Recently, in a thoughtful address to U.S. bishops, Chicago Cardinal Francis George warned of a disturbing tendency within the Catholic Church.

The Church runs many fine schools, colleges, hospitals and corporate works of charity. These institutions all make valuable contributions to the surrounding culture. The problem, according to Cardinal George, is a tendency to make these contributions on the culture's own terms. There is no longer a clear confessional purpose — a sense of discipleship — in many Catholic organizations. The idea is to blend as much as possible with the secular culture.

It is a serious problem. Call it a lack of supernatural outlook or the internal secularization of the Church.

Simply put, there is a hesitancy to be Catholic. The implicit assumption in some Catholic institutions is that the culture has more to teach the Church than vice versa. The result is an attitude neatly summed up in the question asked of prospective teachers in a certain

Catholic private school I know: “You're not too Catholic, are you?” Part of the problem is that in recent decades many Catholic organizations have scrambled to modernize, to do their work professionally. And this is a good thing. It is obvious that a Catholic school or hospital should be run with professional savvy and that whatever sound methods are out there should be ours.

G.K. Chesterton's adage that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly is not a good motto for a Catholic institution. We should be running schools and hospitals that are at least as good as any other, if not better.

But, as Cardinal George points out, the “profession-alization” of Catholic institutions has come at a steep cost. While busying themselves in their appointed tasks, many Catholic educators and administrators have lost sight of an essential truth: They are part of the Church, and the Church is not like the world. It is the Body of Christ. Even in the conduct of its institutional operations, the Church has to be different. Before anything else, she is on a mission that transcends her mundane tasks, however important they may be.

In many Catholic institutions, there is a flight from Catholic specificity, from the doctrines and practices of the Church. In their place is put a kind of generic Christianity that is hardly distinguishable from bourgeois liberalism's understanding of the common decencies. There is no sense of sharing in the Church's evangelical mission or in the universal call to holiness. On issues where the Catholic Church's position is unpopular, political correctness often trumps doctrine.

Catholic education has been especially the victim of this trend of secularism. Recently, the newly arrived pastor of a Catholic parish that runs a parochial school made a discovery. The teachers as a matter of policy don't teach the Catholic children how to make the Sign of the Cross. Why? Don't even ask. Suffice to say there are parties in the Church today who are just discovering the educational fads of the '60s, at the time when the rest of the world is largely abandoning them.

There is no more unhappy person than a mediocre Catholic priest.’

Cardinal George argues that “the primary crisis at this moment, and always, is a crisis of discipleship, of conversion to Jesus Christ individually and socially within his body, the Church.” Catholic institutions need to undergo an examination of conscience. What is our primary mission? Are we genuine disciples, or are we simply professionals who happen to have a “Catholic” label? Do we understand that our first duty is our own personal conversion, that our work ought to be an overflow of the interior life before it is anything else?

The French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos once wrote a very hard saying: There is no more unhappy person than a mediocre Catholic priest. Dare one also apply this to Catholic institutions?

Whenever I visit a genuinely Catholic school or college — one that is unabashedly loyal to the magisteri-um and teaches the fullness of the faith — I am struck by the bright, good cheer on the campus, both among students and faculty. Thomas Aquinas College in California is an example.

I have had a quite different experience on campuses that have dropped virtually everything except the label “Catholic.”

Heterodox Catholicism is indeed “an exhausted project” — and these days seems to suffer a kind of mood disorder.

We have to relearn that secular strategies and practices are not an end in themselves, that bishops are not simply chief executive officers, that Catholic colleges are called to have a shared devotional life, that mere human contrivance is not enough to run a parish, that in the long run no amount of professionalism makes up for a lack of holiness.

Christ came as a sign of contradiction. If a Catholic institution is comfortable with an increasingly post-Christian environment, it ought to ask itself what it is really about.

George Sim Johnston, author of Did Darwin Get It Right?, writes from New York.