Author name: amdg

The Pillar Catholic portal reports on a recent address by Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Orlando, Florida. Schnell, a Catholic and distinguished mathematical biologist, presented a scathing assessment of the state of Catholic higher education in the United States, 25 years after the implementation of John Paul II’s apostolic constitution *Ex Corde Ecclesiae*. He highlighted a “Catholic paradox”: despite having a “massive infrastructure” of 230 colleges and universities enrolling over 600,000 students, these institutions produce “average outcomes.” Only 35% of adult Catholics hold a bachelor’s degree, matching the national average, and a staggering 43% of those raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic. Schnell attributed this failure to Catholic institutions imitating secular ones, focusing on rankings, job training, and adopting a vocabulary of “progress” and “success” rather than the human person. He called for a return to a distinct Catholic identity, emphasizing the need for a “spirit of the place” influenced by John Henry Newman, and urged bishops to be “more vocal” and “more pushy” in asserting their ownership of the word “Catholic.” This address, while seemingly critical of secularization, remains firmly within the bounds of the post-conciliar paradigm, failing to diagnose the true root of the crisis: the systematic destruction of Catholic doctrine and the very concept of the Church’s mission by the architects of Vatican II and their successors.