A bright light at Notre Dame

The chair of the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame has fired back an open letter today to the Notre Dame community in disagreement with Father John Jenkins' letter on allowing "The Vagina Monologues" play to be staged on campus. Prof. John Cavadini does not delve into the controversial issues surrounding the play (Christopher West does touch on it in his April 21 Herald column) but focuses rather keenly on Father Jenkins' description on the identity and function of a Catholic university.

The statement of our President barely mentions the Church. If the Church is ever mentioned in the responses I have read so far, it is in the gratitude expressed that we have not attempted to "appease" the Church or the Church hierarchy, or else in the (unintentionally) patronizing allusion to those who care about the University's relationship to the Church as implicitly conceiving the University along the lines of a seminary. It is as though the mere mention of a relationship with the Church has become so alien to our ways of thinking and so offensive to our quest for a disembodied "excellence" that it is has become impolite to mention it at all. The President's statement repeatedly refers to "the Catholic intellectual tradition," a phrase that in itself is unobjectionable but which has now become almost a circumlocution used to avoid mentioning what seems unfashionable and almost unthinkable to mention, namely, the Church.

Cavadini later raises this crucial question:

The ancient Gnostic heresy developed an elitist intellectual tradition which
eschewed connection to the "fleshly" church of the bishop and devalued or
spiritualized the sacraments. Are we in danger of developing a gnosticized
version of the "Catholic intellectual tradition," one which floats free of any
norming connection and so free of any concrete claim to Catholic identity?

Cavadini has stuck his neck out in defense of a "Catholic intellectual tradition" intimately and unapologetically tied to the magisterium of the Church. Here's hoping a lynch mob doesn't form among his peers and the student body to hang him.