Bramwell - ND's Great Service

Bevil Bramwell, priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, writes at The Catholic Thing,

Notre Dame has done a great service to the Catholic Church. Yes, I said service. For the first time in a long while, a noted “Catholic” institution has given clear public witness to its “Catholicism” in a way that cannot be fudged or swept under the rug. It is not every day that you can enlist the President of the United States, and a non-Catholic at that, to help you in making such an unequivocal assertion of your deepest understanding of what it means to be Catholic.

The University of Notre Dame has squarely put before the nation and the world a conception of Catholicism that is essentially a kind of low-church Protestantism, with its view of religion as “what we do in our local community.” In that kind of arrangement, the people in a particular church gathering may accept some common notions of what the Christian faith is, what Christian principles are, but reserve to themselves how they will be lived out institutionally. They have their own “take” on things, fiercely defend that take, and are extremely proud of it.

Needless to say none of this is how the Catholic Church understands things. No offence to low-church Protestantism, but we are by definition not low-church Protestants. Our local communities and institutions belong to a larger whole, the Catholic Church, what we believe to be a global – and universal – society established by God himself. This larger whole holds to and teaches one truth. In this Catholic Church, at least according to the Second Vatican Council: “in [Jesus Christ] all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). This one truth describes reality. (Watch that connection to reality!) Thus all of the individual teachings of the Catholic Church are interrelated; there is no possibility of separating them for convenience, for having the President of the United States on campus, or because we have decided it’s of no great importance that we ignore certain of them ...

Read all here.