Culture, Conflict, and Change:
The '67 Strike at Catholic University

By Robert B. Townsend

(NB: This paper was written between May 1989 and February 1990 and reflects the historiography of that time. However, as recent events in the Church have demonstrated, the conflict between authority and truth remains as salient as ever.)

In one of the most effective faculty-student strikes of the 1960s, protesters shut down the Catholic University of America in April 1967 to reverse the dismissal of a junior faculty member. The subject of the strike was not an obvious focus for a campus uprising. Charles E. Curran had been on the theology department faculty for just two years, and drawn the ire of the ecclesial hierarchy by publicly questioning a number of Church teachings on moral issues. However, Curran's dismissal precipitated latent tensions in the about the values and authorities that should define the Church and the university. When the dust settled a year later, a fundamentally different view of Catholicism was written into the statutes and accepted as the governing ideology of the institution. Temporarily at least, this transformed the institution from an authoritarian antimodernism to a “community of scholars” in which the “only constraint on truth is truth itself.”

When the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965, the interpretation and implementation of the Council’s reforms were a source of often-bitter debate. After more than a century in which opposition to modernity and other faiths had been a defining principle, members of the Church suddenly had to come to terms with declarations that, “respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.”[1] Among American Catholics this prompted a fundamental reevaluation of the norms and values that governed their lives.

The process of integrating these reforms into the ideals and values of American Catholic culture remains largely unexplored as a historical phenomenon. Writing about the cultural effects and implementation of the Second Vatican Council remains, with rare exception, limited to treatments by journalists and theologians.[2] However, recent developments in cultural and intellectual history provide the tools for a substantial rereading of the events of that period, a revised view that avoids the tendency to read these events through the lens of a particular issue (such as birth control) or a specific theological point of view.

Notes

[1] “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Co., 1987), 928–29.

[2] The treatment of Catholicism as a social and cultural phenomenon is fairly novel in the writing of its history. Historical writing about the Catholic church in America has been quite late in moving away from institutional histories focusing on the interactions of church leaders. Two notable exceptions are Philip Gleason’s Keeping the Faith in America (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987) and Jay Dolan’s The American Catholic People (New York: Image Books, 1988). However, their perspectives on the reforms of the 1960s are colored by their personal involvement in those changes. As a result, they both tend to reduce the struggle for reform to a battle between two internally homogeneous camps—the conservatives and the reformers. As this study will show, neither camp was a monolith, and reform was not as smooth and uncontested as their readings suggest. Joseph A. Komonchak has offered a useful cultural model in a number of articles, most notably “The Ecclesial and Cultural Roles of Theology,” CTSA Proceedings 40 (1985): 15ff. Unfortunately, his model sets a “Roman Catholic subculture” in opposition to other currents in the rest of American society, and thus fails to deal substantively with the internal dynamics of this larger cultural form.