While Pope Francis opened the Synod on Synodality in Rome on St Francis’s feast day, I was some 80 dusty miles away, co-leading, with Mgr Keith Newton and our guide James Jeffrey (see his ‘Life & Soul’ Asissi Diary) our latest Herald pilgrimage along the Way of St Francis.
Over the course of 70 miles (110 km) we punished soul, body and liver, and ended up renewed physically and spiritually. Admittedly, our pilgrim band probably ate better than humble St Francis did in 13th-century Umbria (it is truffle country, after all) but I like to imagine that his spirit lives on in the soil and vine of every Assisi Grechetto wine we drank.
Around four miles from Assisi, as the noon heat burned down on us, I washed my face from a hilltop water trough used by animals and villagers. Joining us were a few novices and priest from a modern Belgian religious order with only 27 members, an off-shoot of the Capuchins.
As we walked together along the olive groves, I asked the blue-robed novice master – a bearded, happy-looking man of around 40, who had no phone and had been sleeping in barns and bus stops – what he thought of the Synod. “If I say I am against,” he said, “that is not Catholic, so let’s wait and see.”
The question of what may, and may not be, Catholic brings me to our cover story on our survey of the Leading US Catholic Colleges. The main theme that emerged is the extent to which a number of soi-disant Catholic universities today can strictly be described as “Catholic”, especially some of the more progressive Jesuit colleges. As we report, one famous 180-year-old Massachusetts college was threatened with being stripped of its right to call itself “Catholic” by the local Boston bishop. Yet there is also a rearguard spiritual fightback going on at a number of other Catholic colleges as our cover illustration by Christian Adams depicts.
Researching the guide over the last 12 months with our US special projects editor Jamie MacGuire has been educational. Other than the noble pockets of Catholic resistance that we highlight, there is an unquestionable crisis of identity today in America’s 230 Catholic colleges identified by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. America’s once great Catholic institutions are now under threat from the progressive tide of toxic cultural and gender politics, as well as the demands – for status, rankings and sporting glory – of wealthy donors. With some colleges having multi-billion dollar endowments, and liberal/conservative factional in-fighting, comparisons can be made between some of the wealthiest Catholic seats of learning today and the swollen European monasteries of the 16th century.
Our methodology includes questionnaires sent out to over 200 colleges in the last 12 months; interviews with dozens of presidents and college heads, as well as students, parents, benefactors, trustees, priests and educational philanthropists, and months of independent research.
All Catholic colleges that made the Wall Street Journal Best Colleges 2024 rankings are included in our survey. Our emphasis, in addition to academic excellence, student life and sport, has been on the Catholic ethos of colleges, a subject not referred to in the US Best Colleges guides.
In terms of sources, we have found the 2024 “College Free Speech Survey”, compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), illuminating. Many prestigious Catholic universities were ranked badly, suggesting that the belief in moral individual choice is under threat. Another useful source is the “Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College”, founded in 2007, indispensable to assisting devout Catholic students and parents in their choice of college. Whether having single-sex residence halls with strict visiting restrictions is enough to save Christian identity on US college campuses remains to be seen.
Finally we come to the Middle East, where we fear deeply for the plight of Christians in the Holy Land. The war has been utterly brutal, while the anti-Semitism that has erupted around Europe since the attacks on Israel by Hamas – a proscribed terrorist group – has been shocking. We pray for peace in the land that we still dare to call Holy, where Our Lord lived, walked and taught.
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