Catholic Studies: A Brief History

From its modest beginnings in the early 1990s, St. Thomas Catholic Studies in St. Paul, Minnesota, has grown over the years into an enterprise with a diverse array of institutes and projects, involving more than 1200 alumni and dozens of faculty, and gaining a national and international reputation. It has sparked the founding of more than fifty similar Catholic Studies programs and initiatives across the country and around the world. Noted papal biographer and Church commentator George Weigel opened a recent article in First Things, entitled “Homage to Don Briel,” with the following lines: “In the history of U.S. Catholic higher education since World War II, three seminal moments stand out: Msgr. John Tracy Ellis’s 1955 article, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life”; the 1967 Land O’Lakes statement, “The Idea of a Catholic University”; and the day Don J. Briel began the Catholic Studies Program—and the Catholic Studies movement—at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities.” Anyone familiar with Catholic higher education will be well aware of the first two of Weigel’s seminal moments. But many may not be familiar with the third. This brief history is an attempt to fill that gap.

To understand the point and the progress of Catholic Studies, it is important to understand both the context of its beginnings and the principles upon which it has gone forward. From the first it has been an organic growth, a creative response to a challenging situation rather than a carefully worked-out blueprint theorized in advance and meticulously put into play. Like all such organic movements, it has had a life of its own and has provoked a response in students, faculty, benefactors, and the wider community that has surprised even those who were leading it. Like all such movements, it has gone forward under guiding principles rather than under specific bureaucratic structures, and its eventual form has been mapped onto the impetus of its vivid life, rather than the reverse. This has meant that it has been both promising and difficult for some in the wider university culture: promising in the obvious enthusiasm it has generated for the intellectual life in students and faculty with all the consequences such enthusiasm brings—growth in numbers, support from donors and benefactors, and a high morale—and difficult in that it has not always been easy to capture its essence or its life in the normal academic arrangements of the modern university.

If Catholic Studies has been a creative response, the question immediately arises: a response to what? What was the context that spurred its inception and growth? To answer that question, a brief look at the wider picture of higher education, both Catholic and secular, can help.

No one doubts that higher education in America is at a crossroads, perhaps at a point of crisis. Our universities have not lost their importance as centers of training and of credentialing for professional success, but the nature of what the university offers has been undergoing rapid and radical change. The university’s structures, from the organization of its departments to residential traditions for students, grew in the soil of a time now past, amid a culture whose practical needs and basic philosophic assumptions were very different from ours. Current demands upon the university, both in terms of the skills it is asked to inculcate and the values by which it is to conduct its business, have put serious pressure on those older arrangements. Colleges and universities have been forced, often reluctantly, to ask themselves basic questions about their point and their purpose.

Until fairly recently, universities were understood to be key societal institutions for developing and passing on the heritage of a whole civilization. They were places of central cultural importance, the task of which was to give the members of the next generation a way of understanding the world, a formation of character, and a set of proficiencies that would allow them to think and act intelligently in preserving and furthering that heritage. Given such a wide and integrated vision, it was not strange that a college president such...