending on further observation which may be more extensive or conclusive. As soon as a scientist begins to talk about the meaning of the knowledge they have discovered, they have entered the discourse proper to another discipline and must engage that discipline responsibly. There are many irresponsible engagements, not the least of which is Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s declaration that “philosophy is dead,”[5] while yet insisting on making undisciplined philosophical judgments about freedom, etc. But the point is not that the Catholic Intellectual Tradition requires scientists to become adept in philosophy or theology, but rather that the search for truth—research properly and comprehensively speaking—is enacted in an intellectually disciplined conversation in which the disciplines are not simply juxtaposed in dialogue, but layered. The word that has been chosen to describe this layered conversation is “integrative” or “integration,” which is not the same as, though it includes, interdisciplinarity.

Ex Corde specifies that, “In a Catholic university, research necessarily includes (a) the search for an integration of knowledge, (b) a dialogue between faith and reason, (c) an ethical concern, and (d) a theological perspective” (§15). Elaborating point (a), the document notes:

Integration of knowledge is a process, one which will always remain incomplete; moreover, the explosion of knowledge in recent decades, together with the rigid compartmentalization of knowledge within individual academic disciplines, makes the task increasingly difficult. But a university, and especially a Catholic university, “has to be a ‘living union’ of individual organisms dedicated to the search for truth. . . . It is necessary to work towards a higher synthesis of knowledge, in which alone lies the possibility of satisfying that thirst for truth which is profoundly inscribed on the heart of the human person (§16).

This description of “integration of knowledge” transcends the interdisciplinary because “interdisciplinary” can describe the mutual conversations of biology and physics, or even biology and anthropological paleontology or sociology and anthropology, to the extent that the social sciences are circumscribed by empirical methods. For example, knowledge gained by empirical methods shows that all living things die and that therefore death precedes human beings and that as biological organisms their death is an integral part of the evolutionary process. This truth could be (and has been!) used to claim that therefore the connection proposed by Scripture between sin and death—and there is perhaps no more decisive coupling of ideas in Scripture than this—is fanciful. But this is a foray into meaning, since it implies that the meaning of human death is reducible to that of any other biological organism. As a claim on meaning it has already moved into the domains of philosophy, which includes the science of meaning (hermeneutics) and theology, the proper object of which is divine revelation.

Thus an “integrative” approach aims not simply at juxtaposition, that is the presence of all these disciplines on campus, or simply at interdisciplinarity, which can take place entirely on one “level” of the conversation; it cannot remain on one methodological level, but must eventually as it were involve disciplines that are “higher” in the sense that they are specifically equipped to deal with logic, meaning, and metaphysics (philosophy), and, the next level up, with the light and meaning of revelation (theology). As Ex Corde goes on to say, the search for a “higher synthesis” is aided specifically by philosophy and theology:

Aided by the specific contributions of philosophy and theology, university scholars will be engaged in a constant effort to determine the relative place and meaning of each of the various disciplines within the context of a vision of the human person and the world that is enlightened by the Gospel, and therefore by a faith in Christ, the Logos, as the center of creation and of human history” (§16.).

This latter point is why theology is considered worthy of singling out for mention in its own paragraph:

Theology plays a particularly important role in the search for a synthesis of knowledge as well as in the dialogue between faith and reason. It serves all other disciplines in their search for meaning, not only by helping them to investigate how their discoveries will affect individuals and society but also by bringing a perspective and an orientation not contained within their own methodologies (§19).

But theology for its part cannot leave the other disciplines behind in the dust, as though on its own it could promulgate fully the “meaning of truth”; it must continually “seek understanding” of the very mysteries it proclaims in the light of knowledge ever newly discovered or proposed. As Ex Corde continues, “In turn, interaction with these other disciplines and their discoveries enriches theology, offering it a better understanding of the world today, and making theological research more relevant to current needs (§19).”

As you can see, research at a Catholic university is not a task left to any particular researcher, but is only explicable as a multilayered conversation among researchers and scholars in different disciplines. If Ex Corde is our inspiration, the mission statement of a Catholic university should in some way reflect this ideal of research as a multilayered intellectual conversation that ultimately, and seemingly paradoxically, searches for truth in the conviction that in the proclamation of the Gospel we already know the fount of truth. Many Catholic university mission statements, unlike the secular statements mentioned above, do in fact persist in mentioning the search for truth in various ways.

Our own university mission statement at Notre Dame is one that persists in mentioning the pursuit of truth. It actually echoes Ex Corde. It states not only that the university is dedicated to the search for truth, but for truth for its own sake, and not, in the first place as instrumental for another more “useful” end: “The University is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake.” In the “context” provided to understand such a statement, we read that “A Catholic university draws its basic inspiration from Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and from the conviction that in him all things can be brought to their completion.” Thus we have the equivalent of a search for truth already knowing the “source” or fount of truth. And that fount of truth, Jesus Christ, is the ultimate point of integration of inquiry or research, yielding a commitment to a world view in which “there is an intelligibility and a coherence to all reality, discoverable through spirit, mind, and imagination.” Notice that these commitments to Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and to the ultimate intelligibility and coherence of reality are institutional commitments, just as Ex Corde instructs.

