Catholic institutions of higher learning were of particular importance to Justice Scalia, a graduate of Georgetown University. In this 1994 address at Catholic University, Scalia traced the history of religious colleges in the United States, arguing that their role has varied according to broader attitudes toward religion in society. The “secularization of our national character,” in which the culture shows “no preference between religion and irreligion,” means that Catholic schools face new obstacles and must operate accordingly to maintain their distinctive identity and unique purpose. And central to that purpose, “at least at the undergraduate level, must be precisely moral formation”: a good Catholic school must teach students not only “to think well, but to live virtuously.” Justice Scalia delivered this speech upon receiving a prestigious award from Catholic University.
I am genuinely honored to be a recipient of the Cardinal Gibbons Medal. Surely there are few awards in the country that have such a distinguished list of recipients—from John Kennedy to Nancy Reagan, and including, to mention a few of those I admire particularly, Fulton Oursler, Fulton J. Sheen, Cardinal Baum, Archbishop Hannan, and Monsignor John Tracy Ellis. I am proud to be in such company.
It is always somewhat intimidating to receive an award from a Catholic organization. The Church has been wise, I think, not to pronounce its greatest heroes, that is to say, its saints, until after they are dead. Preferably not until long after they are dead, so that their entire life can be considered with some detachment—indeed, not merely with detachment but with a devil’s advocate to point out all the warts. In honoring someone who may still go on to flub the dub, you take some risk. I am relieved to observe, however, that you are not honoring me for my saintliness; and doubtless the choirs of angels are pleased with that as well. Not to mention my loving but Hibernically frank wife, Maureen.
Besides not honoring me for having achieved sanctification, I am sure you also do not honor me for my position on what has become a defining issue for the Catholic Church in America, and indeed throughout the world: abortion. Or at least not for my position as a federal judge regarding the constitutionality of laws prohibiting that act. I accept no praise for that from Catholics, but only from lawyers; because I would hold otherwise, whatever my personal views on the practice, if I thought the law were different.
I am a natural object of your generosity, however, because my ties to Catholic University, though perhaps not unusually close, have been unusually long. I did my undergraduate studies, of course—in the mid-1950s—not at Catholic but at Georgetown. I was well familiar with CU, however—partly because I used to travel with some frequency to Little Rome, that part of the city occupied by CU and many other Catholic institutions, including the usual object of my visits, Trinity College. Many was the evening I recall standing on the island across from Peoples Drug Store on Dupont Circle, waiting for the transfer bus that would take me up North Capitol Street to your part of the city.
I was also painfully familiar with Catholic University as the object of my intense envy because of its drama program. I was president of the Mask and Bauble Society during my time at Georgetown, and we did our best—though with little hope of success—to match the highly professional productions staged by the fabled Father Hartke, who, I may note, is another of my predecessors as recipient of the Cardinal Gibbons Medal. I think it is fair to say that, in those days of the ’50s, we thespians at Georgetown had the same feelings toward the Catholic U theater group that the teams of the American League had toward the Damn Yankees. I am glad to see that the fine tradition of good theater at CU has held up better than the Yankees, and that Father Hartke was not succeeded by George Steinbrenner.
My later relations with CU were more sporadic. Of course I was reminded of it every year later in life—whether in Cambridge, Cleveland, Charlottesville, Washington, Chicago, or Palo Alto—as the annual church collection would be taken for its support. And I would contribute or not, I must confess, depending upon whether one of its media theologians had rubbed me the wrong way that year. (That is one of the lesser reasons I am not up for sainthood.) During the 1970s I held, successively, several posts in the executive branch of the federal government. As one of them was coming to an end, I gave some thought to putting myself forward as a candidate for the deanship of your law school—and went so far as to interview with the search committee of the faculty. But I was wise enough, even at that young age, to conclude that being a law dean was indeed (as one of my former deans and mentors had described it) like running a zoo with the cages open. And since then, to bring my Catholic U career down to date, I have spoken several times at the university and at the law school, and have come to be a friend, if not a confidant, of Father Byron and Brother Ellis.
