Culture and Difference

An exploration of the disjuncture between the seemingly modest goals of the strike and the radical changes that resulted highlights distinct differences among the elites responsible for interpreting and implementing the Second Vatican Council. Working backward from the strike, one can trace the formation of three distinct subcultures in the university during and after Vatican II. While each group declared itself to be firmly within the larger tradition of Catholicism, each subculture drew upon fundamentally different traditions, authorities, and cultural resources during the strike.

Protesters at Catholic University stand in the shadow of the National Shrine. This photo and all others on this site from the Cardinal Yearbook, 1967, except where noted..

The first subculture centered on the conservative clerics who ran the university. This ecclesial subculture deployed the language and values of a reactionary antimodernist form of Catholicism that predated the Council. Their worldview set itself in fundamental opposition to nineteenth-century liberalism, especially to notions of democracy, rights, religious liberty, and a progressive discovery of truth. As part of this worldview, a deep acceptance of the paternal authority of the Catholic hierarchy was deeply rooted in the structure and statutes governing the university, and supported by eighty years of institutional tradition.

Given this, and despite a few minor outbursts of discontent, the clerical leadership failed to notice that by 1967 a second subculture had formed among Catholic academics at the university. As they were trying to come to terms with the new language and authorities offered by the Council, paternal Church authority seemed anachronistic in a university context. They drew particular strength from Council statements on freedom and conscience. At the same time, the powerful and unprecedented example of prominent academics serving as consultants to the Council suggested a new understanding of Catholic higher education. This subculture fused the Council’s evident openness to modern notions of human rights—especially the right to due process—with ideas of academic freedom drawn from American traditions of higher education. The faculty would slowly develop the ideal of a “community of scholars” in opposition to the direct application of clerical authority in the university.

Even as older Catholics in the faculty were widening their worldview in fairly modest ways, younger Catholics in the student population were developing a third subculture, which drew in aspects of the national student counterculture with its antiauthority stance, willingness to use organized protest to effect change, and attraction to contemporary music. They posed a much higher standard of democratic legitimacy than the faculty, and were less inhibited by an ingrained deference to Church authority. As a result, they would play a critical role in catalyzing the strike, forcing the issues into the open, and putting a public face on the controversy.

The differences between these three groups provide a useful measure of the divisions in the Church at that time, but their similarities should also be noted. The leaders of all three groups professed their allegiance to the Catholic Church—indeed, prayer services and Masses would serve as a crucial social activity to bring the strikers together. Moreover, the leaders of these subcultures were socially homogeneous—middle class, white, and male.[3] However, these similarities would not prevent the fragmentation that erupted in 1967.

Note

[3] Data on economic status for students, faculty, and administrators can be drawn from The Catholic University of America Self Evaluation for Middle States Association of Colleges and Universities, January 1970. Data on racial and gender profiles are drawn from a visual review of pictures of administrators, faculty, and students in the Cardinal Yearbook, 1967.