I believe this latter point is key to the establishment of a research culture that is distinctive to a Catholic university. I believe that if it is publicly embraced, not left to lie as a dead letter but periodically referred to in public statements of our intellectual ideals by university leaders who can speak with the voice of the university as a whole, Catholic universities can become beacons of the intellectual life, of research at its most searching depths, discovering the most searing and the most subtle truths, blazons of impartiality and disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the meaning of knowledge—in short, leaders not just of the Catholic intellectual life but of intellectual life in our nation.

Why is that? Because, by proclaiming that we do believe in the pursuit of truth for its own sake, and that that belief derives from our conviction that we already know the source of truth, “Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom . . . in [whom] all things can be brought to their completion,” we are forced and compelled to seek, as an institution, to examine this very conviction, to search out its depths. We are compelled to develop the Catholic Intellectual Tradition so that it encourages and takes in the various disciplinary advances without micromanaging their methodologies or presuppositions, while at the same time refusing a monopoly on truth to any of them. Nor does our commitment allow the university itself to become a series of parallel searches for truth that in the end are simply juxtaposed and end up producing a series of truths that seem incommensurate with each other. The ensuing fragmentation of knowledge makes the task of a higher synthesis seem more impossible than ever, and university mission statements can come to lose any faith in the ultimate intelligibility and coherence of reality.

If on the university level we are periodically reminded of our mission, theology would be forced to clarify how it is that we can be committed to the truth of Jesus Christ as the source of all wisdom in whom all things can be brought to their completion and yet have space for meaningful interreligious dialogue and value the presence of other believers. And, of course there is no Catholic science, no Catholic biology and no Catholic chemistry—that is a truism—and yet there are Catholic scientists and others who are religious believers. They can be every bit committed to the most rigorous application of the scientific method and yet as believers have an openness to a non-reductive account of the human being that could generate insights that are at once more scientific and more open to accounts of organisms, even non-human organisms, that are capable of resisting fully mechanical accounts of life which ironically, in the name of science, make it more vulnerable to exploitation, as Pope Francis has reminded us in Laudato Si’ (e.g. §§115, 122).

This is even true for non-living physical reality. Is it true that, as Richard Dawkins put it, nature’s relation to us is one of “pitiless indifference?”[6] That is not a scientific conclusion. Yes, it could be uttered as the opinion of a scientist at any university including a Catholic university, and yet at a Catholic university, publicly committed to the coherence of truth in Jesus Christ, such a person might be more likely to encounter “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.” It is easier to exploit the pitiless and indifferent, perhaps harder to exploit “Brother Sun, Sister Higgs Boson Particle, Brother Quarks and Sister Mother Earth,” all of whom, like Sister Water in St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures, are “humble and precious and chaste.” Could there be a science in its very scientific character that is more likely to lead to the latter than to the nihilism of pitiless indifference, and where there are philosophers and theologians around interested in dialogically exploring the openness of a scientific system to personalism? All of this is much more likely if we are impelled to go deeper, to try to articulate and specify ever more subtly the vision of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition to which the Catholic university is publicly and repeatedly committed.

The Catholic university should be especially “capable of conducting an impartial search for truth, a search that is neither subordinated to nor conditioned by particular interests of any kind,” because of its publicly stated and periodically reaffirmed commitment to Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom. His Incarnation, as a divestment or expropriation of status and prestige, encourages us and even forces us to look deeper than status and prestige, which are always reflections in some way of claims to power and political influence, such that we can resist the lure of obsession with rankings and refuse to confuse excellence or truth with prestige, perhaps one of the most irresistible temptations of the modern research university. Under pressure from the quest for prestige, truth becomes subject to intellectual fads, which begin to seem self-evident and to require no argumentation. The arbiters of prestige become narrowed down to a handful of “top” university presses which can become a default magisterium.

Whole academic programs can grow up based on assumptions that promise prestige but are closed to the presence of potential members whose work might question those assumptions. For instance, most departments and programs of women’s or gender studies are built on Judith Butler’s proposal that gender, sex, and even bodies are exhaustively accounted for as “performance,” as thoroughgoing social constructions, all the way down. It can become conceived as an intellectual excellence never to question that assumption such that any assertion of a more traditional view can come to seem parochial, dismissed as sexist and more importantly, as anti-intellectual. Nor does this imply that such questioners do not have a responsibility to read and engage seriously Butler’s thought. They might even find some of it useful.

A publicly stated and publicly reaffirmed commitment to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition’s quest for a higher synthesis of knowledge can preserve and nurture respect for previous syntheses even as the quest for synthesis is ongoing. For if it is indeed ongoing, then it must in some way be a reflection on and development of previous attempts. Ironically, if a Catholic university leaves these behind as objects of institutional interest relevant to its commitment to the quest for the integration of knowledge, it does not simply end up at what could be thought of as a standard, secular model of intellectual excellence, but with less. This applies, for example, to institutional commitments to “virtue” and to “justice” in particular. Convinced that Jesus Christ is the source of all wisdom and therefore of the coherence and intelligibility in reality, Thomas Aquinas, developing previous tradition, made a distinction between the natural virtues, accounted for in philosophical ethics, and the theological virtues, namely faith, hope, and love, along with the theological ethics flowing from this distinction.

