The College Problem
College (in USA 1965-2024) is bad for the faith of a Catholic. Typically, the 18-year old leaves a home where the faith is practiced and graduates 4 years later with lost or diminished faith: absent from Sunday mass, cohabitating/contracepting, career obsessed, ideologically liberal, dismissive of tradition, and spiritually uprooted. College is, for many, a total, immersive environment wherein one studies, works, socializes, sleeps, eats, and attends class. Even Catholic schools, especially the most expensive and prestigious, are systemically hostile to our faith for several reasons:
- Social life of insobriety and unchastity.
- Intellectual culture of secularism, Marxist-Freudian progressivism, techno-scientific idolatry, and contempt for religion/tradition.
- Obsession with career, competition, achievement, bourgeois security and comforts.
- Total immersion in the monotone peer culture of adolescent, insecure, inbred, narcissistic indulgence out of touch with the harsh realities of work, accountability, authority, survival, and discipline.
- Little or no steady engagement with living, communal faith.
Choice of a College
This decision is unique for each student; and involves many factors of which Catholic identity and culture is one; and not necessarily the decisive one. Others include: price and financial aid, location (far or near home; city, country suburb), size (small, large, medium), social life, demographics, academic quality (for the intellectual), sport program and coach (for the athlete), career preparation, prestige, campus charm/beauty and any number of idiosyncratic preferences and aversions.
For the Catholic family and student, a steady environment of faith, on or off campus, needs to be first priority. The bourgeois family entrusts its child to the campus with unbounded confidence: this is a great experience, the pathway to success and happiness, a sound investment in a bright future. From a Catholic perspective, it is at best risky and arguably reckless.
Some radical, countercultural Catholic renewal communities (the Neocatchumenal Way for example) reject the idolatry of career achievement and the college degree, keep their children close to family and faith community, and chose modest, economic, commuter, less prestigious schools. Many go on to professional and academic careers but keep the priority on faith/family and reject campus decadence, career obsession, and the entrapments of elite "woke" culture.
Their intuition is correct. The normal campus is an intensification of broader trends in elite society, media and peer culture that are viciously hostile to historic Catholicism. Normal parish life, in itself, has been, for over 50 years (when we started our own family), fragile and vulnerable in the face of the forces attacking the faith. A thriving, vigorous faith today requires, normally, immersion in some intensive renewal community: Charismatic Renewal, Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenal Way, Latin Mass Community, Opus Dei, etc.
My oldest grandchild Brigid offers an attractive approach: a junior at Columbia University, she participates there in Catholic activities but takes the subway downtown Friday evenings for lively meetings of her Communion and Liberation University (CLU) group which enliven and strengthen her faith.
Four Types of Schools
Since students spend most, if not all of their time embedded in the campus, we consider here four types of schools: secular; moderate, traditional and progressive Catholic schools.
1. Secular schools, private and public, modest and prestigious, are not just non-Catholic but virulently anti-Catholic academically and socially. But they have two positives for our faith:
- They are blatant and transparent in their hostility and therefore do not present a counterfeit Catholicism and oftentimes evoke a reaction whereby the young person asserts the faith against the uncamouflaged opposition.
- In some, but certainly not all cases, there is a small, but vigorous counterculture, possibly some blend of traditional and evangelical/Pentecostal Catholicism in Newman campus ministry, a FOCUS group, or informal faith gathering. Paradoxically, one might find here a more intense, authentic Catholicity than is available at Catholic schools. My nephew-priest found that at the University of Illinois and it is common on Ivy League schools.
2. Moderate, Mixed, Mainstream are majority of Catholic schools, maybe between 80 and 90%, a blend of forces pro and contra our faith. Here we find good Catholic resources for those so inclined, but the usual dorm culture. Unfortunately, the predominant trend is to mimic prestigious secular schools by hiring faculty, not for Catholic mission, but for academic status alone. And so, over the course of time, there is a deterioration of Catholic identity in academics. This trajectory was uncovered by a doctoral dissertation (by my sister) about our own Seton Hall University with which my own family is familiar. It has very strong Catholic assets (seminary, Jewish-Christian Studies, Focus, service projects, Catholic Studies and others) but a rampant cultural progressivism across the disciplines. This would also describe our premier university, Notre Dame.
Schools in this group may lean more heavily towards the traditional or the progressive. Our family has familiarity with three that retain strong dynamics of Catholic life: Mount St. Mary's (Maryland), DeSales University (Allentown, Pa) and Assumption (Worcester.)
3. Strong Traditional, Orthodox Schools. This is a limited number (20 to 30) of mostly smaller, many fairly recent, which quite deliberately offer a classical, intense Catholic alternative to the progressivism which swept our schools starting in the late 1960s. The larger, stronger among them include: Franciscan University of Steubenville, Benedictine College in Kansas, Ave Maria in Florida, Christendom, and University of Dallas. They offer a strong academic program in a classic, liberal arts vein. There is less focus on career, science/technology, and Dionysian social life; much more focus on moral character, spirituality, and our Catholic legacy. It retains the ancient focus on formation of the person. They offer a coherent, inclusive Catholic culture that effectively strengthens the student's faith. It is, obviously, the ideal choice in the view of Grandpa. Critics of these schools point to lack of diversity in student body and academics. A response to that is that graduate school, usually in a large university, offers the more mature such values.
4. Progressive schools, (Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham, Marquette, Holy Cross, etc.) have emulated the prestigious secular institutions and present themselves as mimetic competitors in all essential dimensions: academic status, ethos of sexual liberalism, leftist politics with the Marxist oppressor/oppressed binary now applied not to class but to racial and sexual identity, focus on professions and career, investment in research and science/technology. This agenda carries with it, inexorably, an implicit disdain for traditional Catholic values around gender/sexuality, family, morality, authority, and tradition. Traditional Catholicism is viewed as misogynist (male priesthood), homophobic, clericalist, authoritarian, and regressive. In its place is offered a new, enlightened spirituality which blends classic values (care of the person, social justice, concern for the poor and marginalized, "catholic" openness to others) with an acceptance of Cultural Liberalism. These schools are a serious concern for the traditional Catholic family as they present as a more authentic, relevant Catholicism even as they scorn much of our legacy. To make things worse, this philosophy tends to embrace the entire college culture: peer and dorm life, academics including theology and philosophy, administrative policy, and campus ministry. There remain a remnant of orthodox Catholics (e.g. Peter Kreeft at Boston College) but they are increasingly outliers and exceptions.
The staff at these schools are generally of high quality: scholarship, moral character, achievement, competence and deeply pious in their progressive way. This makes them, of course, all the more appealing for our young; and more dangerous from the viewpoint of traditional parents/grandparents.
Such school offer much genuine value in academics, morality, social policy, culture and spirituality. A young person can benefit greatly in many ways. But the pervasive value structure includes a rejection, not always explicit, our core beliefs.
Conclusion
My own primary desire is that our grandchildren receive, cherish, and share the faith we have received from earlier generations. The world we live in is viciously hostile to our religious legacy; as Roman Catholics we do well to vigilantly, prayerfully protect, cherish and share our faith. As (small "c") catholic Catholics we know that God is everywhere: we welcome and affirm all that is good, true and beautiful, in every kind of school and environment.
The "passing on" of our faith is primarily in the close bonds of faith and love between parents and children. But family cannot stand alone; it is organically part of the Church and the many organisms that flow from it. Our own 27 grandchildren are in 12 different schools: private, public, parochial; elementary, secondary university; very large and very small; prestigious and modest.
Our singular joy is that they continue to grow in God's grace and our faith, in a variety of circumstances. We can only rejoice and give thanks!
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