Pope Readies a Challenge to Catholic Educators

Pope Benedict XVI will use his trip to America next month to present Catholic educators with a powerful challenge, one whose effects could ripple from Notre Dame, Ind., to Tarrytown, N.Y., prominent Vatican watchers are predicting.

The expected message: Become more Catholic, or else.

In one of just a few major addresses planned for his six-day visit to America, Pope Benedict is scheduled to speak about education at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., before an audience that should include the president of every Catholic college and university in the country, plus representatives from every archdiocese, which oversee Catholic primary and secondary schools.

In what university officials said was the first convening of such a group in 29 years, the address will insert Pope Benedict into an ongoing debate in America regarding how Catholic colleges, universities, and even primary schools should assert their Catholic identities — even as Catholic enrollment declines.

Educators said the pontiff's service as a cardinal in the years before he was elected pope, in 2005, suggest he will enter the debate on the side of increasing so-called Catholicity.

The pope will encourage Catholic educators, but also emphasize the importance of "promoting and strengthening" their Catholic identities, Catholic University's president, David O'Connell, predicted.

"Doubtless, I think, there will be a challenge there," the president of Franciscan University in Ohio, Terence Henry, said of Pope Benedict's speech. "He may challenge Catholic universities to get back to the spirit of why they were founded. They were not founded to be another Penn State or another Ohio State."

A professor of moral theology at Marquette University who has sparred with the Vatican, Daniel Maguire, said he also expects the pope to land on the side of change, though he scorned the prospect. "Anybody should know what the pope is visiting universities for," Mr. Maguire said. "His business is to control theology."

Pope Benedict's position on a lightning rod question that inflamed the Catholic academy in the 1990s, a papal law declared by Pope John Paul II in 1990 that exerted tighter controls over Catholic colleges and universities, is seen as especially indicative. The pope, who in 1990 was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was a strong supporter of the order, known as Ex Corde Ecclesiae, several sources said.

As criticisms of the law mounted, with skeptics charging that the church was attempting to muzzle academic freedom, Cardinal Ratzinger made a rare 1999 visit to America, reportedly his first in eight years, to defend the order, newspapers reported at the time.

The bitter debates of the 1990s have faded from public view in recent years, but a divide over how tightly the Vatican should control universities — and how closely they should align themselves, in classrooms and dorms, with the church's teachings — has persisted.

Universities have seen internal battles over questions such as whether to display crucifixes and how to deal with student-generated entities such as gay and lesbian support groups and condom distribution campaigns.

In New York, protests have erupted over universities' choices of commencement speakers. Conservative Catholics protested the decision of Marymount Manhattan College in 2005 to make Senator Clinton the commencement speaker, citing her support for abortion. The same group, called the Cardinal Newman Society, protested Marist College in Poughkeepsie's decision in 2003 to name Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, its commencement speaker.

The Society has also made its battle proactive, heralding the creation of about a dozen new, more conservative Catholic colleges in the last 30 years in a book, "The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College."

Schools in the guide, such as Franciscan University in Ohio, often require several courses in Catholic theology and ban co-educational housing, as well as groups that promote homosexuality.

Father Henry, of Franciscan University, described the conservative colleges as "springing from the heart of the church," and said others are "cholesterol in the heart of the church."

Mr. Maguire called such colleges attempts by the church's far-right fringe to mimeograph the evangelical Bob Jones University in North Carolina.

If these colleges became the standard, he said, "Catholic universities would then become like a Bob Jones University, where there's only one view tolerated and there's only one debate going on. Issues would be decided by the hierarchy, and you would have to mouth the party line, at which point it really wouldn't be a respectable university at all."

In this divide, some people close to Pope Benedict appear to have aligned themselves with the more conservative colleges. A member of the Vatican is speaking at Franciscan University's commencement this year, and the pope's former education secretary, J. Michael Miller, who has since been appointed archbishop of Vancouver, spoke at a conference on Catholic higher education that the college held last year.

Archbishop Miller argued that Catholic universities must connect all their primary activities with "the evangelizing mission of the Church," the university reported in a newsletter.

"He is a true educator, so he has a passionate interest in education," Father Henry, who said he has regular conversations with Vatican officials, said of Pope Benedict. "He's looking at Western Europe, and he's looking at the United States, and he's not seeing a vibrant faith among the intelligentsia, among the elites of our culture. And I think he's probably going to attribute that to maybe Catholic universities needing to put more emphasis on their primary identity."

The president of the Cardinal Newman Society, Patrick Reilly, said Fordham University in New York, his alma mater, is one institution that he hopes will be forced to change by Pope Benedict's address, describing the university as a central offender in terms of violating its Catholic roots.

Fordham's director of communications, Bob Howe, described that charge as ridiculous, saying the university's relationship with Edward Cardinal Egan of the New York Archdiocese as strong and healthy. "There's no way that someone could look at Fordham and say that we are retreating from the Catholic identity," Mr. Howe said.

As for the pope's speech, Mr. Howe made just one prediction: "I don't think us being Catholic enough is the topic of the conversation. That may be what the Cardinal Newman Society would like it to be about. But I don't think they can say or anybody can say what it will be about yet."

If that is the messsage, it is an open question how much Pope Benedict will actually be able to change. Only Catholic University is controlled directly by the Vatican; other colleges have no such ties.

Mr. Reilly said a strong message could still have a powerful influence, affecting the kinds of Catholic universities parents and students choose to attend.

Mr. Maguire, however, said he expects little change.

"People will listen to him, and he'll go back home, and it won't make much difference," he said.