The Letter

The pastoral letter, read from church pulpits all over the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis last week, set down stringent new requirements for Catholic attendance at non-Catholic colleges and universities. "We are alarmed and grieved at the number of graduates who are selecting secular and non-Catholic colleges," wrote St. Louis' Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter. "In our solicitude for our young graduates, we remind them and their parents that they must always be far more concerned about nurturing and protecting their Faith than they are about pursuing higher studies."

In this spirit, Archbishop Ritter declared that no Catholic student may attend a non-Catholic institution unless written permission is obtained from the archdiocese. Such permission will be granted only "for just and serious reasons," where students promise to enroll in college Catholic activity and discussion groups. Among just and serious reasons: financial hardships that might be involved in attending a Catholic school, receipt of a scholarship from a non-Catholic college, unavailability of certain courses in a Catholic school that might be essential to the education of an individual student.

Although Archbishop Ritter sternly warned that no Catholic student under any circumstances is exempt from the provisions of his pastoral letter, Catholics are bound to this edict only as "a matter of conscience," in deference to the spiritual authority of the archbishopric. Moreover, some Catholic clergymen are not convinced that attendance at one of the 258 Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. is an automatic guarantee that a Catholic student's faith will be strengthened.

Says the Very Rev. Dom Aelred Gra ham, prior of the Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine monastery whose monks run the exclusive Portsmouth Priory School, which annually sends the majority of its graduates to non-Catholic colleges (top favorite: Harvard) : "Sooner or later, boys are going to have to face the challenge of the unbelieving modern world. The ques tion is: Where are they going to do it? St. Thomas Aquinas stated that an inade quate argument for religion invites the derision of nonbelievers. If a boy at a Catholic college has the impression that his religious problems are not being hon estly faced -- that he is being provided merely with stock textbook answers --then he might conceivably be in a worse position than in an atmosphere of true inquiry. In such an atmosphere, at least, he can always rely on the simplicities of the faith he learned in childhood."

Added Dom Aelred: "Educators and educated alike should be preoccupied with the truth. The Catholic Church has al ways claimed that she has nothing to fear from the truth. If these two propositions were kept in mind, then the secular v. the Catholic college controversies might largely disappear."

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