Many Catholic universities have become salt that has lost its savor.
They’ve drunk so deeply from the post Christian cup that if you took the word Catholic from their names, you would never guess they were anything other than another state-run school. Their alums, as well as the rest of us, feel cheated by this. After all, a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into building these schools, all of it dedicated to the proposition that a Catholic education was distinguishable from the education provided by secular schools.
It’s as if a great treasure of Catholic culture has been stolen from us, and the theft has been instituted by people we trusted to care for it — our priests and religious who run these schools.
Evidently, Peter Blatty, Georgetown alumnus and author of The Exorcist, shares these feelings. He recently signed a petition asking Georgetown to either implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae or stop the false advertising of claiming to be a Catholic university.
While I understand the emotion, I also think there should be more that we can do than just ask these schools to either be Catholic or stop saying they are Catholic. After all, this “drift” they’ve taken into anti-Christ secularism is not just a harmless thing. It amounts to the theft of the treasure of many people, as well as a violation of their trust.
I wonder if there aren’t civil remedies of some sort. I’m not sure what kind of lawsuit could be mounted against these schools, but it’s certainly worth looking into. I also wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to change their leadership. After all, many of the worst offenders are run by Jesuits. Surely they are answerable to somebody; maybe somebody in Rome.
All this is just musing on my part.
For now, here’s the story about Peter Blatty’s actions. From the National Catholic Register:
WASHINGTON — When William Peter Blatty won a four-year scholarship to Georgetown University in the 1940s, he arrived at the Jesuit campus with a sense of relief.
During his childhood, Blatty and his mother suffered through more than 20 evictions for non-payment of rent. For the first time, he knew he could stay put without unwelcome interruptions.
More than a half century later, after winning an Academy Award for the screenplay adaptation of his bestselling novel The Exorcist, Blatty still calls Georgetown “home.”
But his love for the pontifical institution has inspired him to support and sign a canon-law petition that asks the “Catholic Church to require that Georgetown implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a papal constitution governing Catholic colleges.”
If that effort fails, the petition signed by Blatty and 2,000 other Catholics calls for “the removal or suspension of top-ranked Georgetown’s right to call itself Catholic and Jesuit in any of its representations.”
Asked to explain why he has backed a petition that could damage the reputation of his alma mater, Blatty told the Register, “Today’s Georgetown isn’t Georgetown, but more like a living Picture of Dorian Gray.”
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