"It is a fact," says the Rev. Gustave Weigel, S.J., professor of ecclesiology at Maryland's Woodstock College, "that in the United States, where the Catholics form something between a fifth [and] a third of the population, the proportion of Catholics in American scholarship is nowhere near the overall figure." Why is it that, aside from theology, American Catholics have made such a comparatively small contribution to U.S. scholarship? In the current University of Notre Dame quarterly, The Review of Politics, Jesuit Weigel gives his answer: "The general Catholic community in America does not know what scholarship is."
Fifth Columnists. Though many Catholic...