By Thomas Ryan
Though always a work in progress, the care for our Jesuit and Ignatian identity at Loyola University New Orleans seems to succeed because such a wide sweep of people – students, faculty, staff, administration, boards, donors, and friends – can engage at least parts of it.
Opportunities range from homegrown Ignatian programs to regional and national opportunities – including the 39(!) AJCU conferences and affinity groups – to the Ignatian Examen requested by Father General in Rome for all of our Jesuit colleges and universities.
For example, Loyola New Orleans is also clearly Catholic as declared by its mission statement and as enacted in ways liturgical, academic, administrative, and so forth. And yet “Catholic” is more challenging, not just now and not just for Loyola, as the subtitle of David O’Brien’s 1994 Conversations article suggests – “Jesuit Sí, Catholic … Not So Sure.”
This is the case, in part, because Catholicism is far more complex and extensive – geographically, historically, culturally. National opportunities for engaging Catholic identity exist but are more diffuse, and Jesuit colleges and universities tend to plug into fewer of them. Moreover, the times are challenging – personally and institutionally. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s was only the first of what promises to be a steady and demoralizing stream of damning reports, and that’s just in the United States.
In the worst case, Loyola’s Catholic identity is acknowledged in its diminishment. I once encountered a tour guide pointing to Loyola’s Ignatius Chapel and assuring potential students and parents that Loyola does not require Mass attendance. I also attended an interview once in which a colleague extolled Loyola’s Jesuit and Ignatian characteristics (commitment to the usual inspiring suspects – care for the whole person, social justice, seeing God in all things) and downplayed the Catholic – “you don’t have to be Catholic to work here.”
Constrained by limited resources and given a choice between the two, devoting energy to Jesuit is understandable. Yet, Loyola is Catholic, and Jesuit does not emerge from nowhere. St. Ignatius and the Society might be compared to plants rooted in and growing out of Catholic soil. The former could not and cannot exist without the latter.
A response aligning Loyola more clearly with its Catholic identity could make the university more attractive to future students and employees, and that response can be semantic.
North American Jesuits attending mass with Archbishop Jose H. Gomez. Loyola Marymount University.
I am struck at how often institutions across the country pair the word preserve – and its cognates – with Catholic identity. Even “Characteristics of Jesuit Colleges and Universities” (Conversations #42) urges “support and preservation of the Catholic … identity” of Jesuit colleges and universities. And preservation is necessary for caring for what has been, much as seed banks do for the biodiversity on deposit there. Libraries, universities, and museums do the same. In caring for what we know of the past, they provide giants’ shoulders on which to stand and make available the “dangerous memories” that illuminate and critique present injustice (see Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society).
Similarly, the enterprise of Catholic higher education should promote cura Catholica in the sense of preservation of Catholicism’s deposit, its traditions that undergird Catholic identity. Yet, if Catholic identity is perceived as only preserving what has been by drawing careful distinctions to defend against confusion, then only specialists can contribute to it.
In response, I propose an account of cura Catholica that is invitational. Indeed, cura implies more than protection. It’s the root for the verb curate that entails creativity. It has medical resonances and anticipates the flourishing that healing enables. Agriculturally, it can refer to cultivation, which can be a communal activity.
A start, and only a start, to cultivating Catholic identity would be to take a page from the Jesuit playbook and develop opportunities for finding common ground, including in the common good.
Whatever else Catholicism may be, it, like many other denominations and faiths, is also committed to the dignity of all creation and of all people, especially those on the margins, to the fashioning and disclosure of beauty, to discerning what goodness looks like embodied in lives and practices, and to discovery of what is, has been, and will be in human affairs, indeed in all creation.
Actions that promote dignity, beauty, goodness, and truth build up Catholicism, no matter who performs them or to what other ends they may be directed. By extension, any member of the Loyola community who contributes to such efforts enhances Loyola’s Catholic identity. Inviting others to see their work as building up Catholic identity in this way need exclude none and so could permeate “through the whole” (one translation of the Greek katholikos) university.
This project would require generosity and hearing others on their own grounds, in terms of their own accounts of dignity, beauty, goodness, and truth– not an easy thing. It could also be a catalyst for other efforts, both appreciative and critical, aimed at cultivating Catholic identity. Altogether, it should make Loyola New Orleans more true to its mission and, we hope, Catholicism more true to itself.
Thomas Ryan is the Marjorie R. Morvant Distinguished Chair of Theology and Ministry, director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry, and associate dean of the College of Nursing and Health at Loyola University New Orleans