IN an article about Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the longtime president of Notre Dame University who died recently, Thomas Droleskey writes about the “incalculable devastation” at Catholic colleges and universities since Vatican II:

Many are the horror stories of faithful Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their orthodoxy while teaching in formerly Catholic universities. Naturally, the harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are open-minded and receptive to all people. College administrators at these institutions of apostasy have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of higher learning.

All of this has had a devastating impact on the intellectual and spiritual formation of young Catholics, many of whom now enter a formerly Catholic college or university after having received the relativistic theological training provided them in a Catholic high school that is in conciliar captivity. Ironically, these badly catechized young Catholics entering what they think, albeit falsely, to be Catholic colleges were taught in high schools by the graduates of the very institutions intent on brainwashing them with the same sort of advanced disinformation possessed by their high school teachers. The cycle thus perpetuates itself ad infinitum.

Most of the graduates of formerly Catholic colleges and universities have learned nothing that is true about the Faith, coming to believe they can do anything they want as long as their “fundamental option” is for God, including the practice of contraception and the procuring of an abortion. Remember, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton received his undergraduate degree from Jesuit Georgetown University in the direct aftermath of Georgetown’s having secularized itself. (Georgetown’s sister Jesuit university, Fordham, was the first historically Catholic institution in the nation to divest itself of official Catholic control and to voluntarily remove Crucifixes from the walls of its classrooms in the Fall of 1966 a full ten months before the Land O’Lakes Conference.) It is thus is no wonder that a large number of the Catholic pro-aborts in public life are graduates of once Catholic institutions of higher learning.

A good deal of Catholic collegiate and university education in the past used to integrate the truths of the Faith into every aspect of their academic programs. While non-Catholics who had a specialty in mathematics or science might have been hired from time to time to teach in their fields of competency, they were expected to familiarize themselves with how the Catholic Faith imbues all fields of knowledge, as Pope Pius XI noted in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. Such scholars were also expected to remember that they were never to place in doubt the truths of the Catholic Faith, never to use their classrooms as a forum to profess that which was contrary to what the Catholic Church held was received teaching of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man, Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Catholics who taught in Catholic universities and colleges understood that they had the obligation to be scholars who were faithful to the totality of the Deposit of Faith and to see in their students redeemed creatures who were looking to them, the faculty, for a model as to how to live the faith in the midst of one’s own professional responsibilities. There was an integrity to the teaching of the Faith which flowed over into all aspects of a college or university.

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