CINO Spotlight on DePaul

Given the school’s propensity to discipline professors who make pro-Israel statements and defend those who attack Church policy and traditions, a case could be made to name DePaul University in Chicago as a college that is Catholic in Name Only (CINO).

At an activities’ fair, when adjunct professor Thomas Klocek took exception to a group that compared Israelis to Nazis, the students, in turn, complained about the Catholic professor to one of the deans. Dean Susanne Dumbleton [pictured] sided with the students.

Dean Dumbleton sits on the Board of Directors at the Chicago Network for Peace and Justice (CNPJ). The CNPJ is itself affiliated with the People’s Electronic Network (PEN). The PEN’s most recent projects include lobbying against pro-life federal judicial nominees and complaining about the appeals that the family of the late Terry Schiavo filed to try to save the life of the woman that the last Pope made a deathbed plea for.

When the current Pope was attacked by the community editor of the school newspaper, the university did nothing. “Not only do we have a conservative, narrow minded and somewhat fascist leader leading our nation, it appears that the new Pope may hold similar views,” Matt Thomann wrote. “It may be wrong to draw parallels between a religious leader and the president of the United States, but I think it’s important to recognize that not only our national community, but our global community as well seem to be retracting into a digressed state of mind; a state of mind that will continue to harbor global epidemics, hatred, fear and death.”

No faculty member, lay or religious, did bother to point out to Matt that he “may be wrong.” This silence came from a college that devotes pages of its web site to its Catholic identity. “As a university,” the web site reads, “DePaul pursues the preservation, enrichment, and transmission of knowledge and culture across a broad scope of academic disciplines.”

“It treasures its deep roots in the wisdom nourished in Catholic universities from medieval times,” the web site claims. “The principal distinguishing marks of the university are its Catholic, (St.) Vincentian, and urban character.” A look at recent events indicates that the last of these might overwhelm the first two “distinguishing marks.”

Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C. M., the president of DePaul, protested an article by David French of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group that supports Klocek. Father Holtschneider not only defended the school’s tacit dismissal of Klocek but offered a novel defense of its commitment to academic freedom that some might consider an odd rationale for a Catholic priest to rely on.

“Recently, I have found myself as president standing up for this academic freedom when the university withstood a nationally organized campaign against a production of The Vagina Monologues on campus,” Father Holtschneider wrote in his letter to French. The aforementioned production has become a Valentine’s Day staple on many campuses that are, arguably, Catholic in Name Only.

When I went to a Catholic grade school back in the 1960s, we used to observe the feast day of Valentine and other saints by bringing cupcakes into the classroom.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.