Msgr. John Tracy Ellis (right) with Archbishop Patrick O’Donnell, June 19, 1961. Photograph: John Tracy Ellis Papers/American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives/Catholic University of America

Some years ago, the neoconservative Catholic intellectual Michael Novak gave wry praise to the instructors who taught him philosophy and theology at Catholic institutions in the 1950s. They had, he recollected, “some of the finest minds of the 15th century.”

Historian Eugene McCarraher of Villanova University related the backhanded tribute while serving up a slice of his argument at an April 30 forum titled “State of Mind: The Intellectual Life of American Catholics,” sponsored by a host of BC entities including the president’s office and this magazine. McCarraher shared the stage with Jesuit theologian Michael J. Buckley and Notre Dame’s Professor of Law and Theology M. Cathleen Kaveny. The forum, which brought together about 150 people on a Sunday afternoon in Corcoran Commons, marked the 50th anniversary of a persistently influential critique of the American Catholic mind.

That critique had flowed forcefully from the pen of Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, who died in 1992 and was known as “the dean” of American Catholic Church historians. Ellis wrote his essay “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life” in 1955 (a book of the same title was published a year later), and it rattled American Catholic higher education. In the essay, printed in Fordham University’s journal Thought, Ellis applied fairly objective measures, such as how frequently Catholics were published in prestigious journals, and exposed the meagerness of scholarly output among U.S. Catholics across the disciplines. He traced this tired showing to a defensive mind-set pervasive among Catholics, as well as to a failure to measure up to the best of Catholic academic traditions. Looking beyond higher education at the general population, Ellis lamented that the “vast majority of [American] Catholics remained relatively impervious to the intellectual movements of their time.”

Catholicism in America was still an immigrant Church at the time of Ellis’s writing, and Ellis was mindful of the barriers raised by poverty and anti-Catholic prejudice. But when enumerating reasons for the intellectual sluggishness he saw, he listed, with other explanations, “the absence of a love of scholarship for its own sake” even among many Catholic scholars and administrators.

It is fair to say Catholic higher education in this country “has come a long way” since then, University President William P. Leahy, SJ, noted in his greeting at the forum, though he added, “There’s a lot more to be done.” Today, leaders like Leahy are more likely to ask not simply if Catholics are making a contribution to the nation’s intellectual life, but if they are making a distinctively Catholic contribution. It is an approach that Villanova’s McCarraher favors too.

“It would be silly to deny that the quality of scholarship at Catholic univer­sities has risen in the last half-century,” McCarraher said. But his praise was qualified. Ellis had placed an exceptional value on Catholics achieving not only respectability but “commanding influence” in scholarly circles, and over the latter mark McCarraher threw doubt.

The Villanova professor argued that Catholic intellectuals have often shied away from etching their faith into the “conceptual architecture of their disciplines.” Although he spread the blame widely, he pointed particularly at neoconservative Catholic intellectuals and what he considers their unwillingness to examine American institutions through the lens of Catholic social thought. “In and out of the university, Catholic intellectuals must blaspheme the totem of the market-state, the canon law and theodicy that goes by the name of economics, and the civil religion of American nationalism,” said McCarraher, who is the author of Christian Critics: Re­li­gion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (2000).

As McCarraher’s remarks suggest, questions about the state of Catholic intellectual life are more value-laden than they once were. They are more contentious as well.

Agreeing that “Catholic scholarship is more than simply scholarship done by Catholics,” Buckley, who is the author of The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom (1998), offered his own definition, holding that “Catholic scholarship is engaged whenever any area of human culture or knowledge is pushed to its ultimate.” He described Catholic scholarship as an advancement of knowledge that addresses the intersections of faith and culture and embodies understandings about God’s action in the world and what it means to be human. As one possible illustration, he noted that a scholar who sought to grasp something about the meaning of human life through the human genome would be drawn into a deeply Catholic pursuit.

Movement toward meaning and truth in any discipline is “inchoatively religious,” Buckley posited, which is not to say “quantum mechanics or dancing or exploration is religion or theology,” but that the drive of the human mind is toward ultimate questions. He left unsaid whether today’s American Catholic intellectuals as a class are advancing knowledge in this way, to any remarkable degree.

In his famous essay, Ellis made the point that not only Catholics but Americans as a whole appear lacking in a love of reading, are not particularly fond of surpassing intellect, are attached to material things more than to the life of the mind, and are excessively practical and result-oriented. Kaveny of Notre Dame suggested that these four qualities are at least as manifest today as in the 1950s.

Kaveny described what she termed an “instrumental account of the intellect” in American culture: “Our minds in this vision are our tools. We use them to get what we want. They are not us.” Americans’ intellectual modus operandi, she said, is usually to marshal evidence for positions already arrived at, and not to engage in an unfolding search for truth. Kaveny, who sees ideological think tanks and Web blogs as exemplars of this skewed application of brainpower, noted that the Internet is “the perfect vehicle for obtaining information for the instrumental mind. You Google, you get your result . . . it’s over in an instant.”

As Kaveny sees it, there are growing cadres of well-intentioned Catholics entering public arguments as partisans rather than as pursuers of a truth they may not yet fully possess. She cited, by way of example, young Catholics on college campuses who claim for themselves and the Church “the culture of life” over and against the broader society’s “culture of death.” Kaveny concluded that in both Church and society, “I think the task of intellectuals is to combat the instrumentalization of the intellect, not feed it, by emphasizing how knowledge changes a person, how becoming wiser, becoming more fully integrated in the world as it is, actually changes who you are, for the better.”

If Ellis’s critique applies today, that is not what BC Associate Academic Vice President Patricia DeLeeuw heard after she assigned it recently to her graduate Church-history students. In her remarks as forum moderator, DeLeeuw related that her students “thought the piece interesting, a bit hyperbolic—and a relic of a distant and very different past.” She and others in the room on April 30 seemed not nearly so sure.

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