The biblical command to “Go … and teach all nations” provided the inspiration for the creation of Georgetown University, the first Catholic college in the country. John Carroll, the Jesuit archbishop who founded the college in 1789, chose a site by the Potomac River to facilitate the missionary focus of his order. The original mission of Georgetown — and all Catholic colleges until the mid-twentieth century — was to keep the faith alive and spread it to others. Faithful Catholic parents could be confident that when they sent their sons or daughters to a Catholic college or university, their children’s faith would be strengthened, and their commitment to Catholic teachings would remain intact. For more than a century, the philosophy of the great theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas shaped the curriculum of all Catholic colleges in the United States, offering an antidote to the erosion of spiritual, intellectual, and human values. 

All of this changed after the 1960s. Today, most of the more than two hundred Catholic colleges and universities in the United States have moved far from their founders’ shared vision of encouraging moral virtue and missionary zeal. They have adopted the curricular fads of their secular peers, hosting gender studies departments, teaching the faith as a social phenomenon, and granting professorships to people who believe in an entirely materialistic world. Leaders of Catholic universities claim that their commitment to social justice differentiates their schools from secular colleges, but they neglect to mention that they have defined the term social justice so broadly that they now welcome pro-abortion groups, LGBTQ clubs, drag shows, and Pride celebrations. 

Fewer than twenty faithfully Catholic colleges and universities, like my own academic home, Franciscan University of Steubenville, are exceptions to this rule. 

While Georgetown is now ranked as one of the most prestigious universities in the country, it has become so thoroughly secularized that its faculty and students have become leaders in advocating for rights that are counter to Catholic teaching, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

One of the university’s most well-known graduates, William Peter Blatty, the late best-selling author of The Exorcist, was so concerned about Georgetown’s refusal to propagate the faith that he filed a canonical petition with the Vatican in 2013 asking that the Church deny the university the “right to call itself Catholic.” Blatty, accusing the institution of “tak[ing] pride in insulting the Church and offending the faithful,” described Georgetown as a “Potemkin Village” and declared it to be “the leader of a pack of schools that are failing to live up to their Catholic identity.”

The loss of a true Catholic identity on most Catholic campuses culminated in 1967, when Catholic university leaders gathered in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, to create a manifesto that declared their “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical.” Since that conference, many Catholic college presidents have operated as though the road to upward mobility circumvents the Church.

Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, who served as president of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 until 1987 — and who orchestrated the Land O’ Lakes declaration — wrote in his 1994 book The Challenge and Promise of the Catholic University that “[t]he best and only traditional authority in the university is intellectual competence.” 

So concerned about the loss of Catholic identity on these campuses was Pope Saint John Paul II that, in 1990, he promulgated the apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae, which identified the centrality of Catholic higher education to the Church as a whole. Literally translated as “from the heart of the Church,” Ex corde attempted to address the slide toward secularism by calling on Catholic colleges to be faithful to the Church’s salvific mission. 

Faithfully Catholic faculty at Notre Dame welcomed Ex corde Ecclesiae as a means of renewing the fading Catholicity of their campus. But their hope that the apostolic constitution would counter the effect of the Land O’ Lakes declaration was in vain, as they have been forced to endure their university’s honoring of a parade of pro-choice politicians, including then president Barack Obama, who was given an honorary degree in 2009, and then vice president Joe Biden, who in 2016 was awarded the Laetare Medal — the “most prestigious award” given by Notre Dame “in recognition of outstanding service” to the Catholic Church.

Nothing, however, could have prepared them for Ash Williams, a self-described “transgender man” who was invited to deliver a lecture at Notre Dame on March 20, 2023, to preach on the goodness of abortion. According to Notre Dame’s independent student newspaper, the Irish Rover, Williams, who calls herself an “abortion doula,” claims to draw upon her “Black, trans, abortion-having life” to question social norms opposing abortion. Williams declared in her talk that “abortion is a type of birth” and suggested that we don’t understand it as such “because it has become so disenfranchised.” Williams, who, according to a NPR profile, “provides physical, emotional, or financial help to people seeking to end a pregnancy,” shared with Notre Dame students that she has undergone two abortions and has a tattoo on her left forearm of a surgical instrument used in abortions.

These efforts by the university and its groups go beyond embracing a diversity of viewpoints; they deliberately seek to celebrate acts fundamentally contrary to Catholic teaching.

