Catholic University in Washington, D.C., has a high aim—"to search out truth scientifically, to safeguard it, and to apply it"—qualified in practice by a timid feeling that now and then some of the truth has to be suppressed. The newest case of suppression has the school's faculty in revolt and deeply worries many of the 239 Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S., who are C.U.'s guardians.
Barred from a student lecture series at C.U. last month were four eminent Catholic intellectuals, including two of the nation's top Jesuit theologians, Fathers Gustave Weigel and John Courtney Murray; a noted Benedictine liturgical scholar, Father Godfrey Diekmann; and one of the official theologians at the Vatican Council, Germany's Father Hans Küng. To Monsignor William J. McDonald, rector of Catholic University of America, giving a forum to these scholars might seem to place his school on the liberal side in debate at the council (now in adjournment until September)—and he did not want the school to be on any side.
An Indignant Cardinal. The ban was a case of caution carried to outrage, and it was with outrage that U.S. Catholics responded. At least 23 Catholic newspapers lamented what Wisconsin's Green Bay Register calls "one of the saddest pages in the history of intellectual Catholicism in the U.S." One editor denounced C.U.'s "authoritarianism"; another labeled the university a "citadel of mediocrity." Snapped Bishop John K. Mussio of Steubenville, Ohio: "Legitimate controversy should not be sidestepped by a center of learning. Suppressing views is no service to truth." In a stiff letter to Rector
McDonald, St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter described himself as "dismayed" and "indignant."
More than 200 of the university's 350 faculty members appealed McDonald's "speaker ban" to the 40-man board of trustees, which consists of all U.S. cardinals and archbishops, plus five bishops and six laymen. And where at first it seemed that only one incident was at issue, C.U.'s eminent church historian, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, went on to charge that "for nearly a decade, this type of suppression has been going on constantly at this university."
Every Catholic Contributes. C.U. is the only "national pontifical university" in the U.S. As such, it is controlled ultimately by the Vatican's Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities. It is the only U.S. Catholic university whose rector must be approved by the Pope (the others are run by religious orders or individual dioceses). Every U.S. Catholic is supposed to contribute to its support via an annual collection in all churches (1962 gleaning: $1,500,000).
In practice, Catholic University has been run by its rectors. They influence the rotating executive committee of trustees to which they report. They preside over the peaceable academic senate below them. In the 1930s one of them tried to build the school's reputation with big-time football (in 1936, C.U. actually beat Ole Miss in the Orange Bowl) and piled up a huge deficit. Another allowed the engineering school to lose accreditation (since restored) in the 1950s.