I am, ladies and gentlemen, not a proponent of after-dinner speeches, particularly heavy ones. And so I shall make my substantive remarks this evening quite brief. I want to say a few words about Catholic education, and about its place in modern America. What a Catholic university must be depends upon the society in which that university functions. In Europe in the Middle Ages, when everything around was Catholic, I suppose the task of a Catholic university was simply to be a university; to preserve, expand, and pass on the body of human knowledge. It had no special or peculiar responsibility, except perhaps in its schools of theology, for nurturing or keeping alive the faith, and the manner of life that the faith entails. With the Reformation, that changed, as the great universities of Europe, and later of America, divided themselves on denominational lines. I did my third year of study at Georgetown in its junior-year-abroad program at the University of Fribourg, which was the only Catholic university in Switzerland. The others, at Geneva and Lausanne, for example, were officially Protestant. And in this country, the earliest colleges and universities were also denominational.
Even so, however, after the Reformation and until the great upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, Western society was still essentially Christian. It was still possible to speak of “Christendom.” The sectarian universities, Catholic and Presbyterian, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Baptist and Methodist, espoused different dogmas, to be sure, but still taught, and existed in the midst of, a common, generally accepted Christian morality. That was true in the new United States no less than in Europe. While the magnificent Constitution we brought forth in 1787 banished sectarian religion from government, religion in general and Christianity in particular remained a prominent part of public life and manners. That lasted well into the nineteenth century, as the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” well enough demonstrate.
That changed with the French Revolution, which ultimately spread throughout Europe a secularization of public life. The University of Paris, where Aquinas taught and Ignatius recruited Xavier to the Society of Jesus, became a secular state school. And that secularization eventually, though much later, came to these shores. Here it went through an intermediate stage, in which, acknowledging the identity and great contribution of our largest non-Christian religious minority, we became a nation that believed in, and celebrated, its Judeo-Christian character. That was not much of a stretch, after all, Christianity being—as the Romans recognized but we sometimes later forgot—a sect of Judaism. We were at that stage of development, the Judeo-Christian stage, when I was a boy—or at least we were at that stage in New York, where we acknowledged publicly our national beliefs in a personal God, and in certain common, revealed truths including the Decalogue, and agreed to differ respectfully about the rest.
One can trace the changes in America from the opinions of its Supreme Court—even (and indeed, especially) those opinions that were wrong about the law because they allowed it to be distorted by social beliefs. The prime example is one of my least favorite Supreme Court opinions, delivered without dissent in 1892, entitled Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. The case involved a federal statute entitled “An Act to Prohibit the Importation and Migration of Foreigners and Aliens Under Contract or Agreement to Perform Labor in the United States, Its Territories, and the District of Columbia.” A church in the city of New York made such a contract with an English minister, whereby he was to come to New York and serve as the church’s rector and pastor, which he did. The United States sued the church for the penalty provided by the statute, and the trial court upheld the sanction. The Supreme Court reversed. Even though the language of the statute was categorical and made no exceptions for ministers (though it made exceptions for professional actors, artists, lecturers, and singers), the Court simply refused to read it to mean what it said. “It is a familiar rule,” the Court said, “that a thing may be within the letter of the statute and yet not within the statute, because not within its spirit, nor within the intention of its makers.” I do not believe that. I think the text enacted by Congress is the law, and the duty of the Court is to apply it (unless it be unconstitutional), rather than to consult spirits. That awful case is frequently cited to us by counsel who want us to ignore what the statute says. But for present purposes I am interested in another mistake the Court made. The spirits it listened to caused it to go on for eight pages leading to the following conclusion:
These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation. In the face of all these, shall it be believed that a Congress of the United States intended to make it a misdemeanor for a church of this country to contract for the services of a Christian minister residing in another nation?
