Today Pope Benedict beatifies Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890).  Newman was an Anglican prelate of some repute who, with others at Oxford during the 1820s and 30s, was lured by the recently-discovered value of historical studies.  His research revealed that Roman Catholicism held the larger deposit of the faith from apostolic times.  Eventually, for Newman, the precedence of Catholicism became irrefutable.  If you can’t beat them, join them.  And that is what he did… in 1845 (at 44 years old) at great personal expense: he lost many connections in England and his salaried position.  He went to Rome, was welcomed there, studied and was ordained.  He was then made rector of the English Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a patron of Newman’s.

His writings are enormous.  He is a poet as well as a scholar.  His Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his autobiography, is very famous.  Another tome of note is his Idea of the University.  It is for this that Newman is identified with the Catholic ministry at secular campuses.

Newman addresses both interlocutors of the university setting.  He offers the benefits of theological insights to the higher education enterprise.  Theology is akin to literary texts knowledge.  There is a value to this at the table of intelligent thought.  And Catholic theology, in particular, with its groundedness in philosophy, is most helpful in offering input to the human endeavor of knowledge, understanding and wisdom (especially wisdom).  On the other hand, Newman points out that theology benefits by being open to the insights offered by science (his notion of science exceeds purely physics and chemistry; it would include psychology, etc.).  Thus the university (higher education) will be more fully human if the “conversation” includes all parties of study.

Robert Bellah, a retired sociologist at Berkeley, once said that there is a danger of the university losing its true identity.  If disciplines fail to interact with one another at some level of meaningful discourse, then higher education institutions will truly be a only a “multi-versity,” by which Bellah means, a mere physical juxtaposition of disciplines in a common geographic area without any meaningful conversation taking place between them.  

At Indiana University the ‘invention’ of the Themester seems to be a way of addressing this potential defect.  It offers all of the schools of thought a challenge to think through and address a common human concern from the perspective of their science and, from time to time, to engage in conversation together about these concerns.  The latter dimension happens far to rarely.  Nevertheless, it is a worthy effort to promote.

John Henry Newman’s idea is audacious, daring.  For Catholics it touches on our best ethos, that of seeing the world and its complexities as a place of gaining knowledge and, from this knowledge, gaining some insight into God and God’s splendor.  Creation is not a dangerous place; it is not contrary to Revelation, but it’s complement.  Catholics, therefore, enter the conversation with confidence and wonder, knowing that the Deposit of the Faith is a tremendous aid to humanity in its quest for truth, meaning and hope.  May St. Paul embody this in our mission to higher education and in the ways that this mission is expressed in ministry outward to the whole community: in educating, in works of charity, and in efforts toward justice.