Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., the president of Boston College, recently caused quite a stir by ordering the placement of crucifixes or other religious symbols in all 151 classrooms on the school’s Chestnut Hill, MA campus. This marked the completion of an eight-year campaign to reclaim visibly the university’s Catholic identity. If the Boston Globe’s account is to be believed, the students were happy or indifferent for the most part, but many of the lay faculty were irate. As can only be expected in this region and this epoch (O tempora, O mores!), protests immediately flared up both within the BC community and from outside observers. The iconoclastic (in the original, etymological sense) arguments put forth by the dissenters fell into three main categories, each of which I will attempt to elucidate and address.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that one of The Ennobler’s most faithful readers (and unquestionably its finest and most prolific commentator) is, mirabile dictu, a Jew in the Boston College Class of 2011. I have no doubt that he will have some cogent thoughts on this issue (and perhaps some inside information), but in the meantime he serves to put a human face on the first argument against the increased presence of Catholic images. As Jewish biology professor Dan Kirschner told the Boston Herald, “There is no choice if you don’t think it’s appropriate….I think it is being insensitive to the people of other faith traditions here.” I wish to be as charitable as the circumstances and my constitution allow, so I will not impute to Dr. Kirchner the sentiment that Boston College, a private institution which has been openly and explicitly affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church since its inception nearly a century and a half ago, does not have an unassailable legal right to express its mission in visible form. Rather, his complaint (the prevalence of which on the BC campus I am eager to learn) is that the crucifixes make Jews, Muslims and non-Christians (perhaps even non-Catholics, since I understand each cross includes a corpus) feel belittled and marginalized.
The trouble here is that, once again, it is a simple fact that Boston College is a Catholic school. Everyone knew this when they enrolled or accepted a position at the institution, and everyone understood that this fact implied at least a slight risk of encountering some signs of Catholicism (for example, on my own campus about 60% of the people on campus are walking around this evening with ashes on their foreheads. It happens). Perhaps more importantly, at many of our nation’s venerable Catholic (read here: Jesuit) institutions, it is the orthodox Catholic students who feel belittled and marginalized, demoralized by the culture of flagrant permissiveness and politically correct disloyalty to the Magisterium. Georgetown is the worst in this regard, but for many years Boston College has been very much in the mix of Romanist schools gone decadent. Before we worry about ruffling the feathers of non-Catholics who chose to come to Catholic institutions by displaying Catholic symbols, let’s make sure Catholic students feel at home in their own native habitats.
The second argument stems from the omnipresent obsession among academics with the Baal of “academic freedom”. Dr. Maxim Shrayer, who chairs the department of Slavic and Eastern languages, told the Globe that Fr. Leahy’s move is “contrary to the letter and spirit of open intellectual discourse that makes education worthwhile and distinguishes first-rate universities from mediocre and provincial ones.” Leaving aside the fact that the very concept of a “first-rate university” was invented in Europe by the Catholic Church, this statement makes very little sense. It seems to translate to something along the lines of “people in a college community have the unalienable right to say and express absolutely anything they wish, unless they want to hang a crucifix in a science lab or erect a statue of St. Ignatius Loyola.” Dr. Shrayer, who apparently resents the incursion of Sts. Cyril and Methodius into his ancestral lands, dubiously identifies “first-rate universities” with “secular universities”, and seems to believe that a figurine on two sticks on his classroom wall inhibits his intellectual discourse more than the fact that his paychecks are signed by Fr. William Leahy, S.J.
The third argument comes in the form of an even more mind-boggling comment from BC sophomore and noted Church historian Alex Loverde (I hope you don’t know this guy, Sam!) who helpfully informed the Herald that “I think the Jesuit tradition is more of openness and tolerance,” and bafflingly opined that “an overt display of crucifixes is not what the Jesuits would have had in mind.” Actually, there’s no need to speculate; the Jesuits, at long last, do indeed have visible orthodoxy in mind. What Loverde seems to mean by “Jesuits” is not the real, live priests of the Society of Jesus who actually run Boston College, but the Jesuits in the bad old days of the 1960’s, when the Berrigan brothers interpreted Gospel imperatives as exhortations to mild domestic terrorism and “social justice” and the “Spirit of Vatican II” hung hazily in the air. Mr. Loverde can hardly be blamed for feeling there’s some sort of a bait-and-switch afoot; the nebulous “Jesuit tradition” has become such a trope in Catholic education—advertised and customized beyond recognition by the Jesuits themselves—that I have heard more than one person insist seriously that, “No, no, BC isn’t a Catholic school, it’s Jesuit.” Well, it has taken many years, and there is still much work to be done, but thanks to Fr. Leahy and people like him, Boston College is both once again.
Your move, Samuel.