To be fair to the Court, its opinion made clear that it was just as unthinkable that the statute would prohibit a Jewish synagogue’s importation of an “eminent rabbi.” But the official recognition that we were a “Christian nation” surely had no place in the United States Reports. Legally it was false. But sociologically I have no doubt it was (in 1892) true—which is why the opinion was unanimous and so readily accepted.
For the next stage of our national development, the Judeo-Christian stage, we can jump forward about half a century in the United States Reports, to a case called Zorach v. Clauson, decided in 1952. It involved a program which I myself had been involved in in the New York City public schools—the so-called released-time program, in which public-school children of all faiths whose parents made the request could be released from school an hour early one day a week, to attend religious instruction or devotional exercises. New York City taxpayers challenged the practice as unconstitutional. The Court upheld it. The opinion for the Court by Justice Douglas, hardly one of the more conservative justices, spoke of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and included the following passage:
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being….When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs.
That description of our national character reflects, I think, stage two of our national sociological development: the Judeo-Christian stage, in which monotheistic religion in general was favored, though no particular denomination.
The last and most recent stage, the secularization of our national character, came quickly and is reflected most clearly in the language of a 1968 Supreme Court case called Epperson v. Arkansas. There you will find no more talk about a “religious people,” and about “accommodating the public service to [the people’s] spiritual needs.” “The First Amendment,” the Court says in Epperson, “mandates governmental neutrality”—not merely between the various religious sects, but “between religion and nonreligion.”
My point in this discussion is not to criticize the holdings of these cases, but to point out the progression that they demonstrate in the perception of our national character: from a Christian nation, to a religious nation, to a nation that has no preference between religion and irreligion. I think that perception is by and large accurate, at least insofar as concerns what might be called the “governing classes” of society. The signs of the passing of the old religiousness are everywhere. In our laws, for example, which now approve many practices formerly forbidden because of a national aversion rooted primarily in religious beliefs. In our body of common knowledge, which used to include The Pilgrim’s Progress, and now seemingly does not include the Bible. A recent survey found that only about half of the American people could name the first book of the Old Testament; only about a third could say who gave the Sermon on the Mount; and only about a fifth could name a single Old Testament prophet. A nation that used to abound with names like Ezekiel and Zebadiah now presumably thinks that the Beatitudes are a female singing group, and that the Apocrypha is a building in Greece. I read in a national newspaper recently a piece about some war-torn country, describing how anxious women went to church to “light a candle and make a prayer.” “Make” a prayer! Our information media have begun to lose even the vocabulary of religion.
As one who believes in God, and who believes that those nations that love or at least fear Him, and do His will, will by and large prosper, I regret this secularization of our country, or at least of our intellectual classes. My object here, however, is not to bemoan or even criticize it, but to point out that it has a bearing upon what the nature and the mission of the modern American Catholic university must be. If you are serious about your Catholicism, you are operating in a more hostile environment, or at any rate in a less supportive environment, than used to be the case. That has several consequences which you must be prepared to accept—or else be prepared to lose your institutional soul.
First, you cannot expect to be as attractive a place for many faculty members and students as a secular institution that shares their beliefs and values (or the lack of them). If the place is indeed infused with Catholicism, it will be uncongenial. In the days when I was a law professor at the University of Chicago, I served for a term as a member of the Board of Visitors of the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Rex Lee, who is now the president of Brigham Young, and was then the dean of the law school, had been a colleague of mine at the Department of Justice. The J. Reuben Clark Law School was a place that had not lost its religious character—and for that reason would in some respects have been a difficult place for even me to teach. Oh, sure, it would have been sort of nice to stay in a place where dinner conversation does not stop and forks pause midway to the mouth when you mention that you have nine children. But I would have had to take on my entire daily ration of caffeine before I left home in the morning and would have had to sneak cigarettes in the men’s room. In a Catholic university, there are, or ought to be, similar constraints concerning an expected lifestyle that is increasingly different from that of the surrounding world.
