Newman on Higher Education

When Archbishop Cullen appointed Newman equally Rector of the proposed Catholic University of Republic of Ireland inward 1851, it was to spearhead the Church’s answer to a system designed to enable Catholics to obtain degrees within the secular, utilitarian organisation devised yesteryear Sir Robert Peel: the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast, Cork together with Galway. As Newman wrote, the University was intended to attract American also equally Irish Gaelic students, together with to learn a centre of Catholic cultural renewal for the whole English-speaking world, “with Great Britain, Republic of Malta (perhaps Turkey or Egypt), together with Republic of Republic of India on 1 side of it, together with North America together with Commonwealth of Australia on the other.” It was an extraordinary vision, together with fifty-fifty if this get-go Irish Gaelic Catholic academy was reabsorbed yesteryear the secular organisation afterwards Newman’s departure, it had provided the occasion for a serial of discourses on pedagogy (The Idea of a University) which proceed to influence Catholic thinking today. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), defining the basic constitution of a modern Catholic university, clearly bears the grade of Newman’s thought. 

Today, Newman’s ideas are to a greater extent than urgent together with relevant than ever. Zenit has late published a useful serial of articles on this subject yesteryear Fr Juan R. Velez ("Newman's 'Idea' for Catholic Higher Education", Part 1, Part 2). The tensions betwixt “liberal” or progressive together with “conservative” or authoritarian elements inward the Catholic academic world tend to come upwards to a caput over the

enquiry of whether faculty should move obliged to accept an oath of loyalty to the Holy See. In Newman’s vision of a Catholic university, loyalty to the magisterium was presupposed. No 1 tin bill Newman of infidelity (even if he famously, together with rightly, pose conscience earlier the Pope inward an after-dinner toast). The insistence on a formal oath may cause got a component inward weeding out dissenters, but it betrays that the essential spirituality of a Catholic establishment has already been lost. The mere taking of an oath, yesteryear itself, is non the agency to restore that spirit.

To sympathise this, nosotros demand to reverberate on what the Church (and yesteryear extension whatever Catholic community, including a community of scholars) genuinely is. H5N1 eucharistic ecclesiology views the Church non solely from the side of the “people” or from the side of the “authorities”, but from the “inside”; that is to say, equally an extension of the Incarnation.  It recognizes the Church’s deepest reality inward the dear which is the rootage of her unity. In that dear is inscribed the Trinitarian dynamic which lone enables us to overcome dualism without falling into monism (totalitarian or socialistic corporatism).

The Church has the nature of a sacrament. The house to start renewing the Catholic spirit of an establishment is thus alongside the liturgy. Daily Mass together with regular opportunities for prayer should move the axis some which the life of the Catholic community turns, cultivating both the sense of the sacred together with the sense of the community, the vertical together with the horizontal dimensions, the dear of God together with the dear of neighbour, all at the same time. As far equally possible, the curriculum should follow the liturgical year. Students should move offered opportunities to participate inward a pattern of prayer, meditation, skillful plant together with fasting that volition assist them inward living to a greater extent than inward the spirit of the evangelical counsels. The sense of (moderate) asceticism could inward fact move seen equally an essential constituent of a Catholic education, since it engages the volition inward the transformation of a agency of life. The advertising manufacture expends large amounts of energy, inventiveness together with fourth dimension inward manufacturing artificial needs, or channelling natural desires towards item commodities: pedagogy inward a Christian establishment should assist students to discriminate betwixt truthful together with simulated needs, fifty-fifty equally it strengthens their resolve to pursue creatively the chore of fulfilling their ain real needs equally human persons, through loving service.

Newman emphasized consistently from his Evangelical days that Christianity is much to a greater extent than than a laid of doctrines or institutions.  At its pump is the dear of a Person, Jesus Christ, who lone fully reveals to us the rootage together with role of created reality together with of our ain lives. Ex Corde echoes Newman: “the human beingness tin come upwards to a unified together with organic vision of knowledge” (section 85). The salubrious human heed aims to run across things get-go inward their natural wholeness together with integration, together with it does so yesteryear loving reality or the truth of things per se; yesteryear beingness receptive to it, inward such a agency equally to shape a sort of living communion alongside it. H5N1 Catholic pedagogy thus has to move founded on the dear of truth, on honor for reality that transcends us, together with on the capacity of the human heed to know the “essences” of existent things. This stands inward contrast to the prevailing philosophy of our age, which makes the choosing self the creator of meaning.

As Christians, nosotros know yesteryear religious belief that it is inward Christ that all truth finds its abode together with fulfilment; but that does non hateful that all intellectual problems tin move solved alongside a doctrinal statement.  Each together with every dependent plain has its ain legitimate autonomy; a Catholic academy is non 1 inward which the teachers of physics or biological scientific discipline or history must written report to the professor of theology inward fearfulness together with trembling.  Nevertheless, the theology professor inward a Catholic academy does know a secret.  He knows that inward the end, if y'all press physics or biological scientific discipline or history to its ain deepest level, if y'all pursue your intellectual quarry to its ultimate lair, y'all volition observe love. What is magnetism, asks the poet Coventry Patmore inward The Rod, the Root, together with the Flower, “but the echo of the senseless stone to the real vocalisation of far-off Love, together with the final result of the osculation of God transmitted through the hierarchies of sky together with globe to the lips of the to the lowest degree of beings?”  In some shape or expression, the theologian knows that it is dear that volition plough out to move the forcefulness that moves the sun, the stars together with the pump of man.  It is inward this sense that Christ -- who reveals the nature of dear -- is implicitly at the centre of the curriculum fifty-fifty of secular studies inward a Catholic university.

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