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Despite all the evidence that most American Catholic colleges have lost their way, cause for hope exists in the flourishing of the faithful Catholic colleges that were born out of this crisis. These institutions — such as Christendom College, Franciscan University, Ave Maria University, the University of Dallas, Wyoming Catholic College, John Paul the Great Catholic University, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, Thomas Aquinas College, Belmont Abbey College, Benedictine University, the University of Mary, and a handful of others — remain strongly committed to their Catholic identity. And, contrary to concerns that retaining a traditional Catholic identity would degrade the schools’ academic status, many of the more traditional Catholic colleges have won recognition for academic excellence from some of the most prestigious organizations that rank colleges and universities.

For example, the vibrantly Catholic Thomas Aquinas College in Ventura County, California, with its impressive “Great Books” program, again placed in 2022 in the top fifty of US News & World Report’s annual ranking of national liberal arts colleges. Only one other Catholic college did the same. Thomas Aquinas also scored in the top twenty-five for “social mobility,” which is measured by the college’s low-income-student graduation rate. 

At Franciscan — as at the other faithful schools identified here — Ex corde Ecclesiae informs decisions made on faculty and staff hiring, academic curriculum, and campus life. Recently, intellectual leaders at Ave Maria sought to make Ex corde more accessible by republishing it and distributing it to students and staff throughout the college. As Roger W. Nutt, the university’s provost, described in the book’s prologue, “Ex Corde Ecclesiae has been an inspiration and guide to the university since its founding, [and] the document is used for orientation of new faculty and other formation opportunities on campus.” 

The mission of a Catholic university, according to Ex corde Ecclesiae, is most importantly the “continuous quest for truth”; secondly, the “preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society.” Recognizing this, faithful Catholic colleges and universities, rather than avoid or surrender on difficult issues, engage with them from an authentically Catholic perspective.

For example, when the Biden administration in 2021 promised federal sanctions against schools and colleges that do not permit biological males to participate in women’s sports teams, Ave Maria’s provost mobilized the faculty and staff to develop a robust policy designed to protect the university from these possible mandates. This policy, which draws upon Scripture as well as teaching from the Catholic popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, requires students, faculty, staff, and coaches to “conduct themselves in accord with their biological sex at all times, both on campus and when representing the school at off-campus events.”

This policy can be contrasted with one recently published by Villanova University. In the fall of 2022, Villanova’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion collaborated with its Gender and Women’s Studies department to produce a “Gender Inclusive Practices Guide.” The guide says that “gender inclusivity” is “fundamental to Villanova’s mission” and touts the recently available option for all members of the Villanova community to share their preferred pronouns with the university.

At Ave Maria, devotion to the Blessed Mother permeates the campus. Each evening, there is a student-led Rosary walk. During the school year, the Adoration chapel on campus is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There are at least six weekend Masses and three daily Masses on campus while school is in session. 

Similarly, it is the spiritual life at Franciscan University that makes all the difference. There are several daily Masses as well as periodic praise and worship services. Perpetual Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament in the campus’s Portiuncula continues all day, every day, with Franciscan students signing up for a weekly holy hour commitment at the start of every semester. Completed in 1987, the Portiuncula is a recreation of the thirteenth-century Portiuncula founded by Saint Francis of Assisi after he heard the words “Rebuild my Church” coming from the crucifix that hung in the tiny, decrepit San Damiano church in the country near the saint’s home in Italy.

The most popular weekday Mass at Franciscan begins at noon, and every day the chapel is filled to capacity. Students join faculty and staff to pray the Rosary before Mass, and many remain in the pews afterward for private prayer before returning to afternoon classes. Saturday mornings, the university upholds its commitment to fighting for the unborn with “pro-life Masses.” And every Sunday, five Masses are celebrated — including one  in the Extraordinary Form. All are almost always filled to capacity.  

Confession is available throughout the week, and a community Rosary is prayed every weekday evening in the beautiful Rosary Circle located right at the center of campus. Most importantly, Fransican provides students with a peaceful place for private prayer at the Tomb of the Unborn Child. The Students for Life club gathers every Wednesday evening to pray the Rosary at the tomb.

In his 1852 book The Idea of a University, Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman describes the Catholic university as “a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the faith.” At one time, all Catholic colleges shared this vision. It was what made them Catholic. Today, however, parents must be careful. They will be well served if they encourage their children to attend a Catholic college like Ave Maria or Franciscan, or any of those institutions truly committed to adhering to the principles outlined in Ex corde Ecclesiae.

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