Mission statement

Between 1962 and 1965, thousands of Catholic bishops, theological advisors, and others from around the world met in Rome at a series of doctrinal meetings known as the Second Vatican Council. There, as it is often said, they collectively threw open the windows of the Catholic Church, instituting well-known reforms such as Mass in the vernacular.

RELATED LINKS

• Land O’Lakes Statement text
• Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life

At the same time, one familiar and significant sector of the institutional Church—Catholic higher education—was also direly in need of ventilation. In the United States, for one example, Catholic universities plied their trade in the context of the modern research university, but with little about them that addressed modernity and offering few, if any, programs that would attract the most talented and ambitious Catholic students. In the mid-1960s, not a single Catholic institution in the country stood in the upper reaches of colleges and universities.

Vatican II barely spoke to this matter, but in the summer of 1967, a collection of 26 U.S. Catholic leaders—university presidents, senior administrators, and lay trustees, bishops and scholars and high-level religious—stirred by the currents of the council and what they saw as the challenge that Catholic colleges faced, made plans to meet at a gate in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. From there they would fly together to a remote location, where they would spend four days trying to agree on a reimagining of American Catholic higher education.

On a mid-July day, this swath of distinguished Catholics boarded a twin-propeller plane owned by the University of Notre Dame, on their way to a Notre Dame facility in the Wisconsin wilderness that conducted biological research, notably on mosquitos. Their destination was a set of (un-air-conditioned) buildings near a small resort town called Land O’Lakes. Invited and led by two of the nation’s most eminent Catholic college presidents, Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, of Notre Dame, and Paul Reinert, SJ, of St. Louis University, the entourage included six university presidents, among them Boston College’s Michael P. Walsh, SJ (who served 1958 to 1968), accompanied by his academic vice president, Charles F. Donovan, SJ.

For four days, the men (no women participated in the meeting) stayed in rustic quarters and deliberated on the future of Catholic higher education; for recreation, they fished in streams and bogs (while swatting mosquitos). On July 23, they issued their five-page “Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University,” which became known as “The Land O’Lakes Statement,” in which they resolved that the “Catholic university of the future will be a true modern university but specifically Catholic in profound and creative ways for the service of society and the people of God.”

The idea that Catholic higher education needed to make a greater effort to meet the intellectual standards of the postwar era was hardly new. A provoking public pronouncement on the matter had been voiced in 1955, when a soft-spoken monsignor and Church historian named John Tracy Ellis penned a rattling essay exposing the meagerness of U.S. Catholic scholarly output across disciplines and lamenting that American Catholics through history have “remained relatively impervious to the intellectual movements of their time.” The essay, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” appeared in the journal Thought, and was published as a book the following year. As presidents, vice presidents, and people of influence, those who gathered at Land O’Lakes were impatient with the unhurried progress toward academic vigor in their sector and frustrated by various forms of ecclesiastical control over the institutions.

In the past few months, the 50th anniversary of Land O’Lakes has rekindled a sometimes-fractious debate on the nature and identity of Catholic higher education. Some have gone so far as to see insidious motives behind Land O’Lakes, which came at a time when Catholic universities were just beginning to place themselves under the legal control of independent, appreciably lay boards of trustees rather than ecclesiastical authorities such as the Society of Jesus (Boston College took this step in 1972). “The Land O’Lakes Statement Has Caused Devastation for 50 Years” was the title of a commentary last July, authored by Patrick J. Reilly, president and founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, which describes itself as dedicated to “promoting and defending faithful Catholic education.” Reilly and others argue that the 1967 group intentionally and successfully secularized Catholic higher education—made it less Catholic—for purposes of gaining stature in secular academia and qualifying for federal funding, including research grants and financial aid. The statement “represented a public, deliberate choice for opportunity over mission,” wrote Reilly on the Newman Society’s website. “I accuse the signers of succumbing to the temptation of worldly prestige.” Similarly, in a July article for Crisis Magazine, priest-author George W. Rutler said those who gathered at Land O’Lakes “were fraught with a deep-seated inferiority complex, rooted in an unspoken assumption that Catholicism is an impediment to the new material sciences, and eager to attain a peer relationship with academic leaders of the secular schools.”

