The Absentees

"It is a fact," says the Rev. Gustave Weigel, S.J., professor of ecclesiology at Maryland's Woodstock College, "that in the United States, where the Catholics form something between a fifth [and] a third of the population, the proportion of Catholics in American scholarship is nowhere near the overall figure." Why is it that, aside from theology, American Catholics have made such a comparatively small contribution to U.S. scholarship? In the current University of Notre Dame quarterly, The Review of Politics, Jesuit Weigel gives his answer: "The general Catholic community in America does not know what scholarship is."

Fifth Columnists. Though many Catholic teachers worry about "Catholic absenteeism in scholarship," they often urge students into the intellectual life for the wrong reasons. The student is supposed to be a sort of fifth columnist with a double duty to perform. "He should use scholarly method to introduce into [the] sciences Catholic teachings which are really derived outside of them, and negatively he should refute, in scholarly fashion, the work done by those whose findings apparently are hostile to the faith." For too long, says Weigel, the American Catholic has regarded himself as a' member of a "beleaguered community" constantly on the defensive. "It is not too extreme to say that in many cases [Catholic] classes of philosophy are used to form defending debaters of Catholic positions. Philosophy is not envisaged as a personal quest for truth but rather as a predigested apologetic of religious belief. Young men, firm in their faith and lovers of debate, esteem this highly, but they escape the encounter with scholarship . .

"Because of the general defense-mentality of the teachers for all problems, there is a marked preference for solutions given in the past . . . Older solutions have proved to be perfectly consonant with theological thinking. A new solution has no such guarantee . . . There is a strong urge to make questions timeless with timeless answers. New questions are preferably reduced to old ones and hence they need not be answered anew, because the old answer is already there. This deepfreeze technique gives the students the impression that there really are no new questions . . . Instead of making the disciplines an intellectual encounter with the real as it swims into our experience, [Catholic teachers] prefer to petrify it by reducing it to a logical scheme of abstract verbalisms ..."

Noblest Action. "This kind of training leads away from scholarship. The postulate of all scholarly investigation is the nagging existence of mystery. The training of not a few young Catholics makes them believe that there is no mystery. It is all objectively clear and the category schemes of the past can make it manifest. If that is so, there is nothing more to be done. It has been done already and why waste time doing it over again?"

In persuading more young Catholics into the life of true scholarship, says Weigel, there must be no urging "with the whip of the Church's need ... It is essential to woo young men and women to this vocation because it is good in itself ... for next to the contemplation of God, the contemplation of God's creation is the noblest action of man. This we must preach. This our youth must hear. Hearing, they will be attracted."

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