The Place of the Catholic College

Photo by THERESA PETRY on Unsplash

NB: Normally I don’t post on consecutive days, and I’ve been saving this piece as a draft for some future date, but, after reading an article about Harvard in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, decided to post it now.

While Harvard is not a Catholic college there is plenty of discussion currently about “what a college or university should be.”

Hopefully what follows adds to the discussion about our Catholic institutions. Pass it along.

I came across this 1935 commencement address that begs our attention today.

It was delivered by Martin Ruud (1884-1941) on June 2, 1935 at The College of St. Thomas in Minnesota as he received an honorary doctorate. Rudd was an authority on Old and Middle English and produced the standard life of Thomas Chaucer in 1926 as well as Shakespeare in Norway and Shakespeare in Denmark.

The title of his address was “The Place of the Catholic College.” Three things are notable about this speech delivered nearly ninety years ago:

• its content,

• its relevance today, and,

• perhaps most surprising - Ruud was not Catholic, but a Lutheran.

Let me share enough of his very long speech to give you the great gist of the thing.

Rudd first acknowledges the unique position he is in as a non-Catholic teacher of English from a state university talking about the place of a private Catholic college:

“It would be hazardous, and even imprudent, but for two things: in the first place, I am catholic enough to be willing always to speak under correction; and in the second place, I welcome the opportunity in a congenial atmosphere to speak, or rather, to think out loud, about education - education with a small e.”

He lays his foundation:

“In these days we have been compelled, as never before, to search our hearts, to ask ourselves if American education is really in the right way, if these hundreds of so-called colleges are really performing any useful function; whether they are or not, many of them, in their drabness, their inadequacy, their intellectual emptiness a scandalous economic and social waste.”

He laments the sheer number of colleges:

“In Ohio and Pennsylvania there is hardly a self-respecting village without its college, unless to be sure, it boasts a ‘university’.”

He speaks of civilization:

“The Church is first, and above all else, the custodian of God’s revelation, of the faith delivered once for all to His saints; but the Church has also, as it has ever insisted, a human aspect. The civilization in which we live … is a Christian civilization - not Buddhist, or Confucian, or Mohammedan, or Darwinian, or anything else. Some would regret it no doubt … but the form and essence of it … are the form and essence of two thousand years of Christian history. And the central fact of that history is the Catholic Church.”

In several more paragraphs he establishes his thesis that

“a Catholic college, provided it is a college, and not a mere scrap of paper, or a wilderness of bricks and mortar, or a football team, need never doubt its reason for being. It need never doubt it, and in these days less than ever, because, like the Church, of which it is the creature, it is the custodian and the witness of Catholic civilization. And it is my profound conviction that in our times, when the world has become a madhouse of charlatans, each crying out his own special foolishness in religion, in economics, and in politics, we can do no better on commencement day than to remind ourselves of what are the notes - the visible accidents if I may use a scholastic term - of that civilization.”

Ruud then speaks of those notes, those “visible accidents”: reason, orderly thinking, intellectual precision.

“Catholic civilization is a civilization of reason. It is impatient of loose thinking and muddled writing. Can there be a greater gift to the world than this? And could there be a nobler function of a college than to hold up with unswerving hands the torch of right reason in a night of folly where the air is rent with the cries of charlatans hawking their wares?”

Ruud then sounds another note: beauty.

“For the most satisfying thing about a perfect intellectual operation is the sheer beauty of it. God has in his infinite grace somehow endowed the Church with a miraculous sense of the beautiful.”

He follows with examples of the holiness of beauty in the Church, beginning with Catholic liturgies and adding,

“it is all pervasive: in the Blessed Eucharist, in the hymns of the Missal and the Breviary, in the noble churches which still survive from the Age of Faith, in the beauty of vestments and sacred vessels, in the comeliness of the altar, in the majesty of Gregorian chant.”

Ruud then contrasts “noble churches” with civic ambitions including the building of stadiums, railway stations and convention halls, and asks

“If a college, once more, can in a world of hideous palaces and viler slums, bring to men and women dulled by the leaden dullness of filth and squalor, numbed to insensibility by jazz and crooners, and the sheer boredom of vulgarity, this gift of beauty, need she plead either size, or wealth, or a winning team for her existence?”

He follows his treatise on the holiness of beauty with one on the beauty of holiness - the “strange unearthly beauty of holiness, so overwhelming that it sometimes moves us with something akin to terror.” He gives examples from the saints and the blessed, including “the humble friar, the poorest of the poor, Francis,” and Thomas More with his “high sense of duty” whose “pleadings at the bar, his rulings on the bench, his advice in the King’s Council that has repercussions for eternity.”

He continues at length on “the strange unearthly beauty of holiness,” before concluding, saying in part:

“A Catholic college is not a nursery of saints, but an institution of learning which venerates not merely learning or men of learning, but holiness, and Sir Thomas More above Sir Isaac Newton, and has something precious to give us.”¹

1. Address found in Prose Readings: An Anthology for Catholic Colleges, Vincent Jos. Flynn, ed., Charles Scribners Sons, 1942.