Become more Catholic, or Else...

The New York Sun reports another item on the Pope's agenda for his upcoming visit to America: read the riot act to Catholic educators.

Pope Benedict XVI will use his trip to America next month to present Catholic educators with a powerful challenge, one whose effects could ripple from Notre Dame, Ind., to Tarrytown, N.Y., prominent Vatican watchers are predicting

The expected message: Become more Catholic, or else.

In one of just a few major addresses planned for his six-day visit to America, Pope Benedict is scheduled to speak about education at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., before an audience that should include the president of every Catholic college and university in the country, plus representatives from every archdiocese, which oversee Catholic primary and secondary schools.

[snip]

"Doubtless, I think, there will be a challenge there," the president of Franciscan University in Ohio, Terence Henry, said of Pope Benedict's speech. "He may challenge Catholic universities to get back to the spirit of why they were founded. They were not founded to be another Penn State or another Ohio State."

Judging by the reaction of this fellow, the Holy Father has his work cut out for him.

[Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University Daniel] Maguire called such colleges attempts by the church's far-right fringe to mimeograph the evangelical Bob Jones University in North Carolina.

If these colleges became the standard, he said, "Catholic universities would then become like a Bob Jones University, where there's only one view tolerated and there's only one debate going on. Issues would be decided by the hierarchy, and you would have to mouth the party line, at which point it really wouldn't be a respectable university at all."

While it is gratifying the Pope is taking on Catholic colleges and universities, with their whackadoodle ideologies and professors, it is even more important the Holy Father address the problems in Catholic elementary and secondary schools. As the left's stranglehold on the American public schools grows tighter and tighter, those schools increasingly become institutions whose only function is to create future wards of the welfare state. If liberal (in the old sense) education is to survive in the United States, the role of religious schools becomes more critical.

Owing to their ubiquity, as well their still being in generally better repair than their public school counterparts, the Catholic schools play an especially vital part in the preservation of civilization as we know it. While they have been subject to the same dumbing down so prevalent in all educational institutions, the damage is not so severe and can still be reversed. If Catholic schools do the job right, their young charges will be sufficiently forearmed against the ideological assaults they will face in college, far less receptive to the corrupting influences of heresy and Marxism. If Catholic schools return to the standards they upheld fifty years ago, the need for the massive overhauling of so many Catholic colleges will be all but obviated, the heretics finding few takers of their wares; a marketplace solution, in a way.