The Catholic Studies Reader

8. Catholic Studies in the Spirit of ‘‘Do Whatever He Tells You’’

8 Catholic Studies in the Spirit of ‘‘Do Whatever He Tells You’’ una m. cadegan During a celebration of the University of Dayton’s sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university’s Center for Social Concern performed a song he had written for the occasion, ‘‘Do Whatever He Tells You.’’ At the reception after the celebration, a colleague still fairly new to the university, personally nonreligious but with an evident affinity for the university’s mission and commitments, commented that he thought the song was a little odd—hadn’t something like ‘‘do whatever he tells you’’ been written over the gates of Soviet labor camps? My first response to the remark, phrased more wittily than I can recall here, was laughter, but I also felt the pull of the teachable moment. The song’s catchy, singable refrain (‘‘Do whatever he tells you/Do whatever he says/Everything will work out fine/Jesus will turn water into wine/Do whatever he tells you’’) quotes Mary’s words to Jesus at the wedding feast of Cana (John 2:1–11), a scene long of importance to members of the Society of Mary (Marianist), the religious congregation that founded UD, because of its meaning for the society’s founder, William Joseph Chaminade. Trying to maintain a light touch (we had, after all, reached the wine and hors d’oeuvres portion of the event, and a junior faculty member showing up on a Friday afternoon like a good citizen did not deserve to be rewarded with a sermon from a senior colleague), I noted the story’s importance to the Marianists, and I also tried briefly to indicate the line’s complexity in the story. Far from a simple, authoritarian directive, it represents a complex moment in which Mary, despite Jesus’ somewhat curt rebuff to her hint that the wedding party had run out of wine (‘‘My hour has not yet come’’), nonetheless anticipates his intervention by alerting the servants to stand by for imminent instructions. Foreknowledge? Motherly nudging ? Prefiguring of thwarted female ecclesial authority? The story’s 172 una m. cadegan complex valence could and does lead in many directions, and it seemed important in that moment to point this out to my colleague, who had so reflexively, if jokingly, associated the song’s refrain with an ethos catastrophically counter to that of a university. This episode passed quickly into small talk over carrot sticks and mini-quiches, and I doubt my colleague even recalls it. But it has long been emblematic for me of the complexity involved in communicating the university’s mission and identity to faculty colleagues. ‘‘Do whatever he tells you’’ (and all it stands for concerning Marianist educational heritage and philosophy) has rich resonance not only for those committed personally and spiritually to Catholic tradition and its Marianist embodiment, but also for a compelling vision of intellectual life and university purpose. Its meaning is far from apparent on the surface, however, and communicating it to those who are fully a part of the university enterprise but distant from the Marianists as a religious community requires time, relationship, study, and luck, all in impeccably precise and perfectly timed proportion. Instead, of course, what we get is real life. Even for those tolerantly open or actively predisposed to learning about the university’s mission, such learning requires, among other things, time. It therefore inevitably competes for the time required by other commitments such as classes and research and meetings and the occasional moment of leisure. Yet if it does not somehow take place the university abandons all hope of being meaningfully Catholic, since if the faculty do not own and embody the mission, there may be some Catholic elements to a university —but it will not be a Catholic university. This conundrum is (perhaps numbingly) familiar to everyone involved in thinking about how to make and keep Catholic universities Catholic. Over the past couple of decades at the University of Dayton, we have explored a variety of ways to address it, none of them unique, but nonetheless distinctively informed by the university’s Marianist heritage and character. In describing Dayton’s approach, I hope to do more than make a list of committees and speakers. In the spirit of Jim Fisher’s hope that this project reflect explicitly on ways in which American Catholic Studies might serve as an intellectual resource for the Church in passing on the faith...