Viewpoint
More doubts than decisions at meeting
By MICHAEL J.
GILLGANNON
Over 200 delegates of bishops’
conferences, representing 50 countries, and representatives from both Catholic
and state universities, attended a confused but ambitious gathering Sept. 23-26
to plan a Jubilee 2000 World Congress of University Professors.
The conference, held at Sacred Heart University Conference Center
in Rome, was called by Cardinal Pio Laghi of the Congregation for Catholic
Education and Cardinal Paul Poupard of the Pontifical Council for Culture.
The congress is to focus on “The University For a New
Humanism,” a favorite and reiterated theme of Pope John Paul II underlined
most recently in his last encyclical on faith and reason. The congress will
have a wide variety of sub-topics discussed in university centers all over
Italy and the Holy Land Sept. 4-8, 2000. A summary of final reports will be
presented to Pope John Paul II in the following Jubilee ceremonies on Sept. 9
and 10, 2000.
Ambitious? Incredibly so. Church authorities want to provide a
forum for dialogues between faith, science and culture on such topics as
anthropology, bioethics, globalization, physics, metaphysics, medicine,
architecture and art -- the list goes on.
It is a worthy task recalling the best of the Catholic humanist
tradition from Copernicus, Galileo and Michelangelo, to Thomas More and
Cardinal John Newman and on to Jacques Maritain and Karl Rahner. But one is
wise to remember the trials (legal and spiritual) of those pioneers as they
tried to interpret and assimilate human advances in thought and action with the
encrusted “traditions” of custom and church practice having little to
do with “tradition” as authentic faith and permanent teaching.
Since the goals and themes of the Jubilee event are ambitious, one
might forgive the organizational confusion. The world meeting will be a first
for all concerned, organizers and participants. Still, the planning meeting in
Rome left huge questions to be answered very soon for the proposed cultural
encounter.
Who participates? The planning invitation went to bishops’
conferences around the world. They sent a wide variety of delegates. The United
States sent one delegate from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, but
not from Catholic universities or campus ministry. The Catholic Campus Ministry
Association knew nothing of the meeting. On the other hand, the chaplains of
Georgetown and Cornell took part, sent by their universities.
Monica Hellwig, noted theologian and president of the Association
of Catholic Colleges and Universities, was an invited panelist. The presidents
of various Catholic universities from developing countries, such as the
Philippines and Indonesia, attended and reported their difficult experiences of
growth.
Very few university professors were in attendance, though they are
the supposed protagonists of the scheduled intellectual, cultural and
theological programs of next year.
There was no clarity about the representation or contribution of
those Catholics working in greatly diverse settings of ministry in higher
education. The title of the Jubilee meeting, “World Congress of University
Professors,” left the planning meeting with more doubts than decisions.
Who are the professors (and only professors?) to be invited as participants?
Who will be the contributing speakers and experts covering such a wide variety
of themes on science, culture and faith?
The Jubilee 2000 meeting is designed to emphasize Catholic beliefs
and their historical contributions to science and the humanities. But will it
include ecumenical and interreligious questions about the new global challenges
to both faith and science in the 21st century?
The meeting received a preponderance of academic and ecclesial
input from Italian university experiences and from curial authorities. A
“world meeting” cannot be limited to such narrow sources if it is to
be taken seriously by scientific, church or ecumenical intellectuals and their
institutions.
No clear distinction was made between those working in Catholic
universities as administrators, teachers or campus ministers and those growing
numbers now ministering at state or private, non-confessional universities. Not
every developing country has a Catholic university.
In Bolivia, the Catholic university has 12,000 students while
almost 150,000 Catholics are in the state university system. And similar
percentages would be true from Mexico on south. Still, no attention was paid to
preparing either professors or pastoral ministers in developing countries for
the new, ever-multiplying Catholic presence in the university populations of
the Third World. That world will become a First World in the new millennium
because of its determination to find a human place for its over 4 billion
people. Universities will be the key to this development, and most of those
universities will not be of Catholic inspiration. They will be teaching Western
science and technology to meet global challenges, and that will mean they will
also be teaching a humanist tradition of research, experimental inquiry and
personal and professional ethics. It could be a unique opportunity for church
ministry to higher education, but few are prepared to meet these new needs --
nor was there any sense of institutional urgency about the task at the
meeting.
Most delegates, while enthusiastic about the basic idea of the
Jubilee Congress, voiced their doubts about the process and the tone of the
presentations made to them. The presentations, from individual speakers or
panels, were magisterial and didactic. Very little time was given for
questions, and only the briefest of dialogues was held. There was no time set
aside for the interaction of the delegates. Delegates could have come and gone,
meeting and speaking with no one while, against all modern adult pedagogy, they
were passive and silent listeners. Most modern grammar schools have a more
interactive process of learning for their students. This structural and
methodological error must be corrected for the congress next year.
Finally, in this meeting about global human creativity and culture
there was a disappointing negativism. A pall of Eurocentric pessimism about
human history and, despite Vatican II, about the Christian humanism of hope, so
contrary to the pope’s own vision of this millennial threshold, pervaded
the proceedings. Cautionary counsels and corrections of the world’s errors
seemed to be put forth as the purpose of the proposed Jubilee Congress -- a
goal not shared by the quite hopeful delegates, especially those from youthful
developing countries, in spite of their monumental problems of social ferment
and instability.
The Catholic church has a humanist tradition of great antiquity
and of urgent relevance. It would be a sin against the tradition not to share
this horizon of hope about humanist -- incarnational -- values with a world
hungering to believe in, and to create, a viable global human future in the
first century of the new millenium.
Fr. Michael J. Gillgannon is coordinator for campus ministry of
the Bishops’ Conference of Bolivia and campus minister to the State
University of La Paz.
National Catholic Reporter, November 19,
1999
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