The Ecclesial Subculture
and the Sacredness of Authority

The reactionary antimodernism of the Catholic Church in the early part of the twentieth century pervaded the university’s history, culture, and governance. This ecclesial subculture was premised on a vertical notion of authority that privileged deference to the paternal leadership of an all-male priesthood, a “clarity and certitude of faith, effective sanctions for disobedience or disbelief, and an unshakeable belief in the ‘one true Church of Jesus Christ.’”[4]

The university had operated under clerical leadership from its founding in 1889, and the American Catholic hierarchy maintained this direct role through their numerical dominance of the university’s Board of Trustees, the appointment of senior clerics as university presidents (called “rectors”), and the assignment of priests to most positions of authority in the university administration. This was institutionalized through statutes that explicitly placed the institution at the lower end of the Church’s chain of authority, stating that the judicial status of the university “venerates the Roman Pontiff as its supreme Ruler and Teacher and submits unreservedly to his Apostolic Authority as the only safe norm of truth.” The statute then provides that the Board of Trustees of the university “shall govern the University in the name of the Hierarchy.”[5]

The structure of the institution was placed in the service of a form of Catholicism, which had developed over the previous century as “a positive alternative to the developing liberal society and culture, engaged in some very acute criticisms of modern society, and sought both to win converts and rechristianize society.”[6] While doctrinal “liberals” founded the university,[7] they and their beliefs were effectively driven from the institution following a 1909 controversy in which certain faculty were accused of “Americanism”—an openness to U.S. forms of democracy and religious tolerance. As a result the university was placed under tight ecclesiastical control, and explicitly bound by the reactionary antimodernism being enunciated by the Church in that period.[8]

Bishop William J. McDonald

Bishop William J. McDonald, who was appointed rector in 1958 from a position in the philosophy department, was an active proponent of this worldview. His writings typically defended the continuing relevance of Catholic dogma as a bulwark against modernity, or developed grounds for Catholic opposition to communism and “state socialism.”[9] These views are manifest in McDonald’s writings in an idealization of authority and the premodern past. In his inaugural address he called on the university community not to be “dazzled by the claims of the so-called Enlightenment and of the other more recent movements and philosophies which promised to be harbingers of a bright new world.” He also called upon students and faculty to “try to recapture something of that total Catholic vision of light and truth in which we are privileged to play such a providential role,” and emphasized the distinctiveness of Catholic philosophy as against “the intellectual wastelands around us.”[10]

Similarly, Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia, who served on every major committee of the Board of Trustees and introduced the effort to oust Rev. Charles E. Curran, rejected the idea that the laity (Catholics outside of the all-male preisthood) should play an active role in the Church. He declared that their role “is essentially a participation in the apostolate of the hierarchy, [which] requires a mandate from the hierarchy, and is subordinate and dependant on the hierarchy.”[11]

As Krol’s comments suggest, a key aspect of this worldview was the defining import of paternal authority. McDonald stated from the outset that the role of the Catholic scholar was to excel in his field while maintaining due deference to Church authority.[12] Similarly, Archbishop Krol would tell an audience that the exercise of true individual responsibility “demands the existence of authority. No institution can survive without authority.” He dismissed reformers seeking to diminish the verticality of the Church’s structure of authority as “childish,” and accused them of “mischief, disturbance, and disruption of the life of the faith.” He added that he was “not unmindful that even these children are members of my household, that I am responsible for them and some day will have to account for them before the Throne of Judgement. I am constrained to give an example of responsible leadership, at times to reprove them, and always to give evidence of paternal love.”[13]

This was borne out structurally in the composition of the Board of Trustees, which was comprised of thirty-three cardinals, archbishops, and bishops and just eleven lay Catholics. All were male Catholics over the age of forty-eight.[14] According to Rev. Robert Trisco, academic vice rector at the time of the strike:

