Franciscan University of Steubenville Must Repent

On May 17, 2012, I wrote the following post regarding Franciscan University of Steubenville (FUS) bestowing an honorary degree to General Michael Hayden.

My alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, has been in the news lately. They’ve been skewered and adulated by the two, predictable sides of every news story for discontinuing their student healthcare coverage. Their main published reason for doing so is out of concern for participating “in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.” However, in the same week, FUS honored former CIA Director (during the Bush administration) and General Michael Hayden. He is a well known advocate for “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: TORTURE). What happened to the sacredness of human life? What a pity. John Paul II would be ashamed of this university he was said to think highly of. I know I am.

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Yesterday, upon release of the torture documents by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Mark Shea has also written about the report at his blog, and this follow-up), a student group at FUS, Students for a Fair Society (SFS), initiated a petition at Change.org demanding that FUS rescind General Hayden’s honorary degree.

In support of the petition, I posted the following note today on Facebook:

Dear Friends of the Book:

Many of you are my buddies, pals, acquaintances, and enemies from our alma mater: Franciscan University of Steubenville. We surely disagree on a great many things, big, small, and even medium-sized and tiny things. This may be one of them, too. But I suspect that it is not as divisive as we might think it is. Torture can be tortured into degrees and distinctions; it can be needled and poked at with utilitarianism and relativism and patriotism. Some of you may want to redeem it, like Christ did on the Cross? Perhaps there is a dark light in the feeling of being drowned to death, forcing your body into shock and your mouth to tell any number of truths, lies, and fear-induced stories to preserve your pro-life stance of wanting to not feel like you are going to die with water flooding your lungs and stopping your breath. So don’t call me biased or thickskulled about that. I get it. We can talk about it. But, be that as it may indeed be, an “honour” is usually given to people unlike me: those who are honourable and who don’t invite scandal or raised eyebrow concerns on serious aesthetic grounds. If you wonder IF someone just might be a, say, war criminal, THEN it follows to also wonder why that person would be eligible for an honour worthy of the name — all the more, I should hope, at a Catholic institution. If this makes any sense to you, take a look at this petition and consider signing it or sharing it or, perhaps, doing nothing about it with irony and solidarity.

I’ve faced a number of rebuttals. The most frequent one is to question whether General Hayden is being given due process and the benefit of doubt. This is a bizarre objection since SFS is not asking for Hayden to be tried for a crime. Their plea is to rescind an honour based on dishonourable evidence that has emerged. It is a mild request, really. Perhaps too mild, as we will see. But the idea that this merits the same sort of consideration for a suspect of a crime actually supports the idea that this is not a person to be given an honour — their honour is at the very least eligible to be held suspect.

In sum, the rationale defending torture that I’ve seen from a Christian perspective is built on tortured logic. The most tortured aspect of this logic for Christians is that it directly insults Calvary. To defend torture as a Christ follower is to spit on the Cross.

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For a place as concerned about moral relativism as FUS claims to be in all the things they send me, there seems to be a selective Kantianism at work there, an absolutism of convenience that, in this case, makes the Marxist and the Randian look principled by comparison. (I’ve written about this general phenomenon before.)

I considered a number of activist ploys to make my point. I thought about burning my diploma, but it’s raining outside and my degrees are boxed-up in storage. I thought about waterboarding myself to a tree, but that seemed a bit dangerous and over the top. I thought about letting myself be eaten by an anaconda, but the Amazon is too far away.  I thought of recording a protest song, but I cannot stand Pete Seeger.

But I love Mahalia Jackson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz5udo8Virs

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The present-day Franciscan University of Steubenville was not founded on politics. It was revived by Fr. Michael Scanlan to become the heart of a fiery, alive, and even crazy kind of religious faith in the Catholic Church. It found its mode of expression in the charismatic renewal movement, and built a formidable philosophy department filled with Catholic personalists, led by a student of Dietrich von Hildebrand, a student of Edmund Husserl and one of the first intellectuals to speak out against what would become the Third Reich. Its patron, of course, was Francis of Assisi, a veritable crazy person, not a man of letters. There was no shortage of guts in that campy campus, and I will always cherish it for that. It takes courage to go to school there.

Perhaps FUS fell victim to its own success. After the height of the culture wars, as most Catholic institutions were buckling up or backing out, FUS had its own thing going on, a thing that had an old-time religion feeling, awash in 12-string acoustic guitars. How FUS found its way into the heart of the moral-majority, value-voting GOP storm is hard to make out from the place where I was raised.

The evangelical message of FUS was to me always simple and crystal clear. Four things: the love of God, salvation on the Cross, repentance from sin, power of the Holy Spirit. My father preaches this Gospel to this day and has added nothing to it. Nothing about the poor or abortion, nothing about mercy or justice in the abstract. No New Evangelization, no social media or books or speaking tours. He tells people about Jesus, with nothing but the kerygma as his guide and his story and journey to make it credible. Surely this bare bones approach has its limits, but one thing it doesn’t suffer from is this: It does not fall into trendy ideologies.

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I don’t think that FUS should necessarily rescind General Hayden’s honorary degree. To be frank, I don’t care about these sorts of things one bit and I suspect that there are more than a few others who share company with General Hayden who have been given awards and honours. Let’s not get distracted by superficialities and reactionary outrage.

Amputation will not work here. We don’t throw people away. This is a time to be radical.

FUS must recognize this as a chance for institutional conversion. It needs to repent of letting itself be swayed by politics and fear and convenience. I hope this bit of noise being made is a chance for FUS to wake up, find itself anew, and restore its folky mission and zeal and courage. Sure, we could point the finger elsewhere, but this is my alma mater and few have taken up the impossible standard she has.

My beloved alma mater has taken hard, counter cultural positions before and I believe she will do it again. Right now the hardest thing to do will be to repent and believe in the Good News. It may cost her everything, but that was why I went there in the first place: This was a place to go all-in, this was a place where the Cross meant something.

I hope FUS will become that again someday soon. I look forward to visiting her in April 2015. I hope she will challenge me when I go there — I need to repent, too.