By Malcolm A. Kline

January 27, 2004 - Visitors to the campuses of America's oldest Catholic colleges and universities are more likely to find scenes reminiscent of MTV's The Real World than of any image that they might view on the Eternal World Television Network.

Here are just a few examples of what our sources tell us that you will find at Catholic colleges and universities around the country today:

· In Syracuse, New York, LeMoyne College, a school run by the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, staged a production of the long-running Broadway smash whose title is based on a distinctive part of the female anatomy.

· Gonzaga University in the state of Washington banned such a production when the school's president blanched at the play's depiction of lesbian rape as a positive event. Gonzaga, however, is a Catholic school that will not recognize a campus pro-life group as a legitimate student organization.

· Marquette does have a pro-life group on campus. The Jesuit University also hosts a Gay-Straight Alliance organized on campus.

Just a few years ago, two young women from Georgetown University sparked a controversy among both students and faculty when they published a booklet decrying the modern phenomenon of the hook-up. Professors denounced the book in class.

Last year, that same Jesuit-run school invited a Nigerian cardinal to speak on Christian-Muslim relations. Cardinal Francis Arinze elected instead to repeat Catholic moral and spiritual doctrine.

"In many parts of the world, the family is under siege," Cardinal Arinze told students and faculty.

"It is opposed by an anti-life mentality as is seen in contraception, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. It is scorned and banalized by pornography, desecrated by fornication and adultery, mocked by homosexuality, sabotaged by irregular unions and cut in two by divorce." A theology professor left the stage the Cardinal was speaking on and 70 members of the faculty protested the speech in a letter to the dean of the university's school of arts and sciences.

Forty years ago, such a demonstration would have been unthinkable. The turning point for many of these schools came in the late Sixties when many of their presidents signed onto a letter that expressed their desire for more academic freedom from the Vatican. That letter became known as the "Land O' Lakes statement", named after the conference center at the University of Notre Dame where the principals met.

"To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself," the statement read. The Land O' Lakes statement is officially entitled The Nature of the Catholic University (1967).

Hosting that meeting was Father Theodore Hesburgh, president for many years of Notre Dame. As it happens, Father Hesburgh was the commencement speaker at my own graduation exercises in 1981 when I graduated from a small Jesuit university.

His topic was "The Five C's." I can't quite remember what they were but I am sure Christianity and Catholicism did not make the cut. Nor do I believe I am unique in not being able to recount them 23 years after the talk. Few audience members could remember them 23 minutes after the speech.

It became somewhat of a game at the endless round of graduation parties afterward. ("Closing time? Chivas? Cigarettes? Hey, I'm out.")

If this country's Catholic universities wanted to do something truly memorable, they might consider a return to their original purpose. I know one thing: I would have remembered Cardinal Arinze's speech.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

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