The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Where is it Today?
Rev. Msgr. Richard M. Liddy
Caldwell College, November 4, 2009

I am delighted to be part of your program here at Caldwell College as you welcome your new president, Nancy Blattner. I wish President Blattner and Caldwell College all the success in the world as you undertake this new step in your mission to be a center of excellence and of learning in the modern world - a college rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition and specifically the Dominican tradition of St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena - and, I might add today, St. Thomas Aquinas.

I thank you for this opportunity to speak about the Catholic intellectual tradition today in honor of President Blattner. It is certainly a topic I have given a lot of thought to - especially since Archbishop McCarrick in 1997 called me back from the Georgetown and the Woodstock Theological Center to dedicate myself to the Catholic identity and mission of Seton Hall University. Since then I have run the Center for Catholic Studies at the university - and although there are many dimensions to the work of this center, I have especially dedicated myself to faculty development - to running various development seminars, workshops, lectures - etc and working with the faculty in the creation of a new core curriculum that focuses around the questions central to but not exclusive to the Catholic intellectual tradition broadly understood. [If anyone would be interested in hearing about our new core, I would be happy to talk to them about it later].

1. John Haughey's Book

But first I would like to call particular attention to a book just published this year by Georgetown University Press by John Haughey, S.J. and entitled Where is Knowing Going? The Horizon of the Knowing Subject. This book deals with what we might call "the holiness of knowing." The book is an appeal for a genuine welcoming of all faculty, both Catholic and non-Catholic, with all their expertise and an appreciation that the Catholic intellectual tradition seeks to engage wherever knowing is going in all the disciplines taught in our over 220 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States today.

Central to Haughey's book is the distinction between the Catholic doctrinal tradition - the responsibility of the teaching authority of the Church - and the Catholic intellectual tradition that is fed by the doctrinal tradition, and indeed feeds into it, but in a sense is also more capacious in that it reaches out to wherever knowing is going. That intellectual tradition, though rooted in the past of the tradition, goes far beyond explicitly Catholic concerns to support wherever knowing is going for the good of all of humanity.

Thus, if the doctrinal tradition in the early Councils of the Church affirmed not just the full divinity of Christ, it also affirmed Christ's full humanity. Consequently, the Catholic intellectual tradition concerns whatever is fully human. It concerns not only what St. Thomas Aquinas learned about humanity within the universe from the Aristotle's philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy of the Middle Ages, but it also concerns whatever we can learn today about the world and humanity's place within the world from the modern sciences and all the contemporary academic disciplines.

In other words, our Catholic universities exist because of the full humanity of Christ and the exploration of what that means. They exist so that the Gospel, the Good News of God making a home among us and walking in our shoes, may interact with what St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed as "the autonomy of secondary causes" and the late Pope John Paul in his apostolic constitution, Ex corde ecclesiae, called "the rightful autonomy of the sciences and academic disciplines."

As Catholics we can make these distinctions, but we have not been too good at communicating these distinctions to other faculty, and at showing them how we esteem their contributions to the Catholic intellectual tradition - whether they explicitly adhere to that tradition or not. It seems to me we should be much clearer on who we are and on specifically why we maintain, often with great difficulty, these 220 Catholic colleges and universities - including Caldwell College.

2. The Notion of Catholicity

The integrating notion in Haughey's understanding of the finality of Catholic universities is Bernard Lonergan's "notion of being," that is, what all our searching and re-search is headed for. Such a notion is not primarily a concept, a word, but rather it is the very dynamism of our human spirit as it moves out to explore this or that area on its way to all that is true and good. Haughey adds the notion of "catholicity" to Lonergan's notion and he understands this notion as the search for meaning in any particular area: "connecting the dots," he puts it, making "wholes" where previously there had only been data or disparate threads. Such a notion allows one to understand what has been happening "on the ground" in Catholic universities as during the last half century they have hired expert "knowers" - Catholic and not - in so many fields.

Such knowing going on in so many and varied fields is in continuity with the best of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the past, but it sees that tradition as reaching out in the present to "all that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful." Haughey's development of the notion of catholicity provides an integrating vision for all the genuine intellectual work going on in Catholic universities.

Haughey concretizes his thesis by several biographical accounts of faculty members at Catholic universities who in their research are pushing the frontiers of knowledge in various areas. Each of these - Catholic or not - evidence the characteristics of following a "call." I think, for example, of a book just written by one of our Seton Hall faculty, Rebecca Cox, on what might be called "the fear factor" between students and professors and professors and students - and how such fears set up imaginary walls and greatly impede the possibility of genuine learning - a wonderful example of research fostering genuine wholeness or "catholicity."

