Some educators decry it as a blatant attack on academic freedom. The Vatican considers it a prudent step in preserving Catholic identity in higher education. In a move that already is stirring unrest on many campuses, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops last week adopted rules requiring Catholic theologians to get official approval of their local bishops in order to teach at Catholic colleges and universities. To obtain a bishop's authorization, called a mandatum, theologians must vow to teach only "authentic Catholic doctrine."
The rules, adopted by the bishops during their semiannual meeting in Atlanta, implement a 1990 papal document, Ex Corde Ecclesiae ("From the Heart of the Church"), which was aimed at ensuring that the nation's 235 Catholic schools do not lose their religious identity the way some historically Protestant schools have. While the rules do not spell out enforcement procedures, officials at some schools worry that they will be pressured to use the mandatum in hiring and tenure decisions. Faculty groups and administrators at some schools already have signaled that they will not comply. "It's a matter of conscience," says Lisa Sowle Cahill, a theology professor at Boston College and one of several BC faculty members who say they won't seek a mandatum. William Loewe, president of the College Theology Society and a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., predicts that many educators will simply ignore the rules, hoping that the mandatum process "will become a dead letter."
Unenforceable. It was clear even before the voice vote that many bishops were supporting the rules reluctantly. Some were concerned that making a mandatum a condition of employment would expose colleges and the bishops themselves to civil lawsuits. Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, who led the committee that drafted the rules, sought to reassure his colleagues, conceding that the mandatum was probably not enforceable. Some bishops wondered what was the point, then, of enacting a system with no teeth.
Whether schools and theologians ultimately are pressured to comply, or whether the whole process is simply ignored, some educators say the real damage may come from the "gesture of distrust" by a Vatican hierarchy intent on exerting control over Catholic theologians. The only sure result, says Thomas Rausch, a theologian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, is that many theologians "will feel fear and anger and hurt that in some way they are not seen by Rome as faithful Catholics."