On October 11, seven Catholic university presidents were among the featured participants at an all-day conference, “Land O’Lakes at 50: The State of Catholic Higher Education,” held in Gasson Hall and sponsored by Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life together with the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences dean’s office, and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculties. As a group, the speakers and panelists could be loosely characterized as Land O’Lakes sympathizers; so could undoubtedly the hundred or so attendees, a mix of faculty, administrators, and graduate students mostly from Catholic colleges in New England, seated at long rectangular tables draped with white cloths. There was, however, much conversation about the statement’s limitations as a creature of its turbulent times—and the 21st-century concerns that could engender a new Land O’Lakes.

Panelists discuss the Wisconsin meeting’s legacy in Gasson 100. From left: Presidents Sean Sheridan of the Franciscan University (Steubenville) and LeMura of Le Moyne, journalist Peter Steinfels, presidents Jenkins of Notre Dame and Hemesath of St. John’s (Minnesota), and moderator James M. O’Toole, the Clough Millennium Professor of History at Boston College. Image: Christopher Soldt. Click image to enlarge.

Delivering the opening keynote was the Notre Dame historian of religion John T. McGreevy, who noted in his remarks that the controversial statement actually drew scant notice in 1967 but gradually filtered into Catholic discussions. It eventually “became a fetish item in battles between liberal and conservative Catholics” over the direction of Church-related colleges and universities, he added. McGreevy took up the accusatory question of whether the signers had plotted for “a diminishment of Catholic identity as a necessary step to compete with and mindlessly imitate” the likes of UCLA and Northwestern. “Quite the opposite,” he said, explaining that the authors “saw themselves as fostering and forging a deeper Catholic identity” (the statement itself declared that every Catholic university must be a community of learners and scholars in which “Catholicism is perceptibly present and effectively operative”).

Then McGreevy entertained a less bellicose question—whether the ideas championed in the statement had the unlooked-for effect of making Catholic universities less intentionally Catholic. “It’s a reasonable argument,” the historian said. He pointed out that the signers could not have foreseen the tides of secularization that would soon begin washing through the broader culture, reaching young Catholics, faculty members, and even many priests and nuns, who left religious orders that ran the schools. Those forces made it harder for universities to bolster their Catholic character at the same time that they were struggling to lift academic standards by attracting research-oriented faculty, many of whom, he said, “were almost instinctively loyal, maybe more loyal, to the disciplines in which they trained than the institutions at which they worked.”

McGreevy added that the “reasonable arguments” against Land O’Lakes are unconvincing. He said Catholic universities such as his are, if anything, “more intentional” and explicit in their nurturing of Catholic identity than they were 50 or even 20 years ago. That’s at least partly because they have to be—they can’t assume that present-day students and faculty arrive with any substantial religious influences or commitments. He also suggested that the undisputed academic and financial success of national Catholic research universities has made it easier to recruit the nation’s most ambitious young Catholic students and help shape their approach to learning and life.

In the Land O’Lakes Statement, two words have haunted subsequent Catholic debates: “true autonomy.” As in, “To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities as for all universities.”

During an afternoon panel discussion at the conference, Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, a prominent Catholic writer and retired codirector of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, pointed to “unintended consequences of declaring independence from Church authorities.” She cited in particular a gradual weakening of ties between Catholic scholars—theologians, but also economists and others—and the Church’s hierarchy, often resulting in less involvement by these intellectuals in public statements developed by Catholic bishops on topics such as immigration, global justice, religious freedom, and marriage and family. Gregory Kalscheur, SJ, dean of the Morrissey College, followed with this probe: “Was the autonomy in Land O’Lakes understood too radically?”

