After a year of public clashes between bishops and some Catholic colleges, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick—the 79-year-old retired archbishop of Washington and a former college president himself—urged U.S. Catholic university presidents to forge stronger relationships with their local bishops. During his address on Jan. 31 at the annual meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in Washington, the cardinal told college presidents they would receive better cooperation from their dioceses and experience less friction with the hierarchy if they welcomed their local bishops onto campus and included them in the academic fold of their institutions. Cardinal McCarrick only alluded to the controversy in 2009 provoked by President Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The university’s decision to invite President Obama and present him with an honorary law degree set off a firestorm of criticism from at least 70 U.S. bishops and ignited a national debate on the university’s status as a Catholic institution.
Can College Presidents And Bishops Get Along?
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Canada. The true north, strong and…free? Not if President-elect Donald J. Trump has anything to say about it. And he does.
A Homily for the Baptism of the Lord, by Father Terrance Klein
“If democracy is under threat from authoritarian urges, it is time to rediscover and reorganize our mutual obedience.”
“Today we know how to turn our eyes toward Mars or virtual worlds, but we struggle to look into the eyes of a child who has been left on the margins and is being exploited and abused,” the pope said at his general audience Jan. 8.