Catholic Social Learning: Educating the Faith That Does Justice

7. Education for Justice and the Catholic University: Innovation or Development? An Argument from Tradition

7 Education for Justice and the Catholic University Innovation or Development? An Argument from Tradition The challenge of Christian humanism remains central to the task of achieving the identity of Catholic universities. But today that humanism must be a social humanism, a humanism that recognizes that it must address not only [the] heights to which human culture can rise but also the depths of suffering into which societies can descend. David Hollenbach, S.J.1 The previous chapter concludes Part II, in which the foundational insights and themes developed in the three chapters of Part I—on personal encounter, the Pedagogical Circle, and Catholic justice pedagogy as a MacIntyrian social practice—were seen to be variously at work in three justice pedagogies in university settings: cross-cultural immersion , service-learning, and the study of moral exemplars. In Part III, I turn to issues of Institution and Program. Chapter 7 addresses the foundational question of the place of justice education within the Catholic university. Does it belong at the heart of the university or in campus ministry only? Chapter 8 is summative but also explores the theme of shame more deeply, offers one model of what the Pedagogical Circle might look like within a university curriculum, gives students within that program a chance to speak, and concludes with some reflections on young adult vocational development. 兩 119 兩 120 兩 Institution and Program The Commitment to Justice as Constitutive of the Catholic University The preceding chapters assume that justice education is proper to a Catholic university and that Catholic social teaching should provide not just the subject matter of an elective course in the theology department or the animating spirit in some campus ministry activities but also a perspective that pervades the culture and ethos of the entire university, in its teaching, its research, and its ‘‘way of proceeding,’’ in the classic Jesuit phrase.2 The argument from magisterial doctrine for education for justice in the Catholic university is clear: if ‘‘action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world . . . [is] . . . a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation ,’’3 and if the Catholic university finds its own particular mission within that broader mission,4 then it follows that such a university must also constitute itself according to the demands of justice, as understood by the Catholic tradition. Of course, it must do so ‘‘universitariamente ’’5 —in the manner of a university and not as a social service agency or political party. The Catholic university had a long history of educating for justice before the late nineteenth-century advent of modern Catholic social teaching (CST). What, then, are the warrants or precedents, if any, for the contemporary focus on justice in Catholic higher education? Is this an innovation or a development? In answering these questions, this chapter will focus on justice education proper and also on the formation and learning of its students, but not on justice and research or on justice and the university’s way of proceeding as an institution.6 My basic thesis is that the educational models developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, and John Henry Cardinal Newman, author of the classic The Idea of a University, two major sources from the deep tradition of Catholic higher education, demonstrate that concern for what we now call ‘‘social justice’’ has long been a fundamental dimension of the Catholic university in its Education for Justice and the Catholic University 兩 121 relationship to its students, and who those students are and are becoming , as a matter of intellectual and moral formation. Although this argument has gained ground in recent years7 to the point that references to educating for justice appear in institutional marketing, it is my impression that even as spoken resistance is waning , many members of the Catholic university community still privately believe that justice education is an innovation and even a departure from, if not a betrayal of, the traditional mission of higher education, Catholic or otherwise. They think that the mission should be focused on truth—whether understood as the transmission of the honored truths of the past (as preserved in the so-called ‘‘Western canon’’) or as the pursuit of new truths (as modeled in the most prestigious research institutions) and not...