Crisis at Catholic U.

Catholic University in Washington, D.C., has a high aim--"to search out truth scientifically, to safeguard it, and to apply it"--qualified in practice by a timid feeling that now and then some of the truth has to be suppressed. The newest case of suppression has the school's faculty in revolt and deeply worries many of the 239 Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S., who are C.U.'s guardians.

Barred from a student lecture series at C.U. last month were four eminent Catholic intellectuals, including two of the nation's top Jesuit theologians, Fathers Gustave Weigel and John Courtney Murray; a noted Benedictine liturgical scholar, Father Godfrey Diekmann; and one of the official theologians at the Vatican Council, Germany's Father Hans Kueng. To Monsignor William J. McDonald, rector of Catholic University of America, giving a forum to these scholars might seem to place his school on the liberal side in debate at the council (now in adjournment until September)--and he did not want the school to be on any side.

An Indignant Cardinal. The ban was a case of caution carried to outrage, and it was with outrage that U.S. Catholics responded. At least 23 Catholic newspapers lamented what Wisconsin's Green Bay Register calls "one of the saddest pages in the history of intellectual Catholicism in the U.S." One editor denounced C.U.'s "authoritarianism"; another labeled the university a "citadel of mediocrity." Snapped Bishop John K. Mussio of Steubenville, Ohio: "Legitimate controversy should not be sidestepped by a center of learning. Suppressing views is no service to truth." In a stiff letter to Rector

McDonald, St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter described himself as "dismayed" and "indignant."

More than 200 of the university's 350 faculty members appealed McDonald's "speaker ban" to the 40-man board of trustees, which consists of all U.S. cardinals and archbishops, plus five bishops and six laymen. And where at first it seemed that only one incident was at issue, C.U.'s eminent church historian, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, went on to charge that "for nearly a decade, this type of suppression has been going on constantly at this university."

Every Catholic Contributes. C.U. is the only "national pontifical university" in the U.S. As such, it is controlled ultimately by the Vatican's Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities. It is the only U.S. Catholic university whose rector must be approved by the Pope (the others are run by religious orders or individual dioceses). Every U.S. Catholic is supposed to contribute to its support via an annual collection in all churches (1962 gleaning: $1,500,000).

In practice, Catholic University has been run by its rectors. They influence the rotating executive committee of trustees to which they report. They preside over the peaceable academic senate below them. In the 1930s one of them tried to build the school's reputation with big-time football (in 1936, C.U. actually beat Ole Miss in the Orange Bowl) and piled up a huge deficit. Another allowed the engineering school to lose accreditation (since restored) in the 1950s.

"Little Rome." C.U. began as a graduate school for priests, and although it let in undergraduates in 1904 and women in 1920, it is still something of a graduate-level seminary. Dominated by the vast National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the campus is ringed by 87 houses of study for various orders, giving rise to the nickname "Little Rome." One-third of the 5,300 students are nuns, priests and other religious. The effect is unusual--pretty coeds in skirts and sweaters mixing with bearded Capuchin brothers in robes and sandals and studious Sisters of Chari ty in swooping white headdresses.

The only Catholic member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, C.U. is one of only three Catholic campuses with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter (others: Fordham and Minnesota's College of St. Catherine). Though its $16 million endowment is paltry, its 600,000-volume library is tops for Washington campuses. Its first-rate drama department has enlivened capital culture with some 200 plays attended by 550,000 people. It boasts the nation's only school of canon law, complete with a topflight lay lawyer who converted from Judaism. Sometimes called the "West Point of the U.S. clergy," C.U. counts among its living alumni some 55 bishops and more than 40 college presidents.

Catholics have long thought of C.U. as a model of academic freedom--subject to neither "the hand of an order'' nor the pressure of a state legislature. Even in student rules, it is unusually liberal for a Catholic campus (no "lights out," no supervised study). Yet in recent years, notably under Irish-born Rector McDonald, who took over in 1957, the faculty has increasingly complained of academic timidity at the top. Items:

P: Rector McDonald vetoed as "imprudent" a proposed C.U. symposium on evolution and Christian theology during the Darwin centennial in 1959--while similar symposiums were held at three other Catholic universities (Fordham, Duquesne, and Chicago's Loyola). P: Sociologist Father Raymond Plotvin was forced to withdraw from a major study of family planning in cooperation with Jesuit Georgetown University. Reason: McDonald refused to approve Plotvin's request for a Ford Foundation grant to study "family size preference of American Catholic college girls" because the subject was "too controversial."

P: Father Edward F. Siegman, associate professor of sacred Scripture, was ousted last year "for reasons of health" despite an 18-2 vote of protest by the faculty of sacred theology. Rumored reason: Siegman's probing scholarship irked Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, the apostolic delegate to the U.S., who also takes a dim view of Theologian Kung.

P: By Vatican request, C.U.'s canon law faculty prepared for the council a list of proposed reforms of obsolete church laws. In Rome, U.S. bishops waited expectantly but in vain to hear the C.U. ideas. Reason: Rector McDonald never sent them. His critics call-this "even more serious than the speaker ban."

By last week, six major faculty groups had backed resolutions calling on the C.U. administration to rethink its notions of academic freedom. "Now all this is out in the open." says one faculty man. "The trustees cannot bypass the situation as it exists." Rector McDonald himself i gave a sign that all the protest was having j a telling effect. He announced the appearance at Catholic University next month of a timely guest speaker: Augustin Cardinal Bea, a towering liberal at the Vatican Council. Bea's topic: ''Academic Research and Ecumenicism.''

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