Forming the Faith

IT IS AUTUMN in New Jersey, and across the orange-leafed campus of Montclair State University two grey-habited, grey-veiled nuns have become a familiar sight. Montclair, fourteen miles from Manhattan, with sixteen thousand students, is the state’s fastest growing university. It is also, like all public universities in America, strictly secular. And yet those two French nuns, two Catholic campus ministers who only a few years ago might have seemed quaint, are now prominently featured in media reports of the life of the university community, and the life of the Catholic student body within it.

Empowered by the Spirit

For an extraordinary renaissance is occurring in America, in the Catholic Church’s ministry of university chaplaincy – measured not just statistically, but by a new confidence radiating through chaplaincies and through the nation’s Catholic universities.

In national terms, the renaissance dates from a pastoral letter, Empowered by the Spirit, which the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued in 1985.

The disruptions and anarchy that plagued the campuses of the Western world since the Sixties were coming to an end, and in this letter the diocesan bishop was urged “to be zealous in his pastoral care of students,” because so much depended upon winning each generation of university graduates to the Faith. The pastoral letter urged emphasis on “forming the faith community” and “appropriating the faith,” rather than merely schooling students in Christian doctrine.

The results, as measured in a major survey in 2005, have been remarkable. Of those who participated in campus ministry during student days, forty percent now attend Mass one a week or more; and eighty percent of them say they would encourage someone to become a priest, nun or monk.

This is a startling level of fidelity in a country where religious faith is more universal than in Europe, but where the practise of Catholicism can be very lax.

Another way of expressing the importance of university chaplaincy in America is this: in the United States a third of the working population is college-education, and these people overwhelmingly dominate society, politically and economically, as well as culturally and religiously. There are about 17 million Americans in post-secondary education at any time, of whom five million identify themselves as Catholics (and another eight million as Christians of other traditions). But only a tenth of those Catholic students attend Catholic universities: the rest of them are at secular or Protestant institutions. For these young Americans, destined to dominate the country, the Catholic chaplain is their obvious, formal link to the Church, and the chaplain thus bears a large responsibility for America’s Catholic future.

Veritatis Splendor

The revitalised work of college chaplaincy also owes a lot to the intellectual leadership of Benedict XVI and of John Paul II, both great philosopher-popes.

In Veritaits Splendor (The Splendour of Truth, 1993), John Paul II addressed himself to the nihilism and relativism he said threatened the health of education throughout the West, and especially in America:

“The greatest challenge to Catholic education in the United States today, and the great contribution that authentically Catholic education can make to American culture is to restore to that culture the conviction that human beings can grasp the truth of things, and in grasping that truth can know their duties to God, to themselves, and their neighbours,” declared the encyclical. “The contemporary world urgently needs the service of educational institutions that uphold and teach that truth is ‘that fundamental value without which freedom, justice, and human dignity are extinguished’”.

Following from this teaching, Catholic educators in the United States have recovered a certain self-assurance in insisting on the objective truth of human knowledge against the chaos of cultural relativism often still taught in American universities. As Veratits Splendor teaches, man “giving himself over to relativism and scepticism, goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself”. American Catholic chaplains, and American Catholic professors, have been growing bolder in refuting that illusion. The Rev. Dr. John McCloskey, III, a prominent Catholic priest famous for his conversions of prominent Americans, points out how, not just chaplains, but the “directors and administrators of the universities themselves” have begun to “engage the culture as part of the new evangelization”.

Fr. McCloskey demands, “Is it too much to ask that our universities acknowledge that there is such a thing as objective truth that can be grasped by the natural reason, and that prepares us for the truths of supernatural revelation?

Faith and Reason

John Paul expanded on his teaching in Veritatis Splendor in his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), in which the Pope reflected on the personal damage done to students by a pernicious scepticism about all learning, which leads human thought “to lose its way in the shifting sands… This is why I make this strong and insistent appeal – not, I trust, untimely – that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony.”

“We are children of the John Paul II generation,” declares Sister Faustine of Jesus and Sister Jeanne Marie, the two Montclair State ministers, who were sent out from the Community of the Apostolic Sisters of St. John in Burgundy. They say that Pope John Paul’s Fides et Ratio “is a guiding light for us. He wrote that people have lost their sense of what it is to be a human being because they have lost their sense of God. As campus ministers, we want to give our lives to the Lord in a very true way. We will try to touch the heart of each person we meet. We want to know what makes you, you.”

Agents of transformation

The campus ministers of Adelphi University, in Long Island, New York, call themselves “listeners, servants, and teachers dedicated to serving at the secular institutions of higher education within the diocese”. They declare they can be an “agent of transformation within the academic culture by giving living witness to the Gospel values of Jesus Christ and the principles of our Catholic heritage”. A recent graduate of Adelphi, not herself a Catholic, told Messenger of Saint Anthony that “You could always see them there – you always knew there was a Catholic priest about. It was just part of college life”.

It seems that presence is destined to become more and more important to America’s millions of students, as they change the nature of tertiary education there, and help them build what John Paul II taught universities were to help build: a “civilization of love and truth”.