Catholic schools in America got a late start on secularization, in which most of their Protestant peers had completed the course generations earlier. Six of the eight Ivy League institutions were founded as Christian colleges, as people now are sometimes surprised to learn. In the 18th century, young men received their higher education in a religious setting, under the guidance of an administration representing this or that Protestant church. At least that was the original idea.
The establishing church was preferred, but dissent was tolerated. Gradually the identity of colleges slid from denominational “to Christian, to religious, to wholesome, to ‘the goals of the college’ which by then were stated in intangible terms,” as Father James Tunstead Burtchaell summed up the matter in The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (1998). Seventy years ago this summer, the trustees of Columbia appointed the university’s first non-Episcopal president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, erasing one of the few remaining vestiges of its Anglican founding. The official seal, designed in 1775, is replete with snippets from Scripture and does remain in use, although the notion that Columbia is in any sense Christian has been dead a long time now.
The phenomenon is conspicuous and much noted in Catholic colleges and universities, but it doesn’t stop there. It trickles down to primary and secondary education. Some parents decide to homeschool when they come to see that the Catholicity of the local school run by the diocese or a religious order is awfully wan. I know a Latin Mass couple who sent their son to a non-denominational Christian academy across the street from a Jesuit high school because they felt that the latter was lukewarm not just in its fidelity to Catholic tradition but even in its adherence to mere Christianity.
In recent years, independent schools have sprouted up here and there to meet the demand for classical Catholic education, with an emphasis on philosophy, theology, classics, and history. They answer to no bishop or religious superior. The Lyceum in the Cleveland suburbs is a good example.
The controversy erupted around the time that the national debate over Confederate statues suddenly intensified, after the alt-right march in Charlottesville last month. The coincidence was no more than that, a spokeswoman for the school’s board of trustees maintains, plausibly enough when you consider that the de-Catholicization at issue is a grinding, ongoing process and, these days, a constant in the life of the Church in the West.
Catholic schools in America face two contemporaneous trends: the trend toward increasing secularization in civil society and, in the Church, toward a glib anti-traditionalism originating with the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Women religious — to laypeople and non-Catholics, they were simply “nuns” — were once the lifeblood of Catholic primary education. In their medieval serge habits, they occupied the imagination of the curious pupil who could see them as living midway between the present day and the Church’s birth in remote antiquity. Their numbers declined sharply beginning in the 1960s, and now most students and even many parents and teachers don’t realize how thin the religious atmosphere of their Catholic school already is in comparison with earlier norms.
Friends of San Domenico are right to protest the decision to haul the statues off to the basement, but they should be mindful that they are fighting more than the school’s administrators and trustees. They’re up against no less than the zeitgeist.
Like Gregorian chant and rosary beads and May crowning, statues are integral to traditional Catholicism but not essential to the faith.
Consider that the institutional Church itself is less Catholic than it was before the Council, if by “Catholic” you mean a distinctive Christian culture formed from sights, sounds, manners, and mores that have accreted over two millennia in Western Europe. In practice, Latin as the lingua propria of the Church has been supplanted by modern languages; Gothic and Baroque architecture still shout “Catholic,” but the lion’s share of churches built since 1970 are dedicated to Bauhaus simplicity. To the mind of the modernizer, statues are part of a package of clutter that includes Ora pro nobis and narrative stained-glass windows: We don’t do that anymore.
Abundant statuary violates the reigning aesthetic. The cloud of witnesses — here’s Saint Anthony, Saint Jude is around the corner, next to the Little Flower, and look, Saint Joseph and the Blessed Mother, above and behind the Infant Jesus of Prague — whose colorful, three-dimensional likeness greets the visitor to traditional churches can be an aid to prayer and devotion, but many Catholics now take the Protestant view and find the conglomeration a great distraction: “If we disperse the cloud, we can look directly into the sun and see God Himself.” But we can’t, because it’s too bright. It’s blinding. Each of the saints reflects and refracts some unique portion of the Light, so we study them.
Like Gregorian chant and rosary beads and May crowning, statues are integral to traditional Catholicism but not essential to the faith. You can be true to the gospel and in communion with Rome even in the absence of art that glorifies the sacred mysteries. The art gives joy, however, and not only that — it kindles wonder and moves the admirer to worship God with his whole mind, his whole heart, and his whole soul. Some Catholics are indifferent to the entire panoply of Catholic tradition, which has been severely pruned as of late, like the statue population at San Domenico. Others are attached to a particular element of the tradition that remained and they mourn its passing, but often they fail to recognize that it belongs to a larger body of venerable pious practices that fell before it.
For the past several years Rod Dreher has been advocating what he calls the Benedict Option, whereby Christians unplug from the popular culture long enough to build and cultivate religious communities where they can live, rest, and draw strength, and from which they can return to the world to engage it with renewed vigor: Neither succumb to the culture nor fight it. Excuse yourself from it, enter into a state of recollection, and help to fashion a different culture, one that can serve as a model for others. Spend your inner resources wisely.
Dreher’s plan for Christians vis-à-vis the world has applications for Catholics vis-à-vis the Church. Rome and the chancery may be too big for a single believer to affect, but does he appreciate that he is the bishop of his own domestic church, where he prays the ancient formulaic prayers, meditates on Scripture, and is not too proud to find beauty in a holy card or plaster saint?
San Domenico is a picture of a general decline. The school will go the way that it will go. No one has to follow. If it withdraws what you need to practice your religion with exuberance, say so, but then let it be, and leave. Seek elsewhere for supports to your faith and you will find them. If you don’t, build them yourself.
READ MORE:
Catholic School Removes Jesus, Mary Statues Because They’re ‘Alienating’ to Non-Catholics
America Moves Towards French-Style Secularism
Notre Dame Cathedral’s Fundraising Problems a Sign of Secularist Times
— Nicholas Frankovich is a deputy managing editor of National Review.
