A Mission of Hope

By Father Charles Sikorsky, LC

In his address to Catholic educators, Pope Benedict harmonized his thoughts on education with the general theme of his visit to the United States, “Christ our Hope.” Specifically, he focused on the relationship between truth and hope. He made this point near the beginning of his address when he said, “Set against personal struggles, moral confusion and fragmentation of knowledge, the noble goals of scholarship and education, founded on the unity of truth and in service of the person and the community, become an especially powerful instrument of hope.” In order for our institutions to fulfill their calling to be instruments of hope, the Holy Father challenged us to focus on mission, conviction and love.

First, he emphasized the crucial role that Catholic education plays in the Church’s mission to evangelize. Much more than simply developing the intellectual capacity of students, Catholic institutions are called to help their students discover and accept the truth in a way that has consequences for their lives. Contact with the truth should move the will so that students live and experience more fully the joy and challenge of following Christ and of becoming His witnesses to the world.

Second, the Holy Father stressed that the Catholic identity of an institution is fundamentally a question of conviction and faith. Are we really convinced by Christ? Do we really believe that a vibrant life of faith is necessary for our institutions to flourish? The answers to these questions define who we are and whether we offer a real alternative to non-Catholic institutions.

It must be noted that the much-awaited address was made not only to university presidents, but also to the superintendents of Catholic schools at the diocesan level. Most likely for that reason the Holy Father did not specifically mention John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, Ex corde Ecclesiae, or its General Norms. The point of the address was broader, giving insight into Benedict’s thinking on Catholic identity for Catholic educational institutions at all levels.

Even so, the address was helpful to understand Benedict’s view of what a Catholic university should be. His mention that Catholic identity goes beyond statistics and doctrinal orthodoxy puts the legal norms of Ex corde into their proper perspective. Those norms, such as the need for the university president to be Catholic, the requirement that majorities of faculty and governing boards be Catholic and the necessity of the mandatum for theology professors, need to be understood as a starting point. To be a truly Catholic university, the institution must strive for much more than this.

According to Benedict, it must be a place where conviction leads to a faith that reverberates in each and every aspect of university life. It must be a place “to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth,” and where personal encounter with Christ, knowledge and Christian witness come together “to ensure that the power of God’s truth permeates every dimension” of the institution. In short, the root of the crisis of truth in today’s world is a crisis of faith. If a Catholic university seeks to be part of the solution to that crisis, it must be a place where faith is vibrant and alive.

Speaking specifically to faculty members at Catholic colleges and universities, Benedict’s treatment of academic freedom, one of the most important and tendentious issues facing many Catholic universities, was also revealing. Like John Paul II in Ex corde Ecclesiae, Benedict recognizes the value of academic freedom and the call to “search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you.” At the same time the Holy Father pointed out that appeal to academic freedom in order to justify positions contrary to the teachings of the Church cannot be justified. Such a use would be antithetical to the university’s identity and mission. While we should purposefully and joyfully pursue the truth, we are called to accept the whole and integral truth, whether we find it through reason or God’s Revelation as communicated through the Church’s Magisterium.

Finally, it struck me that the Holy Father sees the educator’s responsibility to lead others to the truth as a requirement of love. He called it “intellectual charity.” What a beautiful way to synthesize the mission and vocation of Catholic education! It brings to mind St. Bernard’s famous quote:

“There are some people who want to know only so as to know. This is misguided curiosity. Others want to know in order to be known. This is misguided vanity. Others want to know in order to sell their knowledge, for example, for money or for honors. This is misguided profit. But there are others who want to know in order to build. This is charity.”

At the Institute for the Psychological Sciences we are committed to serving our students and the Church with the “intellectual charity” to which Benedict and St. Bernard referred. Without question his address is a stimulus for us to develop and be nurtured from the heart of the Church. As a Catholic graduate school of psychology offering master- and doctoral-level degrees, our mission is to harmonize the scientific advances of modern psychology with the Christian vision of the human person.

While our program is empirically driven by wherever the finest scholarship leads us, it is always guided by the truth about the human person and within the moral framework proposed by the Church. As Benedict mentioned in Washington, truth should serve as the basis of praxis. This approach enriches the discipline and practice of psychology by respecting the transcendent destiny of each person, by understanding the relationship between freedom and responsibility, and by seeing virtue, faith and moral convictions as indispensable to the healing process and true human flourishing.

For us and for all Catholic educational institutions, achieving the high goals mentioned by the Holy Father is certainly a challenge, but it is also an opportunity. This is an opportunity to grow, to heal a hurting world and to become instruments of hope.