Loyola President's New Take on Ex Corde Ecclesiae

FIRST THINGS, June/July-Pope John Paul II's apostolic constitution on higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae,“did not come out of nowhere,” observed Jesuit Father John J. Piderit, president of Loyola University in Chicago. “It was designed to meet a situation that, in virtually everybody's opinion, needed remedying: the rapid and distressing decline of a strong religious presence at Catholic universities.”

Father Piderit wrote that he has “modified [his] position” since endorsing the first implementation plan offered by the American bishops for Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a plan that was rejected by the Vatican in 1998. The bishops “had left out at least one essential ingredient,” relegating to a footnote Canon 812 of Canon Law, which states that anyone teaching Catholic theology in a Catholic institution is required to have a mandate from a “competent ecclesiastical authority.”

The bishops have since formed a task force under the leadership of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia that will draw up a new implementation plan that incorporates Canon 812. While “to date the presidents [of Catholic colleges and universities] have responded negatively to the Bevilacqua proposal,” said Father Piderit, because they believe it will undermine the autonomy of their institutions.

However, wrote the Jesuit, “contrary to many reports in the media, the bishops are not attempting to control the university via the mandate.”

Father Piderit praised the Bevilacqua proposal — still in draft form — for “avoiding entanglement of the bishops in the internal affairs of Catholic universities while still implementing the mandate. It does this by defining the mandate as a relationship between the local bishop and the individual Catholic theologian; it addresses the Catholic theology at the heart of the Catholic university without setting up a formal relationship with the university itself.”

He added that the mandate's “indirect impact on the Catholic university may be substantial,” by prompting doctoral candidates, for example, “to prepare more carefully to teach Catholic theology from the perspective of the Church.”

The Blood of the High School Martyrs

TIME, May 31-The courageous witness of the Christian students killed or wounded in April in the Columbine High School rampage “have inspired millions of Americans,” especially adolescents, reported the national magazine's David Van Biema.

While the shootings have struck a chord with Christians everywhere, Van Biema focused on the particular impact it has had on evangelical Protestant teens in a two-page spread that was included in a special report on “Troubled kids.” One martyred student, Cassie Bernall, has become the focus of interest and attention from a new generation of evangelical teenagers.

“The enthusiasm caps a decade of extraordinary growth for Christian youth groups in middle and high schools,” said Van Biema, who cited a 1990 Supreme Court decision that allows prayer clubs to meet on public school property as a contributing factor.

However, unlike their evangelical parents, who often defined themselves as outsides, today's campus Christians, “are willing to engage the culture on its terms. They understand what's going on and speak the language,” Barnard College religion professor Randall Balmer told Time.

Van Biema noted that martyrdom is not prominent in Protestant theology but “the more emotional evangelical variety honors it, sometimes in connection with murdered missionaries or persecuted Christians … and sometimes to lend strength in the face of indignities suffered at the hands of American secularism.” Cassie, he reported, “has been compared to the early female saints, Perpetua and Felicity.”

A Lack of ‘Grown Up Wisdom’

THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 30-The Supreme Court's decision last month that holds schools accountable for sexual and other forms of harassment between students was the occasion for a Week In Review piece by Ethan Bronner that identified a number of serious social problems that have their origin in American family life and the inability of many parents to transmit moral values.

Bronner sums up the opinion of the majority of experts he interviewed who say that “youthful behavior has deteriorated markedly,” and “there are fewer adults around to influence youngsters. As a result, violent television and video images, instead of older friends or relatives, have become role models.”

Dr. William Damon of Stanford University Center on Adolescence told Bronner that “there has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world.

“We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.”

Bronner said Damon “was stunned when he went to Littleton, Colo., last month to find parents saying they felt they had no business learning what their children were doing on the Internet.”

Dr. Damon said the fact that modern adults have a less than black-and-white view of morality and human behavior, that they have perhaps a more nuanced perspective, seems to be blocking their ability to give clear-cut guidance and make strict rules for their children.