The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education voted Sunday on how to approach the 10-year review of Ex corde Ecclesiae, including the questions to explore.
Ex corde, the Vatican’s document to guide Roman Catholic colleges, was released by Pope John Paul II in 1990. The U.S. bishops approved an application document detailing how Ex corde was to be carried out, which went into effect in 2001. The 10-year review, called for in the application document, is supposed to be completed in 2011.
The committee voted to use the recommendations of a working group of bishops and Catholic-college presidents, which suggested five questions for bishops to use in private conversations with the presidents of colleges in their dioceses. The questions were based on a similar set created for the five-year review of Ex corde. The working group added a new question and changed the language to link the questions more directly to the application document.
“I was incredibly pleased and grateful that the bishops came to us and said, Can we create a process together?” said the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, president of DePaul University and a member of the working group.
The review process is important, Father Holtschneider said. “There was certainly a history of mistrust between presidents and bishops in some cases. The more you can get people to talk at length about the serious issues between them, the more you can build a partnership.”
The committee accepted the questions suggested by the working group with minor edits, which focused on clarity more than content, said Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities and another member of the working group. The committee also will forward the working group’s idea that one of the ways those conversations could be built upon would be for the bishops to discuss them at their regional meetings.
The education committee met before the opening of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ annual fall general assembly, scheduled for Monday through Thursday in Baltimore. During that meeting, the bishops will choose a new president. The new president will decide how to convey the committee’s questions to the bishops and presidents, and how to carry out the review.
“It was a very positive discussion,” Bishop Thomas J. Curry, chair of the education committee, said after its meeting. “I think it’s a very positive document, and it will lead to a very fruitful discussion.”
It is hard to know what the five-year review accomplished, since the conversations are private, said Mr. Galligan-Stierle, though he has heard anecdotally there have been more talks between bishops and presidents. “We’re in a better position now that we were 10 years before,” he said.
Colleges have had more time to think about Ex corde since the five-year review, said Dennis C. Golden, president of Fontbonne University and a member of the working group. The colleges, he said, “are much stronger institutions in many ways than they were at the beginning of this process.”
