A statue of St. Aloysius Gonzaga is prominent on Gonzaga University's Spokane, WA campus.
Frequenters of this blog and other Catholic corners of the
Internet likely remember various controversies involving Gonzaga University in
Spokane, Washington. The Jesuit school has come under fire in recent years for
inviting Archbishop Desmond Tutu—who is pro-abortion—to be its 2012 commencement speaker, for
its apparent eagerness to provide insurance coverage for
contraception in compliance with the HHS mandate, and, most
recently, for refusing student-club status to the campus Knights of
Columbus group on the grounds that it violated the school’s
non-discrimination policy by requiring that members be Catholic (the KofC
decision was ultimately reversed by the university
administration).
Last week, a group of Gonzaga alumni, parents, and friends
launched the 1887 Trust,
a non-profit committed to strengthening the school’s Catholic identity in the
face of these and other controversies. Taking its name from the year Gonzaga
was founded by Father Joseph Cataldo, SJ, the group says that its mission is
“to affirm and support what is admirable in regard to Gonzaga’s Catholic
identity, while advocating measures to recover and strengthen that identity
where it has weakened.” Some of those
measures include:
-
being publically committed in its
governing documents to achieving full compliance with the letter and spirit
of Ex corde Ecclesiae;
-
working to attract and maintain a faculty
body that is majority Catholic in composition, with 65% Catholics as the goal;
-
adopting a speaker policy that will
avoid awarding honors or platforms to those who publicly oppose core teachings
of the Church.
I am a Gonzaga alum, so the 1887 Trust and its activities
are of particular interest to me—I realize that many Catholics outside of the
Inland Northwest, if they have heard about Gonzaga at all, are probably only
aware of the controversies mentioned above (or maybe of its
men’s basketball team).
But the response from concerned stakeholders to the
controversies should be of wider interest to those following Catholic higher
education trends, in part because for several years the school had something rather
remarkable: a serious, reasonably well-informed, campus-wide discussion of what
it means to be a Catholic institution. This discussion was influenced in large
part by the leadership of Father Robert Spitzer, SJ—the university’s
then-president who touched off the debate in 2002 when he refused to allow The Vagina Monologues to be performed on
campus—and was encouraged by faculty members and administrators on all points of
the ideological spectrum, but it was, by and large, student-driven. In op-eds,
at campus-wide events, and in personal conversations, students discussed and wrestled
with Catholic identity issues—from guest-speaker policies to the mandatum to academic freedom. It’s true
that these debates could get ugly and, as one might expect from undergraduates,
sometimes threw off more heat than light, but for a time at Gonzaga you saw a
good number of students actively engaged in a conversation about what, if
anything, makes a Catholic institution distinctive.
Father Spitzer stepped down as president of GU
in 2009,
The Vagina Monologues was
performed on campus in 2011, and I’ve been given to understand from folks still
affiliated with the university that many of the conversations we had a decade
ago have been largely dropped. This is a shame, as it is clear from recent
controversies that this wasn’t because of an increased clarity about the nature
Catholic higher education. My hope is that the 1887 Trust will pick up where
the on-campus discussions left off, and encourage Gonzaga to renew its
commitment to the Catholic ideals upon which it was founded.
