Catholic colleges and universities across the country are immersed these days in self-analysis over a question that outsiders might think was figured out long ago: What does it mean to be a Catholic school?
The debate has spurred changes in curriculum, faculty hiring and campus life as well as more symbolic moves that whip up vigorous debate, such as Georgetown University's recent decision to hang crucifixes in every classroom.
``In the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis at Catholic colleges was on academic quality, and that became the top priority,'' says John W. Healey, director of the Archbishop Hughes Institute on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. ``But the schools' Catholic identity was lost a little as a result. Now all the Catholic colleges are asking once again what it means to be Catholic.''
The impetus has been Pope John Paul II's 1990 document, Ex corde ecclesiae, which directed Catholic colleges to affirm their Catholic identity and safeguard their Catholic mission.
The document initially drew bitter fire from the theology departments at many American Catholic campuses. Professors worried that the Pope was meddling with a tenet of academia that they hold sacrosanct - academic freedom.
And some faculty members are still bothered by Ex corde's reference to a papal law, or canon, that requires local bishops to approve those hired by Catholic schools' theology departments. Only a handful of the 224 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States - and none in the Philadelphia archdiocese - currently follow the canon.
But even critics of the canon agree that the Pope's document has been fruitful.
``Ex corde stimulated a reexamination of our mission,'' says Paul Aspin, head of St. Joseph's theology department. ``There are lots of pressures that can obscure that for us.''
