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The Land O' Lakes Statement

This Rock Volume 16, Number 9   November 2005     Frontispiece By Karl Keating   Letters   No Longer Catholic By Tim Drake   What is the Mandatum?   Benchmarks of Catholicity   Where the Catholic Colleges Are   Achieving the Goals of Ex Corde Ecclesiae By Bishop John M. D'Arcy   The Land O' Lakes Statement By TR staff   Right Ways and Wrong Ways to Influence People By Alice von Hildebrand   The Apostolate of Being   Europe Must Return to Christ By Joseph Previtali   What Is an Elephant Like? By Anthony E. Clark   The Dao   Shadows in the Cave   Ratzinger on Relativism   Scripture Speaks   Fortitude By Mark Lowery   Step by Step Is Purgatory Found in the Bible? By Christine Pinheiro and Kenneth J. Howell   Fathers Know Best Apostolic Tradition   Brass Tacks Moral Investing By Jimmy Akin   Damascus Road Finding Mere Catholicism By Peggy Frye   Reviews   Quick Questions    Subscribe    Permissions

In July 1967, a group of twenty-six Catholic men—almost all of them American educators and administrators—gathered at a conference center in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, to discuss how Catholic higher education could participate in the evangelization of the world that was called for by the Second Vatican Council, which had closed only two years before. What resulted was a 1,500-word statement that set the stage for future controversies over the role and identity of Catholic universities.

At issue was the relationship between academic freedom and the role of the magisterium, which the conferees seemed to assume are at loggerheads. The statement declared that the former obviated the need for the latter:

To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities as for all universities.

The Catholic university adds to the basic idea of a modern university distinctive characteristics that round out and fulfill that idea. Distinctively, then, the Catholic university must be an institution, a community of learners or a community of scholars, in which Catholicism is perceptibly present and effectively operative.