A drastic sea change had occurred: the Catholic ghetto walls crumbled like Jericho and working class ethnics rushed out of their urban neighborhoods into the suburbs, up the economic ladder into the upper tiers of the middle class and beyond, and into the Ivys and other elite institutions. I like to identify 1965 as the turning point: the end of the Council, the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, a surge in the anti-war movement, the start of the Culture Revolution and the year I graduated high school and went to college. There was, of course, good in this change: inspired by the Council, the Church was now fully engaged with the broader culture. My time in college was a quasi-permanent low-level state of intoxicated euphoria as I devoured books on culture, the social sciences, theology, philosophy and politics. The problem was that we jumped off the ship into a now-shark-infested ocean: at that very moment elite culture was turning viciously anti-Catholic. Pretty soon Catholics were contracepting, divorcing, co-habitating, aborting, same-sexing and pornographing at the same numbers as the broader now secular, relativistic, nihilistic culture.
A precise date for the change in Catholic higher education is the Land O' Lakes Conference, headed by Fr. Hesburg in 1967. A small cadre, largely from Notre Dame and the better Jesuit schools, declared their independence from any authority, ecclesiatical or otherwise, external to the academic community itself. Ted McCarrick, then president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, was a signatory. Ironically, at this very time Notre Dame was accepting money from major secular foundations to sponsor summer institutes addressing the alleged population explosion and the desperate need for contraception. In other words, the Catholic University divorced itself from the Church but fell into an illicit affair with the now hegemonic liberal elite. Why did this happen?
Answer: the Catholic Inferiority Complex, exemplified by Fr. Hesburg himself. Emblematic of so many to come, Hesburg retained a staunch Catholic identity and piety even as he accomadated to and enabled the new regime of abortion, sexual liberty and a thinly disguised contempt for tradition and authority. He was amazingly successful in cultivating the rich and powerful, in rising to positions of prestige, in gaining widespread recognition and adulation. He seemed to crave such attention, no doubt out of a deep sense of insecurity, and did not seem to worry that he was betraying core Catholic values. In my high school years, I remember reading the renowned Fr. John Tracey Ellis on the intellectual inferiority of Catholics in America. This was a complciated stew: American pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, a largely uneducated immigrant population, the history of anti-Catholicism, the preoccupation of bishops and priests with building institutions. Clearly, Catholics were weak intellectually. But Ellis was not calling for a surrender to liberalism: he highlighted that Princeton and other elite schools were reviving the study of ancient and medieval philosophy, something that should have been done by Catholics. Earlier, his colleague Fulton Sheen, arguably the most influential-saintly-brilliant Catholic intellectual of midcentury America, had argued at Catholic University against the ambition to be a Catholic Harvard. But Hesburg, McCarrick and their cronies allowed this reality of intellectual inferiority to lead them down the most disastrous path: a craven emulation of an elite academy that was turning dark.
And so, for the last half-century, an ambiguity, a split personality, a fierce tension characterizes Catholic higher education: fidelity to the faith against a desperation to fit into elite society. This is pronounced at college level, largely influential at the secondary level, and not so strong in elementary schools.
At high school level, this contradiction is strongest at elite Catholic prep schools and academies which ambition to send graduates up the ladder into affluence, influence and prestige. My own 10 years of teaching were mostly in lower tier schools: St. Mary's H.S. in Jersey City served a mixed population of the urban working class; Immaculate Conception H.S. in Lodi run by the Felician Sisters was the least prestigious all-girls Catholic school in the area and attracted less ambitious, more pious ethnic families that valued faith, safety, discipline, and moral values more than upward mobility. But my own children went to "better" shools in Jersey City: St. Peters Prep and St. Domininic Academy. There I felt the tension as a Catholic parent. I will always be grateful that in these schools my two sons and five daughters flourished: psychologically, academically, socially, athletically. But the catechesis was weak. Already there was a draw towards the liberal values. The main problems: First, a failure to evangelize, to introduce the students into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Secondly, a watered down sense of the sacraments. For instance, the schools had Eucharisitic chapels that were ignored: one daughter told me she felt self-conscious, stupid if she visited the chape to pray as if she was doing something shameful. She was not an insecure person. Third, a weakness in catechesis of chastity. Lastly, a leaning politically to the left. Thish seemed to compensate for the implicit acceptance of the meritocratic system, even as it emulated the very values of those at the top of the achievement ladder. It is no wonder that a typical product of 12 or 16 years of Catholic education is, 5 or 10 years later, co-habitating, contracepting, abstaining from mass and confession, and voting consistently pro-choice.
In the red-blooded, straight-up conservative Catholic circles that I favor (charismatic, pro-life, Marian groups, First Things, Communio, EWTN neo-cathemunal way, etc.) there is a strong tendency to avoid the accomadationism of Catholic schools in favor of home schooling at the lower level and hard core secular universities at the upper tiers. I sympathize with this. At Princeton, Rutgers or Columbia the student encounters the godless culture in its naked shamelessness as a contrast to the Catholic offering. This is better than the watered down Catholic Lite available at most Catholic schools, especially the "best," since the Land O'Lakes Conference.
The approach my wife and I took, with happy consequences: we treasured the parish and local Catholic school, notwithstaning their weaknesses, for what they offered, but complimented that with exposure to more intense, hard core, counter-cultural Catholic engagements: charismatic events, catechetical summer programs, overseas immersion experiences, World Youth Days, and so forth. Currently 15 of my 19 grandchildren who are of school age are in Catholic schools; 5 of my 13 children/and/spouses work in such; and my own children have spent a total of 126 years in Catholic schools. That stands out as one of our very best decisions. I am grateful for this splendid past! Notwithstanding the challenges, I remain hopeful for the future.
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