First Things First: Reflecting Once Again on What It Means to Be a Catholic College

Mapping the Journey Ahead

The beginning of a new academic year brings with it a familiar mixture of anticipation and activity. New students are arriving, and upper-level students return. Faculty come back to classrooms and laboratories. Staff prepare programs and services. Calendars fill quickly, and before long, the work of another year is fully underway.

Perhaps precisely because so much demands our attention, it is worth beginning with first things first. For Saint Michael’s College, that means taking some time to review the basics of Catholic higher education and to ask again a deceptively simple question: What does it mean for Saint Michael’s to be a Catholic college?

Our mission provides the starting point. Saint Michael’s seeks “to contribute through higher education to the enhancement of the human person and the advancement of human culture in light of the Catholic faith.”

Every part of that statement matters. Our work is accomplished through higher education. We are first and foremost an educational institution committed to serious scholarship, teaching, learning, research, and the search for truth. That education seeks the enhancement of the human person. Students are not simply preparing to earn a living. Education concerns the development of persons capable of thinking carefully, judging responsibly, living meaningfully, and placing their knowledge and abilities at the service of others. Those persons, in turn, participate in the advancement of human culture. Education is never merely private. What our graduates know, value, create, teach, discover, and do will help shape the communities and societies in which they live.

And Saint Michael’s undertakes all of this “in light of the Catholic faith.” That final phrase raises questions worth exploring. It does not mean that every member of our community must be Catholic, nor that every academic question has a predetermined Catholic answer. Saint Michael’s is a genuinely pluralistic community. Our students, faculty, and staff include Catholics, members of other Christian traditions, people of other religions, agnostics, atheists, and those who are still determining what they believe. Catholic higher education should welcome that diversity into a common search for truth.

Over the coming weeks, this series will explore eight dimensions of what Catholic higher education means for Saint Michael’s.

1. We begin with what it means for Saint Michael’s College to be a college with a mission and a legacy.
2. We will consider why a Catholic college must be a genuine institution of higher education, committed to academic freedom, disciplinary rigor, intellectual honesty, and the pursuit of knowledge rather than substituting catechesis for education.
3. We will examine the way the Catholic faith provides an intellectual horizon, encouraging the integration of knowledge and the continuing dialogue between faith and reason.
4. We will ask what it means to form persons rather than merely prepare workers, beginning with the Catholic conviction that every person possesses an inherent dignity and that education should develop the whole person.
5. We will reflect upon what it means for Saint Michael’s to live in communion with the Catholic Church, maintaining both the autonomy proper to a college and a genuine relationship with the Church along with the Edmundite tradition from which the College emerged.
6. A subsequent reflection will look historically at how Catholic colleges, including Saint Michael’s, sought to negotiate autonomy and Catholic identity, particularly through the changes in governance that developed around the time of the Land O’Lakes Statement (1967).
7. We will consider the responsibility of a Catholic college to engage Catholic teaching seriously, allowing it to be studied, questioned, debated, criticized, and understood rather than ignored, caricatured, or reduced to slogans.
8. Finally, we will consider how the search for truth must lead toward justice, love, service, and the common good. Knowledge carries responsibility. Education should make a difference not only in the lives of graduates but also in the world they help to create.

These reflections are not intended to provide eight tests by which we determine who is sufficiently Catholic. Nor are they intended only for Catholics. They are an invitation to conversation. Faculty bring the methods and insights of their disciplines. Students bring questions, experiences, and emerging convictions. Staff and administrators shape the institutional environment in which education occurs. Trustees safeguard the mission across generations. Catholics and non-Catholics alike can contribute to the intellectual community that Saint Michael’s seeks to be.

A Catholic college should be a place where questions are taken seriously, disagreement is possible, traditions encounter one another honestly, and the search for truth remains larger than any one person or perspective.

As another academic year begins, first things first: Why do we educate, what kind of persons do we hope to form, what kind of culture do we hope they will advance, and what difference does it make that Saint Michael’s undertakes this work in the light of the Catholic faith?

Those are not questions to settle once and put away. They are questions worth beginning with every year.

If you have any comments or observations that you would like to make, you can contact me at dtheroux@smcvt.edu.  Let’s talk!