Regarding the proposed merger of the Jesuit-run Weston School of Theology in Cambridge. Mass., with Boston College, the BC student newspaper The Heights editorializes on it. Generally they’re favorable, as long as it doesn’t mean the Catholic Church gets a greater presence on campus.
There are hurdles that will need to be jumped before the merger takes place, especially how BC and Weston would resolve the seminary’s official ties to the Church. Any union would require approval of Rome, as well as the boards of both institutions. The University succeeds academically because it is not constrained by religious doctrine. Students are free (for the most part) to speak their minds and professors can teach what they want to teach. BC, like many other Catholic universities, has upset some conservative religious folks who believe that approving gay/straight alliances and hosting The Vagina Monologues makes you anti-Catholic. There’s enough bureaucracy at BC, no one needs JP II getting involved. [emphasis added]
Yeah, everything’s so much better at those Catholic colleges when there’s no attempt to actually make them Catholic, when the “Pope is not involved.” We’re talking about the merger of a school of theology with a Catholic college’s theology department here, not some business school deal. Of course, there should be a Catholic element, of course there should be some guanratees that they teach authentic Catholic doctrine. Otherwise, what’s the point? Why don’t they just strip the fiction of Catholicism from the campus and be done with it?
They don’t because then all that alumni money would dry up and so would enrollment, because the alumni and parents of prospective students still believe the fiction.