Picking up on that thread in a keynote, William P. Leahy, SJ, president of Boston College and the author of Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (1991), agreed that the Land O’Lakes authors “did not always convey ideas with sufficient nuance and clarity.” At the same time, he doubted they ever had any wish to separate themselves and their institutions from the institutional Church. They did have one eye on accrediting organizations and the other on state and federal courts, which had begun ruling that Catholic and other religious colleges were ineligible for public education dollars on grounds that they were sectarian, Leahy noted. He added that the language of “true autonomy” had to do with those practical worries but also “reflected the frustration of Catholic educational leaders with interference” by bishops and religious superiors. Indeed, in a previous talk at a similar conference sponsored by Notre Dame recently, Leahy related that Jesuit institutions in those days could not change curricula, expand programs, or even build new facilities without final approval by the Jesuit Superior General’s staff in Rome.

Fifty years on, has Catholic education reached “another Land O’Lakes moment”? The phrase came from Linda M. LeMura, the first female lay president of Le Moyne College in Syracuse (and indeed of any U.S. Jesuit college), speaking on a panel titled “The Legacy of Land O’Lakes in Catholic Higher Education Today.” Judging from the panel discussions and questions and viewpoints from the audience, there would be no dearth of agenda items for such a “moment” of national dialogue.

For example, several attendees referenced “nones,” the accelerating numbers of young people and others who claim no religious affiliation. Former New York Times religion correspondent Peter Steinfels observed that, while Catholic higher education leaders are more willing than ever to “confront and explain issues” of Catholic identity, such as the need to hire faculty who are comfortable with an institution’s Catholic mission, they face a growing challenge from students who are indifferent to religion. The deliberate institutional commitment to Catholic identity and the millennial drift from organized faith represent “two trend lines” pulling in opposite directions, said Steinfels, who, with his wife, Margaret, is the other retired codirector of the Fordham Center. In other words, while weekend retreats, faith-oriented service activities, and interdisciplinary programs inspired by the Catholic liberal arts tradition are popular with students, their relationship to a university’s explicitly Catholic mission is frequently not students’ central interest.

No one on the platform (set up in front of Gasson’s tall stained-glass windows) had a precise plan for addressing this phenomenon. “They’re interested in spirituality in some ways, but their relationship to the institution is much diminished,” acknowledged John I. Jenkins, CSC, Notre Dame’s president, speaking of students. “I don’t have an answer to that but I think it’s one of the more important questions we face.”

Delicate matters touching on institutional survival, particularly among smaller and financially strapped Catholic colleges, also surfaced. Conference participants mostly tiptoed around this question, with the Le Moyne president making perhaps the most direct comment in connection specifically with Jesuit institutions. “We might not be 28,” said LeMura, referring to the current tally of Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. “Is 28 the right number? Is 25 the right number? And who’s going to decide?”

And then there are Latino-Americans to consider, now making up more than half of the millennial Catholic generation. In his lecture, McGreevy said that how Church institutions of all kinds “welcome, absorb, and transform themselves” for the children and grandchildren of the 20th century’s Latino immigrants constitutes perhaps “the most important 21st-century Catholic identity test.” In the last of three panel discussions that day, Michael Hemesath, the first lay president of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, said Catholic colleges and universities must “provide an education boost” to the Latino population just as they did for earlier waves of immigrants as well as the GI Bill and Baby Boom generations.

Other agenda items for a second Land O’Lakes moment included how to engage faculty members of all disciplines and persuasions in the Catholic intellectual tradition (very carefully, it seems), and how to connect service projects more closely with Catholic identity (“reflection” will be a keyword in that respect, especially in the Jesuit context). By day’s end, the presidents and others were asking what comes next, and in the ensuing weeks, the Boisi Center’s director, Mark Massa, SJ, was exploring what he called a possible Phase II of the conference.

If there’s ultimately a second Land O’Lakes–style meeting under whatever auspices, at least two things about that convergence will be certain. First, the representation of Catholic higher-education leaders will hardly look the same as the Hesburgh-Reinert gang of 26, who in their formal group portrait, mostly in white shirts tucked or untucked into black pants, could easily be taken for participants in a seminary reunion, class of 1937. Second, the dominant concerns will not be academic quality and intellectual competitiveness or the freedom to construct a building except with approval from Rome. As the colloquy in Chestnut Hill made clear, the challenge for the next 50 years is most likely to be that perennial and exacting test of Catholic higher education, shaping and sustaining an integral mission in the face of change.

Read more by William Bole

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