Yet another boring article defending academic freedom on the Catholic campus in anticipation of the Pope’s visit, this time from Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity College in Washington. Methinks they protest too much.

It seems to me in articles that attack dogmatic thinking while at the same time seeing academic freedom as something dogmatic that no one should dare dissent from to be rather ironic. But once again G.K. Chesterton says it best.

"In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.

The problem is so many confuse liberty and freedom with license and that real freedom and liberty is "the right to do what we ought to do." If we believe in or perform any evil we are not truly free but enslaved. The modern idea of academic freedom is pure relativism and largely what gets promoted is not the truth. Without truth we can not be truly free. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and it was Satan who was called the father of lies. Catholic universities should be at the service of the truth and not the winds of theological and societal fads that will pass. Instead they have decided to not build on a firm foundation. Chesterton also complained that children would be taught with academic theories that were younger than they were and this prophet of modern times was right once again.

There is also always the sneering of orthodoxy, which simply means "right thinking." You would think that dissenters would be calling their ideas orthodoxy and to call those of us who fully accept Church teaching as heterodox. Maybe they are just honest enough not to do that.

I also found funny her use of Ex Corde Ecclesiae to try to support what she says and while this document certainly supports the valid sense of academic freedom, she conveniently does not mention the mandatum being required for those teaching theology. This in itself shows that academic freedom is not without bounds. She has the document backward for the most part and sees the culture as influencing the Gospel.

Pope Benedict will be doing his job when he addresses Catholic university presidents Thursday on our obligation to be faithful stewards of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the moral teachings of our faith. We academics do our job when we engage in critical analysis of those teachings in light of our Gospel tradition, contemporary research and cultural context.

A church with a brain is not afraid to ask itself the hard questions about the role of faith, moral teachings and theological exploration in contemporary life. This is what Ex Corde Ecclesiae calls us to do; this is what the pope will remind us is essential and what we will continue to do in our mission in Catholic higher education.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae does address cultural dialogue, but it is mainly about "offering the rich experience of the Church’s own culture" and also calls for a "fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and the culture." What she would put in the category of fruitful dialogue is more like a poisoned fruit. Defending the Vagina Monologues, "gay clubs", speakers who support abortion and other intrinsic evils is like telling Snow White to accept any apple givers that happen come to her door.

What they never seem to get is that the truth of what the Church teaches will never change. The changeable quality is how these truths are taught. We can always go deeper into truth. We can vary the methodologies used to teach the truth to best adapt to the current generation. This was largely the role of Vatican II. Instead what happens is that the truth is changed to adapt to the culture instead of changing how the truth is presented to best address the culture. But to adapt to the culture of death is to drive the wrong way down a one way street. Cultural context only applies to how the truth is taught and not the truth itself, though sometimes cultural context can even help us to better understand the truth.

The Church is never afraid to ask the hard questions. We have a massively parallel processing computer that has helped us to do this. It is the constant teaching of the Church with the thousands and thousands throughout history that have made up this massively parallel processing that has processed the faith throughout the generations. Under the guidance of the magisterium (and ultimately the Holy Spirit) the development of doctrine has lead to a richer and deeper understanding of the mysteries of faith. A Catholic is never afraid of the truth since it only leads to Jesus. We can ask the hard questions because we are confident in the tools that Christ has given us through his Church. "A church with a brain" requires thinking Catholics to think with the Church. But so many so-called thinking catholics would cut themselves off from the thought that went before them and instead of feeding our brains are more likely to feed itching ears.

Catholic Insight is being sued by the infamous Canadian "Human Rights Commission"
and so far for a quite small Catholic periodical has paid six thousand dollars in legal fees to defend themselves with no court date in sight. The "hate crime" is related to denunciations of homosexual activism (not individual persons) and upholding the Church’s teaching.

Kathy Shaidle who linked to this article is also being sued along with four other Canadian bloggers for speaking out against free speech thug Richard Warman the human rights lawyer who specializes in separating humans from their rights.

The picture to the right is one of Richard Warman, or at least I assume that someone with such a thin skin would look like this.

Free Mark Steyn! is keeping track of all of the shenanigans going on in Canada right now. I also wonder if the Human Rights Commission sharing the same initials with Hillary Rodham Clinton is just a coincidence?

An interview with Rev. John Jenkins President of Notre Dame introduces some unintentional hilarity mixed with some wisdom. Regarding the Pope he says:

He is a person who could easily hold an endowed chair at Notre Dame."

Wow, imagine that. Maybe a corner office next to Dicky McBrien and tickets each year for the Vagina Monologue. Though the interview improves with:

Asked to speculate on what Pope Benedict might say, Father Jenkins tells me, "The greatest respect we can show him is to let him speak and then reflect." But the president, who himself has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, says that the pope is "a subtle thinker [who] doesn’t think in slogans." Father Jenkins is worried that "people with various interests will pick out a line or a phrase," and misunderstand the pope’s message.

But then deteriorates when he says:

"The Newman society has no ecclesiastical standing and no academic standing," Father Jenkins says. "For me, it resembles nothing more than a political action committee."

While certainly these points are true, the real question is whether the Cardinal Newman Society is right in their critique or not and not their ecclesiastical or academic standing.

In 1990, Pope John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an encyclical whose provisions included a requirement that theologians teaching at Catholic schools receive a stamp of approval from the church (a "mandatum"), and that the campus environment should be supportive of a Catholic way of life.

Father Jenkins calls Ex Corde a "superb document" that he has read "many times." But most Catholic college leaders, including Father Jenkins, have not implemented it to the extent that they or others expected they would have to. The mandatum provision, for instance, was met at the time with outrage by college faculty and administrators, who found it to be an infringement on academic freedom. But since then, Father Jenkins explains, "positions softened a bit on that. Misunderstandings were eliminated."

The way the mandatum controversy was resolved is this: Local bishops give their approval to some theologians and not others. But no one besides the bishop and the theologian knows who has it. So Father Jenkins can claim total ignorance about which members of his own theology department are approved by the church.

Surely he must have a small statue of those famous monkeys on his desk. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." Or possible Sergeant Shultz has been appointed as the universities president "I see nothing!"

Other intellectual battles seem to have been resolved in the university’s favor as well. Despite the Vatican’s clear condemnation of liberation theology, a Marxist approach to Christianity, the doctrine is still proudly taught at Notre Dame.

Father Jenkins says the situation is not so clear cut: "Liberation theology is a label for a family of views and concerns . . . [a set of] theological reflections in light of certain social and economic conditions." In other words, no violent revolutionaries here.

Despite the large presence of liberal faculty members, Father Jenkins complains that in some circles, the school is not considered radical enough. People on the left say that "we’re too tied to the Republican party. We don’t advocate enough for women’s ordination. You name the socially divisive issue and we’re criticized that we’re not on the front on [it]." And it is true that on the spectrum of Catholic universities, Notre Dame is considered somewhat middle of the road – still less radical than its Jesuit brethren like Georgetown, Fordham and Boston College.

While I think Notre Dame is moving in a positive direction, it often seems that this is largely the result of the students and not the faculty.