The Fight for Catholic Schools and the Future of American Institutions.
22nd May 2023
Marymount University sits on a high hill over the Potomac River, in northern Virginia. Founded in 1950 by a religious order devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the school’s undergraduate courses focus on the humanities—or they did until the president and the board of governors met to “restructure” earlier this year. This meant gutting nearly all the humanities, plus mathematics, science, and even theology and religious studies.
The sheer extent and suddenness of this transformation caught the public’s imagination. A small university’s restructuring is not typically the stuff of frontpage, international headlines. But these cuts perfectly illustrate how Christian education has squandered its moral, intellectual, and religious inheritance in a 100-year search for prestige—a search which has been inevitably followed by a retreat into rootless, commercial secularism and left-wing, political glad–handing. In this, the plight of Catholic universities offers a microcosm of the institutional capture that afflicts traditional institutions around the country. But it also offers instructive, object lessons in how to fight back.
Prior to, oh, say, Vatican II (early 1960s), this could not have happened. The entire reason for ‘Catholic schools’ was to provide education with a Catholic intellectual foundation explicitly separate from secular intellectual fads and fashions. But that was then; this is now.