Faith, hope, and love as theological virtues are ordered toward God as God is revealed in Scripture. They are not ordered, as theological virtues, to the good of human nature as that can be conceived without revelation, although they have profound implications for the life of virtue throughout. At a Catholic university, if one leaves this distinction behind as an element in the theory of one’s programming, one ends up discounting as institutionally significant subtleties of thought and precise distinctions that were hard gained. In so doing, one does not end up with an intellectual excellence that is back to a theologically neutral, secular standard of excellence, but of something less. By institutionally retreating from such a synthesis, or from any, as merely one intellectual possibility among many, one is saying it is not institutionally relevant even if it is relevant for individual scholars. The more one speaks of faith, hope, and love, for example, as though they were the equivalent of “cardinal” or natural virtues or civic or professional virtues without any essential ordering to God as revealed, the more one smudges the concept of natural virtue itself.

Justice in particular can tend to become a self-standing value, losing sight of its ordering to charity, the theological virtue of love, and thus to what Gustavo Gutierriez called the gratuitousness of God’s love. If the institution is not publicly committed to the gratuitousness of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ, then justice can seem to take its place as though it offered a comprehensive ideal of social and personal reform when in fact it can just as easily lead to self-righteousness which is unaware of itself and dystopian visions where the basis of proclaiming the “preferential option for the poor” has been unknowingly withdrawn. That is of course an existential impoverishment, but my point here is that it is also an intellectual impoverishment and as such a failure in “research.” Whenever, at a Catholic university, the ordering of philosophical or sociological accounts of virtue to revelation is made optional either by programmatic commitment or institutional indifference, revelation itself has thereby been placed in a context that relativizes it, and that is de facto a declaration of secularization despite rhetoric to the contrary.

To the extent that a Catholic college or university is ashamed of Jesus Christ, too ashamed to state publicly and with some regularity its ongoing commitment to the pursuit of truth for its own sake and to Jesus Christ as the fount of truth and wisdom, if this comes to seem too sanctimonious, or parochial, or sectarian, too ecclesial, not prestigious enough and not intellectually respectable, then the Catholic Intellectual Tradition will slowly atrophy, its progressive losses not even noticed because the sensibilities formed by the Catholic Intellectual Tradition will be eroded at the same time. One will come to stand for an excellence manqué, a dumbing down of something, a loss, relative even to secular universities who have no such tradition to hand on, and one will end up handing on this loss, despite whatever true intellectual excellence may also be handed on.

But if one lives into this vision unashamedly and on the level of the institution as a whole and not just that of individual scholars, one will promote a truly distinctive research program, a truly distinctive intellectual culture, explicitly seeking the integration of knowledge not as a settled synthesis but a synthesis, you could say, in the very search for it because invested in its possibility. Science will be science, maybe more itself than otherwise, as part of a conversation in which its discoveries may have more intellectual purchase in a conversation that at once transcends and affirms its methodology. Individuals in any discipline may be freer to pursue the search for truth less encumbered by its habitual indenture to the cult of secular prestige and its trends that often tend to occlude their own intellectual presuppositions. Theology will have its work cut out for itself to resist closing in on itself even as those who are not theologians can learn to respect its unique place as the science of revelation and its place in the quest for the integration of knowledge and the meaning of truth.

Truly a Catholic university unashamed of its spiritual and intellectual heritage, unashamed of the Cross “our only hope” (cf. Rom 1:16, Gal 6:14) and willing to speak its commitment in public to Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and truth, could find that it is a fountainhead of renewal not just for Catholic education but for education as a whole, encouraging the recovery of the essential identity of a university in the pursuit of truth for its own sake, defeating by its leadership the cult of prestige, and bearing witness to how a commitment to the ultimate intelligibility and cohesiveness of reality can bear intellectual fruit.

Such a university, because of its explicit public commitment to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, will also be forming new researchers in the sensibilities and reflexes of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and thereby forming top scholars who can bring that vision to other schools and institutes and cause it to take root there. Such a culture can spread with the work of such missionaries, as it were, of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

Friends at Catholic schools with an ambitious research program across the country—we can do this! Especially if we remember the words of Ex Corde, repeated here as an exhortation:

The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished . . . “What is at stake is the very meaning of scientific and technological research, of social life and of culture, but, on an even more profound level, what is at stake is the very meaning of the human person.“. Such renewal requires a clear awareness that, by its Catholic character, a university is made more capable of conducting an impartial search for truth, a search that is neither subordinated to nor conditioned by particular interests of any kind (§4).

Such is the promise of a distinctively Catholic approach to research.

EDITORIAL NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at a public lecture for the deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture of the University of Notre Dame, on 28 January 2025.

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: Catholic Research University