1 comment:
My move indeed! Allow me to begin by making something exceedingly clear: I don't give a fraction of a shit about crucifixes in classrooms. I'm a Jew, I'm someone who is fully in favor of "academic freedom," and I'm certainly someone who wishes he went to a first rate university. I don't think the presence of crucifixes impinges on any of those identities or goals. Furthermore, even if I did, I would have had to take that into account in my decision to ATTEND A CATHOLIC COLLEGE. Fundamentally, I think that all objections to this are adequately responded to in your first point. BC is a private Catholic institution, everyone* who is a student, faculty member, or staff member here knew that going in, and as such Father Leahy can hang whatever he damn well pleases wherever he wants it to hang.
All that being said, I'm a special case. Yeah, I'm Jewish, but I was raised in a town that's like 80% Catholic, and most of my best friends are Catholic. I'm not easily put off by overt displays of religiosity**. Frankly, when I got to BC I was surprised to find rooms that didn't have crucifixes in them. While I do believe that Fr. Leahy is well within his legal rights to correct that oversight, I also think we should be cautious about dismissing the concerns of those to whom this is a bigger deal.
Once again, I've paid very little attention to this, and I think I'm representative of the vast majority of the student body in that respect. Furthermore, I am not nearly familiar enough with the internecine bs between Catholics and Protestants to tell whether the crucifixes will be offensive to the more weak hearted of our Protestant minority. I do know, however, that the argument that orthodox Catholics should be coddled so that they might "feel at home in their own native habitats" holds exactly no water. Not to preach to the anti-choir (the orchestra? the audience? the mutes?), but the classroom is not the "native habitat" of orthodox Catholics. That would be the church and the home. The classroom is the province of all students, and as long as BC doesn't discriminate in admissions based on religion they probably ought not to institute policies that may have a chilling effect on students they accept from varied faiths. Further in this vein, there is something to be said for academic freedom regardless of whatever D&D demon you wish to associate it with. The fact is that to many (including, presumably, orthodox Catholics) the crucifix is not just "two sticks on [a] classroom wall." Rather, it is an overtly religious symbol which suggests that the administration has a vested interest in maintaining a Catholic influence in the classroom. This isn't much of a problem in the humanities, but you could forgive a biology professor for being put off by such an overt religious intrusion into the classroom. And you also shouldn't fault a less acclimated Jewish student for wondering the extent to which that administrative influence effects the lecture. This is not to say that Catholicism and learning are mutually exclusive, far from it. The Jesuit philosophy is at the heart of the design of our university, and they say we're pretty good. Rather, I'm suggesting that this policy will have the unintended consequence of driving those not yet comfortable with the concept of mixing faith and empirical knowledge away instead of helping to create a university environment in which the two may be reconciled for any student.
I won't comment on Jesuit history, as I know literally nothing about it. I'm perfectly willing to accept that Mr. Loverde, who I've never seen in my life, is totally full of it. Still, though, I'm hesitant to equate rejecting some sophomore shooting his mouth off with endorsing Fr. Leahy's program to Christianize our heathen school. While I don't think there's much of a case to be made that Fr. Leahy is out of line on the crucifix issue, I think it even harder to make the case that it, or actions like it, serve to create a "first rate university" by anyone's standards.
Also, we do actually have a pretty kick ass statue of St. Ignatius. He's larger than life, and pointing. I like to joke that he's pointing out exactly which parts of the world he wants set aflame.
*Perhaps I'm overstating the case here. At orientation we were told the story of the freshman who called home after a month and told his parents that "he had no idea there would be so many Muslim women here." Apparently, he failed to grasp the Catholic nature of BC and mistook the nuns for veiled Muslims. On the other hand, I have reason to doubt the veracity of this story. First, in my experience with BC students, I do not believe for a moment that the BC admissions department would accept someone who didn't know what a nun looked like, and certainly not someone who didn't know what a nun looked like but had the vaguest idea what a veiled Muslim woman might look like. Second, since I do know what a nun looks like (my great aunt is one... and I'm also just not a total idiot), I can say with some certainty that there aren't any of them around campus on a normal day here.
**This is true on all days except today. Experiencing Ash Wednesday at a Catholic school as a Jew is a hell of a trip. First, no one tells me its coming, so I'm not prepared at all. Then, I inevitably leave my dorm at like 3, giving people ample time to get ashed. I walk out of my dorm, and all of a sudden I get this sense that everyone has entered a cult to which I was not invited. I figure it out after a couple of minutes at which point everything is fine, but in the intervening time my subconscious is in absolute panic. I was thinking about it today, and I wonder whether the fear about being unmarked in a sea of marked people comes from the original Pesach story, with the lamb's blood on the doors to mark those to be spared. Either that or it just looks wicked creepy.
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