Indeed, I will go further than that. Part of the task of a Catholic university, at least at the undergraduate level, must be precisely moral formation. Not long ago, all colleges, even non-denominational ones, used to consider that their task: to teach young men and women (and college freshmen are indeed still young and impressionable) not merely to think well but to live virtuously. Perhaps because our society no longer has firm beliefs about what is virtuous, there are few if any non-denominational schools that even pretend to pursue that task—unless it is the service academies, which still seek to inculcate the values of honor, duty, and country. Catholic universities, however, cannot avoid that task, and indeed betray the expectations of tuition-paying Catholic parents if they shirk it. Demands for a moral and virtuous lifestyle that is different from much of the world about us will lose you faculty members; and it will lose you students. I think the alternative is to lose your Catholic character.
Besides constraints upon lifestyle, there are, yes, constraints upon what is taught. The only justification for a Catholic university, it seems to me, is that there is some distinctive approach to human knowledge that is peculiar to Catholic, or at least Christian, belief. Otherwise, devote the money to Newman Clubs on secular campuses, or give it to the missions. The existence of such a distinctive approach is no mirage. Georgetown University was a very Catholic place when I was there. One of the best lessons I learned was in the course of my oral comprehensive exam in my major subject, history, at the end of senior year. I had done pretty darned well during all of the questioning, and at the end my history professor, Dr. Wilkinson, to whom I am ever indebted, asked me one last, seemingly softball question: if I had to pick a single event as the most significant in all the history I had studied, what would it be? I say it was a softball question because there obviously could not be any single correct answer. So I groped for what might be a good one. What should I say? The Battle of Thermopylae? No, the Battle of Lepanto. No, the French Revolution. No, the Grand Convention of 1787. I forget what answer I gave, but it was wrong. The right one, Dr. Wilkinson informed me, was the Incarnation. Well, of course. Point taken, and an unforgettable lesson learned.
There are some things that must be taught at Catholic universities, and some things that must not: How to use human fetuses for useful scientific research, for example. Or how Mary was in fact not a virgin and Jesus had two brothers and a sister. Or how artificial birth control and abortion are morally okay. Is this a restriction on free intellectual inquiry? I think not. It is simply a restriction on where it shall be done and who shall pay. If one does not believe in such restrictions, one does not believe in Catholic dogma, and one should not believe in Catholic universities. Catholic universities do not exist, I suggest, simply to make it easier for the press to locate a Catholic theologian who disagrees with the Pope.
The American academic landscape is strewn with colleges and universities—many of them the finest, academically, in the land—that were once denominational but in principle or practice no longer are. Antioch University, for example, was founded by the Christian Church and was later Unitarian. Bucknell and the University of Chicago were Baptist. Dartmouth and Yale were Congregational. Duke, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt were Methodist. Lehigh was Episcopalian; Princeton, Presbyterian. I used to marvel, when I was a young man, at how institutions founded out of religious enthusiasm, and once imbued with religious zeal, could have so far changed. With foolish sectarian pride, I thought that could never happen to Catholic institutions. Of course I was wrong. We started later, but we are on the same road.
Catholic University has a heightened immunity against that development, because of its pontifical charter, because of its board of directors (the American bishops), and indeed because of its very name. But by the same token it has a heightened responsibility. To demand that any Catholic university be more Catholic than this school is to demand, so to speak, that it be more Catholic than the Pope. By and large the school has lived up to that responsibility. I do not mean to minimize the difficulty that entails—in reducing the size of the pool of brilliant faculty and students that the university can draw upon; in producing diminished esteem from a generally secularized national academic establishment; and in diverting financial and emotional resources toward difficult and unpleasant administrative tasks and even, sometimes, litigation. But as the parson says in The Canterbury Tales, if gold should rust, then what would iron do? All Catholic parents who aspire to send their children to Catholic universities—and not merely those who send them here—owe the directors, the administrators, and the faculty of this institution a debt of gratitude for the hard task they have undertaken.