3. Thomas Aquinas and Jane Jacobs

At this point it might be good to make an explicit reference to Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas believed in "intellect," the power of questioning, the active intellect that shines its light on the data and images that come before us in order that our minds might grasp their inner essence or form. Such questioning, a reflection of Aristotle's "wonder," the origin of all science and philosophy, was for Aquinas connected to the natural desire we have to see God - that openness of our minds for being, to know everything about everything, the universe in all its concreteness. It is also our openness to "grace," the healing of our clouded minds and wounded hearts to enable us to be open to God. Aquinas called our spirit, our mind, a "created participation in uncreated light." It is the light of questioning, the light that does not know but that at the same time knows that it does not know and so is able to say, "No, that's not what I am looking for," or "Yes! That's precisely what I have been looking for!" as we make our way through this or that area of human research.

This is not an easy journey. It is not easy to give our lives to research. Aristotle says that knowledge makes a bloody entrance and the French Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote of "the dark adoration" involved in all the dead-ends of research, that seeks and seeks and seeks in the darkness of science because it believes that the spark of light is ahead and beckoning the human spirit.

This dying that is at the center of genuine study and research was highlighted for me by the great writer, Jane Jacobs, the Canadian author of The Life and Death of the American Cities. Her work is a classic because she paid attention to what was actually happening in cities and neighborhoods. Here is what she says about her own research:

Here is what I do. When I start exploring some subject, I hardly know what I think. I'm just trying to learn anything I can about it. Rather than reading systematically, which is possible only if you know what you want, I read as omnivorously as I can mange, in anything that interests me. I often don't even know why I'm interested in some facet or other, and all I can say about this is that from experience I've learned to trust myself when I'm interested. (The experience from which I've learned that is being interested but saying to myself, "no, no, come off it, stop wasting time, this is beside the point," and then learning much later, as I begin to put things together, that it wasn't beside the point at all and my subconscious, or something, was trying to tell me something.)

As I read, and also notice things concretely, patterns from this information begin to form in my mind. Also, I learn that what I thought originally was "the subject" is not necessarily the subject, or is only an alley or side shoot of it - that there is a lost else to it, or underneath it. So I make outlines as I go along, but they keep changing, and what I end up with bears little relation - or relation only in small part - to what I was starting with, I thought. Very messy. This is also very uncomfortable. I don't like al this confusion. I only keep at it because, hard and uncomfortable though it is, it is worse to stay in such confusion. I tend to think: I would never have gotten into this if I knew what I was getting into, but then it's too late.

4. Practical Implications

Genuine research, then, has the character of a conversion, of a movement out of the darkness and images into the light. It is the painful process of moving out of the shadows of Plato's cave into the light of day. It is coming to appreciate whatever is good and true that is going on at the frontiers of the research going on our campuses.

To live in line with this vision, however, Catholic universities have to truly welcome the faculty members who through the years have been teaching at Catholic universities. After all, as students come and go after four or five years, faculty members stay for sometimes 30, 40, even 50 years. What they present to students is the university's "product." According to Haughey, when they do their work well, they are truly contributing to the Catholic intellectual tradition.

What follows, according to Haughey, is a true spirit of welcome on the part of the Catholic religious communities and dioceses who sponsor the Catholic universities. Such a spirit of hospitality requires truly listening to these specialists in "where knowing is going" - whom we have invited to teach in our schools. And if these colleagues are not of our faith, then our schools should truly be "a home for the faiths." I think of a dear friend of mine at Seton Hall who is a Moslem faculty member in our School of Business

Haughey himself has encouraged such hospitality in the many workshops he has run through the years at various Catholic universities. His concern is to evoke from faculty themselves: 1) their "story" of how they came to their specialty in the first place: "Why did you become a physicist in the first place?" Did you experience this as anything like "a call?" - perhaps "your destiny?" And 2)"Where do you see your specialty - your expertise - going? What good is your specialty doing for the world? What contribution does your specialty make toward the common good? Where is knowing going?" Such questions can be asked of each faculty member because in each researcher there is a notion of "the whole" towards which each specialty is oriented.

Haughey concretely recommends that each Catholic university have some group dedicated to fostering such a spirit of hospitality to the efforts of all the faculty - that is, concretely highlighting the catholicity of the school. And this attitude can even become part of our worship: our campus prayer and even our Catholic Eucharist. Take, for example, this chapel service held at Duke University where the following prayer was prayed:

This morning we give thanks for the Department of Mathematics, where students are challenged to use reason and imagination to understand the beauty and intricacies of abstract structure, and where they learn how to apply mathematics as an essential and integral tool of science and technology in areas as diverse as cosmology, finance, medicine, and environmental studies.

To symbolize the congregation's perception of the connection between God and the work of the university in mathematics, a student brings a math text book and a compass to lay on the altar. Over the course of the year each of the disciplines is celebrated in this way.

5. Conclusion

The title of this talk then, is "The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Where Is It Today?" My suggestion is one place it is is right here at Caldwell College. In one way or another it is participated in by all work here to foster knowledge and its benefits for the healing and flourishing of humanity. In the Catholic view all participate in the great movement by which Christ reconciles all things in himself and presents them to the Father. In a special way today, it is within that vision that we honor President Nancy Blattner and promise her our prayers that under her guidance Caldwell College may truly flourish.