Catholic Universities: A Threat to the Catholic Faith?
By Emma Foley
Data shows that 85% of Catholic young adults lose their faith at some point in their college years.
This may be due to a new Sunday-morning independence gained upon leaving the supervision of a parent, the completion of one’s required religion courses, or the widespread generational denouncement of the institution. Nevertheless, this statistic shows the Church is failing the population at this critical age.
I fall in the 15% minority. In college, my faith was strengthened. This was not because I attended Mass every week or was surrounded by strong, faithful students who sought the best for me. Rather, my faith was strengthened because I faced progressive priests and professors who taught the opposite of what I learned growing up. This forced me to reevaluate and rebuild what I believed and why I believed it.
While in college, my faith was strengthened. This was not because I attended service every week or surrounded myself with the right friend group. My faith was strengthened because I was forced to break my faith apart piece by piece and evaluate every until I had an even stronger foundation for what I believed.
The most severe obstacle to maintaining my Catholic faith was neither a secular media bombarding me with morally, ethically, and biologically relative messaging nor a loud culture promising me convenient pleasures, superficial fixes, and therapeutic solutions.
The largest threat to my Catholic faith was attending a Catholic university.
Humanity has been bestowed the gift of intellect, a trait palpably on display at Boston College. The university is in essence the public square, a playground for ideas. I am eternally grateful to have had the experience to learn under a premiere faculty and alongside some of the most critical Christian thinkers. Further, the Church has a responsibility to assess and evaluate doctrine and tradition against culture as she has done for centuries.
However, I noticed quickly that some Catholic absolutes and non-negotiables were being watered down in the name of “equity” or “inclusion.” The Church holds instead that some commands are final and select teachings are not open for interpretation. Boston College is among many Catholic schools across the nation professing otherwise. This is extremely confusing for the faithful on the fence and for outsiders wishing to understand Catholicism.
My first taste of this Magisterial muddling occurred during my freshman year when I attended an event titled “The Church in the Twenty-First Century.” On stage sat a panel featuring a professor, a layperson, and a student. Among several temporally relevant questions, the moderator asked the panel whether women should be able to be ordained. The professor and layperson said yes. The student said no. The student’s belief aligned with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while his superiors’ opinion contradicted it.
This was the beginning of a pattern I witnessed at Boston College: where once existed clear differentiation between non-negotiable and debatable Church teaching, a gray area was being painted. Often, practicing Catholic students disagreed with their superiors. As one of these students who aligned overwhelmingly with catechism and canon law, I quickly learned which campus battles were worth fighting and when speaking up would prove futile. I, like many traditionally religious or conservative students, had fallen into self-censorship—in classroom discussion, in graded essays, in casual conversation. I began avoiding Catholic topics at my Catholic school.
During my senior year, however, I refused to sit silently while a professor watered down the authority of Catholic Church teaching on contraception. In class, he promoted the use of oral contraceptives within the context of marriage to match a widespread and growing favorability among married couples to limit children. The class roster included a deacon, a religious sister, and several lay men and women. When the majority of the room agreed with a reconstruction of the Church’s procreative paradigm, I knew I had to speak up.
“I am going to play my fertile-woman card here. I actually like what the Church has to say regarding the purpose of sex in marriage. It makes sense. If the Church were to allow the pill—a Group 1 carcinogen, by the way, which would be a horrible look for the Church once people begin paying attention to that—she would have to redefine one of the four pillars of marriage: that the marriage is fruitful…that the couple is open to bearing and raising children in the faith.”
I received what I expected—looks as if I were an extra-terrestrial. After class, however, another student came up to me in the hallway. “Emma,” he said, “thank you for what you said in there. Raising those points. Just…thank you.”
A divide exists in the Church today, and it was evident on my Catholic campus. And one side was louder, so much louder that, when traditional views or lifestyles were raised, it was thought to be completely alien to the culture.
This became most obvious to me one Thursday during my final spring semester. I, along with the other sixty-two members of Boston College’s Catholic women’s group, received a text message from the leader. It read, “A student was assigned an immersive journalism project for a class, and she wants to study Catholic women in college. She’ll be attending a few of our meetings this semester!”
I was instantly brought back twelve years to a colorful photo in my sixth-grade science textbook. We were learning about animals, and that particular chapter began with a story about Dr. Jane Goodall, a primatologist who immersed herself amongst chimpanzees. She did this to gain insight into the ape’s natural behaviors in an uncontrolled environment.
Was it so outlandish to be a practicing Catholic woman at a Catholic university that understanding her lifestyle required a similar behavioral study to that of a chimpanzee?
The problem is, at Boston College, it did. The average student was entirely confused—whether due to a progressive professor or a silent student—as to why a twenty-two-year-old woman would choose this traditional lifestyle for herself.
It required an incredibly strong domestic and early educational foundation, as well as an ardent personal curiosity, to test, verify, and even denounce the false theological academia peddled at my school. Most students—even confirmed Catholics or products of nominally Catholic institutions—will not be as fortunate. If practicing Catholics do not defend true Magisterial teaching, enemies of the Church will continue to muddle the black-and-white into infinite shades of gray.
The solution?
Every Catholic allegiant to the two-thousand-year-old Tradition must speak up. She must read everything she can from Scripture and the Church Fathers, rebuilding her faith—a faith based in history and made timeless through beauty. She must engage with the culture both in the classroom and through every chance in public media. She must make her religion accessible to those unfamiliar yet hold steadfast in her conviction that revealed truth, like Apostolic Succession or marital procreation, is absolute.
