It is sad that I must caution readers about the content of this essay regarding Notre Dame University.
For any Christian academic, being critical of Notre Dame University feels like a Pop Warner coach explaining the West Coast offense to Mike Holmgren.
Notre Dame is a great educational home for American Christians. The philosophy department by itself is of importance to any “mere Christian.” Great good is done there and every Christian college and university could learn from this great institution’s successes.
But as a pathfinder in world-class Christian education, there is also much to learn from the failures of the Harvard of the Roman church. The Pop Warner coach may see a weakness at a fundamental level that would escape a critic more highly versed in the details of the game.
As such a lesser being, I point out the harm, the grievous harm, done to Christian education at Notre Dame when a University dedicated to Our Lady and her purity hosts the Vagina Monologues (VM).
According to news accounts:
The sexually explicit play favorably describes lesbian activity, group self-abuse, and hedonistic sexuality. One scene depicts the lesbian seduction of a teenage girl, which is described as the girl’s “salvation.”
This performance marks the abdication of the duty of a Christian institution to act as an alternative community. At best, religious schools are rare islands of diversity, places where minority ideas can thrive, in the broad American college environment.
Smaller communities like religious schools or institutes in secular schools, like the Hoover Institute at Standford, can act as places of refuge where less mainstream ideas have the oxygen needed to flourish and prepare for interaction with the wider world.
It is very easy for any Christian university to be overwhelmed by the surrounding secular academic culture. It is very hard for them to maintain their sacred space.
A university, any university, has a duty to discuss difficult ideas. A Christian university has the mandate to do so without causing sin in a reasonable person. One can present the ideas of the VM without presenting them in the lewd and crude manner of the play. One can examine without celebrating.
There is no danger of any student with Internet access finding himself or herself cut off from access to crudity or the ideas of the VM. There is no danger at a school as diverse as Notre Dame that libertine sexuality will fail to get a hearing. In fact, it is far more difficult to get a hearing for ideas contrary to this performance at most places of higher education, even those that are Catholic.
Chastity is not fashionable in most departments in higher education and prudence does not fare much better. It is, obviously, a hedonistic age where even food is abused and where most students are in no danger of the puritanical impulse . . . unless it is against the puritanical impulse.
This is not a discussion of censoring works of art like VM. They are easily available to any who wish to view them. It is the failure of Notre Dame to become a place where such sin is not celebrated. Can’t there be one “last homely home,” one last Rivendell, where an alternative culture can exist?
Must one allow sin, blasphemy and the celebration of the unholy, to live the examined life? Aquinas did not think so. Socrates did not either. What does the President of Notre Dame know that they did not?
Once a mind has been debased, Sacred Scriptures and the Holy Fathers make it clear that purity is difficult to regain. What academic merit would justify such a thing?
The notion that having one token Catholic to respond on a “panel” to a forceful dramatic presentation is so weak and impotent as to merit pity or laughter more than anger. It is as if the owner of a home felt honored that he was allowed one seat at his own dinner table, dominated by barbarians.
The sheep have invited the wolves to dinner, but a shepherd will comment after the meal.
None of us is perfect and that makes any human hesitant to be critical. God have mercy on me a sinner. We have all failed, but failing on purpose by inviting wolves to hang with the sheep . . . while having one shepherd about to point out the danger is bizarre. The fact that wolves sometimes dress as sheep does not mean that sheep should give up on wearing wool and put on wolf suits.
There is so much to study and so much that is good, true, and beautiful that a student is unlikely to meet on his or her own in this culture. Most students go to little theater and almost no classical theater. Perhaps time would be better spent inculcating a love for higher things, than in giving students what they could easily gain by getting HBO in their rooms.
Notre Dame does not need to study VM. That is being done in scores of other places. If she wants to engender controversy, Notre Dame could refuse the trendy for the traditional. She could be an alternative place where men and women freely choose chastity, modesty, and dignity. In short, she could be a place where the archaic values of the culture of Catholics in 1963 would receive a hearing, even more radical would be to become a place where Pope Benedict’s ideas and world view were the norm for academic study.
