Father J. Michael Miller, a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil and president of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, has been named secretary to the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education.

Archbishop-designate Miller, 57, will be ordained an archbishop Jan. 12 and will hold the second-highest position in the education congregation under its prefect, Polish Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski.

A native of Ottawa, he is familiar with Rome. From 1992 to 1997 he served in the English section of the Vatican's Secretariat of State. A prolific author and a specialist on the papacy and modern papal teaching, Archbishop-designate Miller has written The Shepherd and the Rock: Origins, Development and Mission of the Papacy (1995) and the Encyclicals of John Paul II (2001). A Latin American scholar, he speaks Spanish, Italian, French and German.

In December he spoke with Register correspondent Ellen Rossini.

You joined the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in 1979 and became its president in 1997. So that's where most of your career in higher education has been spent.

It sure has been. I taught a semester in Mexico at a seminary, the Seminario Regional del Sureste in Tehuacan, and then when I was in Rome I taught two years at the Gregorian as an adjunct when I was working there. I taught seminars on the teachings of Pope John Paul II.

Describe the University of St. Thomas.

It was founded in 1947 as a Catholic co-institutional university. We have nearly 5,000 students, with 2,000 undergrads.

For undergraduates we have a very strong liberal arts core curriculum, which includes a 24-hour bloc in philosophy and theology. We're the only center that offers the doctorate in the study of St. Thomas [Aquinas], in our Center for Thomistic Studies.

We also provide the academic formation for our seminary, in our school of theology, which is one of the two theologates in the state of Texas.

Can you tell me the situation there with the mandatum, which is required of Catholic theology professors?

There's a privacy thing in this. When the bishop does it, he does it with the individual; it's not something that is reported back to the university. But [we've learned] the bishop offered everyone the mandatum. And in our ads we are able to say that everybody has the mandatum. It's a requirement now to be hired.

What is the scope of the Congregation for Catholic Education?

It tries to implement the Pope's vision for education at the primary and secondary levels, less directly, and at the university level, more directly. It also has concern for seminary formation. It has a fairly broad, three-fold competency.

How can your experiences at the University of St. Thomas help you to fulfill this task?

The experiences of being in higher education in the United States and the way American universities operate, I think, can be helpful to the Holy See. There are other models of university education that are more European and tend to be far more specialized than the kind of undergraduate education that is so common in Catholic schools in the United States.

The idea of a residential university that sort of takes care of kids — that just doesn't exist in most parts of the world. I think it might be helpful to have someone on the team, so to speak, who brings that both from personal experience, having attended universities like that and administering one.

How was your time in the 1990s in Rome?

I [also] studied there in the ‘70s. Rome is a wonderful city; you have a tremendous sense of the universality of the Church, the wonder and the beauty of the Church, the Church seething with activity and life. We get a little used to crisis talk in the United States, and in Rome you see that crisis means they have too many seminarians for too few seminaries.

You get a much broader perspective on the life of the universal Church than we often have here. We think everything is kind of downhill and collapsing, and you forget the good things and the signs of the new springtime. You get that in Rome. Rome is, after Houston, the best place to be.

What do you see as the biggest crisis in Catholic education?

I think that varies. The crisis in North American and West European societies [would be] secularization, antagonism toward religion, diffidence to the truth. There's a huge intellectual background and culture that our students absorb even when they've come from Catholic schools. The society influences them to a kind of “nice-ism,” a relativism, a skepticism toward truth. It's the air they breathe. They don't mean ill by it, but it puts an extra challenge in the mix for Catholic education, which is dedicated to the cause of truth.

It's the mind-set that is there. Among ordinary kids — there are more sophisticated movements that affect a small percentage — but most kids are just nice kids, and they have a hard time with some of the tough intellectual form that is also part of the Catholic intellectual tradition.

So you have the challenge of speaking truth in an age where there is no sense of truth.

Exactly. It's not that they passionately believe — they don't passionately believe in much of anything, they don't even passionately believe in what they do. All the edges have been overly softened.

We live in a world of opinion, and you're the master of the opinion. Nobody can contradict how you feel. So statements like, “I think,” “I believe,” “I argue that,” “I am convinced that” — all those are harder for the kids.

It sounds like we need a new revolution in Catholic education.

We need to, beginning with the family, buttress them with a new language that is built on more solid ground. If you don't have that, it's harder for you to absorb the intellectual part of the Catholic tradition. They get it from their family and from their schooling. That's why sound Catholic education is so important. And if the family is not there, it can't do much.

What energizes you? What are the opportunities, the bright lights in Catholic education?

It's a great field in which you can do so much, if you have some clear ideas, if you're willing to work with people. You do have to understand where people are coming from. No one is really convinced simply by imposition of someone else.

When the Catholic intellectual tradition is really lived in an institution and people are really enthused by it, you can see that it changes kids’ minds and hearts. You see the result. That's why people stay in universities all their lives. They do see people change.

So there's the element of evangelization, then?

Some schools put everything on the input, like you have to be perfect when you come in. A few places can do that, but for mass Catholic education, that's not what it's about. To have a criterion — you get to a Catholic school because you go to Mass — no, a lot of kids probably don't go to Mass when they're in high school and you hope that by Catholic education that they'll go out going to Mass. It really has a broader evangelical role.

Ellen Rossini writes from Richardson, Texas.