Most Catholics casually familiar with the University of Notre Dame can tell you that it's in Indiana, has a nationally competitive football team and is known more for its big-school status than its Catholic identity.

Those who keep tabs on the fidelity fallout plaguing Catholic colleges in America also know it for hosting “The Vagina Monologues” the day before Lent last year and for employing some faculty who dissent from Church teachings on faith and morality.

Few know about a bright, shining sign of the New Evangelization taking hold on the campus of the Fighting Irish: the Center for Ethics and Culture, led by Notre Dame philosophy professor Dr. David Solomon.

According to Solomon, the center takes its lead from the writings of Pope John Paul II and is not afraid to say so. “We're a committed, non-neutral center,” Solomon told the Register in a recent interview. “We try to foster an atmosphere where one doesn't have to be apologetic for one's faith commitments.”

Founded in 1998, the center runs an array of programs, including an annual conference in the fall, a series of lectures and presentations on Catholic literature, and interdisciplinary studies in ethics.

Solomon, who grew up Southern Baptist, came to Notre Dame in the late 1960s ignorant of the Catholic intellectual tradition. “I was overwhelmed by the resources of the tradition,” he recalls. As Pope John Paul II added his own stamp to Catholic scholarship through the years after his 1978 election, Solomon found himself especially impressed with the encyclicals on ethics.

“I had the sense that all the other ethics centers that had been founded in the last 30 years seemed to be on the wrong track,” he says. “They turned to Enlightenment philosophy to provide ethical guidance when religious traditions disappeared from the public sphere and the academy. I thought an ethics center that would be adequate to the problems of our culture had to draw on more than just secular Enlightenment philosophy.”

And there was the Holy Father, a sign of contradiction — and of enlightenment with a small “e.”

“His is the most penetrating and hopeful critique of modernity of any critiques around,” says Solomon. “This pope sees as clearly as anybody, without being a reactionary, what is promising and hopeful in modernity and what is disturbing.”

Of special importance in our time, he adds, is John Paul's articulation of how false views of freedom comprise the heart of contemporary liberal culture. For example, in secular liberal democracies, the emphasis on the formal values of freedom and equality have led to relativism and a shallow view of human freedom. “The notion of autonomy and freedom of women,” Solomon points out, “is turned against the dignity of the unborn child.”

The Larger Culture

Solomon sees the center as well positioned to not just analyze and apply the Holy Father's thought, but to further develop it in light of technological advances and shifting societal norms.

Many of the biggest ethical questions today should be seen, he argues, as fitting into a larger cultural framework. Asked about the issue of embryonic stem-cell research, Solomon points out: “If polls are right, a majority of Americans is willing to create human beings in order to destroy them to extract stem cells and promote the health of adults. We're consuming our children. Our attitude toward technology and the benefits of medicine are the large cultural features that make these evils possible.”

It is these “structural” issues that most interest Solomon. “We're not so much concerned about rights and particular duties or obligations,” he explains, “but rather with the larger culture.”

Solomon is conscious of how hostile secular society is to traditional believers. In his view, the center's most important work is the creation of a community of Catholics, Protestants and Jews who take traditional theism seriously. “Especially through our fall conferences, we have created a community of people who want to integrate intellectual matters and personal piety and practice, bring faith and learning together,” he says.

Raquel Frisardi, a Princeton sophomore who presented a paper at the 2001 conference and will present again this year, says the support the center provides is just as stimulating as the scholarship.

“I go to Princeton, an intellectually snotty university, and it's not popular to be deeply religious there,” she says. Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture “enables me to hold on to the values I was brought up with. It helps to know that there is a core of people who are intelligent and accomplished in their fields who are working on integrating their faith into their scholarship. It's very inspiring.”

Young Minds

The center's next conference, titled “Epiphanies of Beauty: The Arts in a

Post-Christian Culture,” is set to roll out Nov. 18-20. Solomon expects nearly 400 attendees. There are 20 invited speakers, among them Notre Dame philosophy professors Ralph McInerny and Alasdair McIntyre, along with Register columnist Barbara Nicolosi (also executive director of Act One: Screenwriting for Hollywood) and Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image journal. There will also be more than 100 other presentations on topics ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O'Connor to the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain, to medicine, architecture and iconography. Several musicians will perform their compositions.

Nicolosi is pleased with the opportunity to contribute her expertise. “Arts are a source of theology,” she says. “The people of God have been exposed to so much ugliness and mediocrity in the last 40 years that they don't even expect the Church to inspire them in beautiful ways anymore. People don't expect it, and pastors don't provide it.”

The center's previous conferences have explored the culture of death, the culture of life and strategies for renewal of the Church.

One striking feature of the conferences is the youth of the attendees. Father Matthew Gamber, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a conference attendee in the past, remarked, “If you go to Call to Action or Pax Christi, all you see are gray heads. Here is where the future of the Church is.”

Solomon has noted the age of his attendees, too. “I think young people are looking desperately for a place where they can have adult conversations about their faith, where they are not condescended to, where they are given freedom to say what they think and ask questions of mature adult Christians,” he says.

“The hardest thing for young Christians,” Solomon adds, “is to find out what it means to be an adult Christian, especially when progress in the intellectual life is so often thought of as a journey away from faith.” That, he hopes, is where the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame can come in.

Tom Harmon writes from Spokane, Washington.