In those days matters affecting the Church were considered to belong to the competence of the Board of Trustees, which at that time was largely bishops, archbishops, and a few laymen and simple priests. So they were not as concerned about ideas of due process, which were then being introduced after the Council. [These new ideas] really had not created much of an impression on the older trustees, and particularly the archbishops, who were used to handling these things without bringing the rest of the faculty into the inquiry.[15]

The perception of a distant and authoritarian board of trustees was so widely held that a month before the strike, the Catholic magazine Commonweal would write that the university suffered from the “excruciating task” of needing to appease the theological conservatism of American bishops and the papal ambassador to the United States, archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi.[16]

A key aspect of the ecclesial worldview was the place of theology and philosophy as the “cornerstone of the curriculum” at the university. As a result, the School of Sacred Theology, in which Curran was employed, was a subject of intense scrutiny for any deviation from accepted Church dogma. Msgr. William McAllister, executive vice rector of the university and the number two executive in the university, maintained that “[i]f a particular University is a Catholic institution, its theological teaching must by definition, reflect the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. In the case of a Catholic University which is also a Pontifical institution, with close ties to the Holy See, academic freedom must obviously follow more sharply drawn guidelines—for the first responsibility of such an institution is to the Church itself.”[17]

As this reading suggests, the culture of the university’s leaders was premised on a general acceptance of their reactionary antimodernist perspective and the central role of paternalistic authority in defending those views. The waning of this worldview as a force for most of the other members of the university community would lead McDonald and the Trustees to pursue an ultimately self-destructive course of action, and leave them bereft of the vision or tools to prevent the strike from occurring.

Notes

[4] William Osborne, “Religious and Ecclesiastical Reform: The Contemporary Catholic Experience in the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 (1968): 78.

[5] Statutes of the Catholic University of America 1937 (reprinted 1964), 6–7. These were fundamentally the same statutes that the university had worked under since its inception, with only minor changes being made in certain offices and faculty rights when the statutes were revised in 1937.

[6] Komonchak, “The Ecclesial and Cultural Roles,” 19.

[7] Gerald P. Fogarty, The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965 (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1985), 83, 132, 141.

[8] According to Fogarty, this was in part a reaction to the “liberals” who founded the university, but that the “Americanist” controversy and the dismissal of Rev. Henry Poels in 1909 sealed the university’s fate in this regard. Fogarty, American Hierarchy, 141, 190–91.

[9] C.f. William J. McDonald, “The Religion of Communism,” American Ecclesiastical Review (AER) 118 (May 1948): 326; McDonald, “Nationalization and the Catholic Tradition,” AER 122 (January 1950): 14; and McDonald, “Communism in Eden?” New Scholasticism 20 (April 1946): 101–25. The 1atter specifically posits the conservative presuppositions of neoscholaticism as a crucial barrier to communism.

[10] McDonald, “The University and the Future,” Catholic University of America Bulletin (July 1958): 1 and McDonald, “For with Thee Is the Fountain of Life,” Catholic University of America Bulletin (January 1958): 3.

[11] Krol, “Anticlericalism in America,” Emmanuel 68 (November 1962): 456. Church historian John Tracy Ellis described him as “a holdover from that era of error having no rights.” This is supported contemporaneously by John O’Connor, The People versus Rome (New York: Random House, 1969), 21–24, 36, 63–64, and “Krol Says Thrust of Vatican II Will Not Be Impeded,” National Catholic News Service (NCNS), 24 April 1967, 7–9.

[12] McDonald, “University,” 5–6.

[13] “Vatican II Will Not Be Impeded,” 9.

[14] Self Evaluation for Middle States, section II, 1–2.

[15] Rev. Robert Trisco, interview with the author, 11 November 1989. See also Leslie Dewarts, “Academic Freedom and Catholic Dissent,” Commonweal 80 (3 April 1964): 3–4.

[16] Norma Kraus Herzfeld, “Problem of Catholic U,” Commonweal (14 March 1967): 41.

[17] From a typed manuscript by McAllister on “The Relation of Theology to the University,” dated 16 May 1967, CUA Archives.