Forming the Faith

A good number of people just refer to themselves as bad Catholics. Is there such a thing?
I would never call people struggling with their faith bad Catholics. What I would say is that they're Catholics very much caught up in this highly secular world that's very caught up in the here and now. It's the world in which they live, because it's the world in which all of us live. And they have come out of a background where they were not fully catechized, not fully instructed in their faith. If we talk about people in their 30s today, those are the ones who the church regards as not fully catechized. If you look back at elementary schools in the '70s and '80s, well, we're not playing catch-up ball because we dropped the ball in too many instances in the '70s and '80s when we should have been helping these now young-adult Catholics get an understanding of the faith. We didn't do a very good job. We've spent an enormous amount of time in the past 10 years just working with publishers just to redo all the catechism texts that were defective that lacked the substance of the faith.

Why was that? Were the books changed in the '70s?
Yes. That whole time of social ferment, upheaval. It was happening in the church as well as the society.

There's some concern that Pope Benedict might be stricter than Pope John Paul II in terms of keeping Catholic universities in line.
You have to remember, and this is important: what a Catholic university announces with its very name is that this institutionally reflects our Catholic heritage. So when you come onto that campus, you should expect to hear the faith echoed in the theology classrooms that are talking about the Catholic faith. You should expect on campus a milieu reflective of Catholic ethics and morality, and you should be able to access your faith support system: the sacraments, a campus ministry that's there for you. So there is a big difference between a Catholic college or university and a secular one.

What about academic freedom? Universities tend to be hotbeds of discussion, ideals and thinking.
And [they] should be. A Catholic university provides for the church what secular universities provide for culture. It's the context in which you do that. That's always been a part of our American tradition. You contextualize, you provide a forum and discussion for the debate. You wouldn't want to exclude that. I believe that's where the Catholic identity of the university provides richness for the whole debate … Let me give you an example. In a theology class the teaching of the church is normative for Catholic theology. It would be parallel to a law school: the judgments of the Supreme Court are normative for good law. You couldn't have a good law class where the professor said, "I'm going to teach you what I think the Supreme Court should have said, so forget about all these rulings, because I'll teach you what the law should be." I think after a while the university would say, "We need to shape up this law school."

What do you think the pope is going to say to the collection of Catholic educators who are obviously very concerned about this?
I think he's going to affirm the work of Catholic universities all over this country. Remember, we here have the largest number and largest percentage of Catholic universities in the world. I think this is a great tribute to the vitality of the church. I think he's going to point out words of encouragement and highlight that there are efforts to refocus on our Catholic identity and our Catholic mission, and then I think he could say words of challenge, to say, "Are you doing this as well and effectively as you should?"

How heavily do you think the sexual abuse scandals of this past decade will overshadow his visit?
When you think that all happened, we're talking about something that came to the surface as a very public event, but happened years ago and in many cases had been resolved—the priest had been out of ministry. I think where we are today is, we have to look at what the Catholic Church has done in the past five years. I don't think there's any institution on this planet that can say it has done as much to ensure the safety of children entrusted to its care. We have all sorts of programs—the safe environment programs. I think the church recognized that some terrible mistakes were made, but then began to address them in a way that was admirable, extremely admirable. In fact, exemplary. How it has addressed the outreach and care of people that were victimized, how it has removed from ministry anyone engaged in that and how it's provided this system of accountability—these audits that are reviewed by an external group. And then all of the programs we have to see that anyone working with youngsters today in schools, parishes, education programs, they have to go through an enormous check.