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Edward Sorin
Edward Sorin by Marvin Richard O'Connell University of Notre Dame Press, 2001 800 pp.; $49.95 |
After generations of dutiful assimilation, American Catholics remain befuddlingly out of step with the cutting edge of American Protestantism. During the heyday of liberal Protestant ecumenism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Catholics were stubbornly sectarian and separatist; amidst the contemporary conservative evangelical rage for confessional, faith-based organizations, Catholics have remained guardedly ecumenical. This conundrum is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the field of higher education. Robert Benne's recent Quality With Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions examines only one Catholic institution, an underrepresentation that at least in part accurately reflects the fairly thorough secularization of the Catholic educational system. Pope John Paul II's efforts to address this problem, most notably through his encyclicals Ex Corde Ecclesiae and Fides et Ratio, have met with mixed reviews among influential American Catholic educators.
The Idea of a Catholic University by George Dennis O'Brien Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002 239 pp.; $28 |
Two recent works speak to the past and future of Catholic higher education in ways that help to illuminate the current debate. Historian Marvin O'Connell's massive Edward Sorin chronicles the life of the 19th-century founder of the University of Notre Dame (the sole Catholic institution to have made it into Benne's sweet six). Philosopher and former university president George Dennis O'Brien's The Idea of a Catholic University takes the debates surrounding John Paul II's encyclicals as an occasion for reflecting on the possibility of Catholic institutions reclaiming their distinct religious identity without sacrificing a humanist universalism he sees as itself rooted in the Catholic tradition. These very different books, in sometimes unintended ways, show the distressingly persistent failure of American Catholic educators to create or even envision institutions capable of sustaining a vital Catholic intellectual life.
To be fair, intellectual vitality was a luxury few Catholic leaders in Europe or America could afford in the 19th century. Edward Sorin was born on February 6, 1814, in the small French village of La Roche, and baptized on the same day in the parish church at Ahuillé. Infant baptism could not be taken for granted in revolutionary and Napoleonic France. O'Connell does a marvelous job of setting Sorin's early religious formation in the context of the violent assault on the Catholic Church in France following the revolution. At first the revolutionaries sought merely to subordinate the church to the state. Soon they attempted to replace Catholicism with a religion of reason, desecrating churches and parodying Catholic rituals. O'Connell recounts one such blasphemy in which a procession of donkeys with crucifixes tied to their tails were led to drink from chalices once used in the consecration of the altar wine at Mass. At the height of the Reign of Terror, priests who refused to leave France were hunted down and killed.
Sorin experienced these persecutions secondhand through the stories of his parents and older relatives. Not so with his spiritual mentor, Basile Moreau. Born on February 14, 1799, in a small French town a few miles south of Le Mans, Moreau had a living memory of the persecution of the Church during the revolution. Refusing to accept the legitimacy of the local state-appointed "constitutional" priest, Moreau's devout parents delayed his baptism, preferring to wait for one of the itinerant, outlawed clandestine priests who earned popular spiritual authority by their refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the state.
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