Bottom line: Catholic intellectualism a university-wide mission that Notre Dame does well at overall, but not because they reject lots of high school seniors.
I wasn't implying ND is the pinnacle of Catholic intellectualism simply because it has the lowest acceptance rate of any Catholic college, but that's tangentially related to my point. ND's acceptance rate is low, in part, because it's such an elite academic institution. Consequently, it attracts a large number of students who both understand Catholicism and have the social intelligence to defend it against an increasingly hostile culture and state.
Conversely, and this is entirely anecdotal here, I've never met a graduate of one of the more traditional Catholic universities that really understands the world well enough to engage with (and defend against) it on an intellectual level. But it's possible those I've met aren't representative of the whole.
i know were talking big time universities here, but I went to St John Fisher, majored in Roman Catholicism. They were absolutely all about exposing numerous faiths in a positive light and then on the back end of the degree it was mainly focused on breaking down Catholicism then rebuilding it with stronger faith.... They are grounded Basillian teachings i believe
That's great; you're the first SJF alumnus I've ever encountered, btw, so the earlier generalizations may not apply to your school. Did you have any classmates who you thought might have a shot at Governor, Congressman or Supreme Court Justice? I don't doubt the quality of the catechism at traditional institutions; just the ability of such graduates to meet the challenges the American Church now faces.
Whiskey-I would love to read your thoughts on "push back" against the prevailing culture? No bad intentions here, just very curious on this perspective from your point of view.
See the above. Congress, the Obama administration, the Supreme Court, etc. are full of "Catholics" who don't seem to understand their faith at all. And the vast majority of those who have been properly catechized either lack the social intelligence or the will to defend the Church in the public square. I think ND is in a unique position to produce graduates who are capable of doing both.
Can't you make the argument (and haven't you?) that our prevailing culture is exactly what it is due to the lessening involvement we have towards religion and God? We have become more and more (and more) secularized. Isn't a strong adherence and foundation in our Faith a way to counteract this? Is this not a good way to push back?
That's only "pushing back" if it's lived openly and in engagement with our secularized culture. A lot of good Catholics seem to be opting out of society as much as possible in order to raise their families within a traditional moral structure; and I can hardly blame them for choosing to do so, but that will only make things more difficult for the rest of us going forward.
I guess my point here, Whiskey, is there are different ways to fight the good fight in our secularized world. Part of what you're saying almost sounds like you're advocating an Opus Dei-like infiltration system-- let's give all our names secular titles; I'll-call-you-you-don't-call-me cloak and dagger-like recruitment; and achieving our Gospel mission based through places of work and other secular institutions. But I don't think you're advocating for something like that.
I am sort of advocating for that. The American Church desperately needs champions who understand and speak the language of secular liberalism, so that they can adequately defend her against it. In writing the majority opinion for
US v. Windsor, Justice Kennedy (supposedly a Catholic himself) basically stated that there's
no rational basis for opposition to SSM (never mind the ~2500 year intellectual history of Natural Law). Catholic Healthcare West, which owns the best hospitals here in Arizona, recently had to dissociate itself from the Church (they're now called Dignity Health) because of the Federal government's unwillingness to allow exemptions for freedom of conscience. Numerous Catholic orphanages on the east coast have already been forced to shut down due to their refusal to let homosexual couples adopt. And I fully expect the Feds to start revoking the tax-exempt status of churches that refuse to marry homosexual couples in the near future.
We're being forcibly pushed out of the public square, and will soon be hard-pressed simply to maintain enough liberty to practice our faith. And despite being the largest denomination in America, I see no one mounting a serious defense on the Church's behalf. The homilies I hear from the altar are atrociously bad-- focusing mostly on culture war issues that assume the basic premises of secular liberalism. Paul Ryan, who professes to be a Catholic, knows fuck all about Distributism; instead, he cites Ayn fucking Rand as an intellectual hero of his. I'll cut my rant short, but you see where I'm going here. Catholicism has good answers to this bullshit, but those Catholics in power seem not to be familiar with them, and those who are familiar with them seem to have no chance of exerting any real influence here. I think ND has the best chance to bridging that gap.
But I agree with you that ND may not be the best institution available if one is primarily looking for a good catechism.
I agree that we do need to push back. Maybe I've adopted the T. Boone Pickens approach to energy though-- all of the above? Let's not take anything off the table and acknowledge and appreciate that each method has a value?
Absolutely. And I don't mean to disregard the value of good Catholics evangelizing by living their faith implicitly and genuinely. That is, by far, what most of us are called to do. But I don't see a particular deficiency there; we need Catholic intellectuals who have the necessary social skills and personal magnetism to effectively defend the Church in the public square. It's that sort of the Catholic that ND is probably best at producing.
