So my title is The Dying of the Dark and the Death and Rebirth of the Catholic University.

For those of you who may not know, the title is an allusion to a 1998 book by a priest professor at the University of Notre Dame named Father James Birchall who wrote a book called The Dying of the Light.

The Dying of the Light is the story of secularization of higher education, in which he explores

about eight different faith traditions.

And those of you who know something of the history of modern or American higher education,

doubtless know that that story has been a pretty consistent one of institutions that

almost entirely were founded by various religious denominations or religious orders, and which

in a very consistent and sort of single unidirection, a kind of ratchet wrench that only moves in

one direction, moved toward kind of a secular direction.

This is not unlike the same story told, really almost exclusively about Protestant

institutions and George Marsden, another Notre Dame faculty member for a long time.

Marsden's book, The Soul of the American University, which told that story about

largely Protestant institutions.

Now, this is large, what Bertrandt tells in his book, which is well worth reading, is largely

a story of what we call secularization, and in particular is about the process of disaffiliation

that took place, really kind of began and then snowballed

around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century and then through about the middle part

of the 20th century.

So it really was a kind of movement that you saw fairly consistently in a kind of fairly compact set of decades in the early

part of the 20th century to about the middle part. And while his virtual study is really focused

extensively on Protestant institutions, there's a section of the book also about Catholic

institutions. In the words of one reviewer, Birchell told a story, and I quote the gradual but effective separation of the church and the academy, a church of various denominations.

...