Introduction: What’s a University For?

Pope Leo XIV formally declared St. John Henry Newman the 38th Doctor of the Church on November 1, 2025, during the Jubilee of the World of Education in St. Peter’s Square.

The occasion for the declaration was most fitting.  Leo’s great predecessors St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI had both commended Newman’s teaching on education in the highest terms.  For example, in his address at Newman’s beatification in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI said, “I would like to pay particular tribute to his vision for education, which has done so much to shape the ethos that is the driving force behind Catholic schools and colleges today.” That vision was of an “educational environment in which intellectual training, moral discipline and religious commitment would come together,” in contrast to the “reductive or utilitarian approach” that is found in secular institutions — and even, it must be admitted, despite the charitable assessment of Pope Benedict, in not a few institutions with a Catholic name and history.

The Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae,¹ issued by Pope St. John Paul II in 1990, strongly reflects Newman’s influence.  In it, the pontiff defined the university as “an academic community” ² whose teaching preserves and passes on the human and Christian heritage and whose research is aimed first and foremost at “integration of knowledge” in a world in which “the explosion of knowledge in recent decades, together with the rigid compartmentalization of knowledge within individual academic disciplines, makes the task increasingly difficult.” ³ The “higher synthesis of knowledge” for which St. John Paul II called is exactly in line with Newman’s understanding of what a university is for.

For decades now, commentators on higher education have talked about the modern “multiversity,” an implicit acknowledgement of the clear difference between modern institutions of higher leaning and universities as traditionally conceived, which assumed that all truth is ultimately connected and which saw as their goal not only the kinds of knowledge that could be obtained through the various distinct academic disciplines but also the exploration of the connections and relations among them.

The modern world has in many ways given up on the conviction that everything is connected. Knowledge is “multi.”  There are truths, to be sure, but not Truth.  Even in the 1850s, when Newman was laboring to build the Catholic University of Ireland, there were already those who thought of a university not as a body of scholars seeking to synthesize all knowledge into a unified and coherent vision, but merely as a place in which all kinds of technical and speculative knowledge are present.  Newman often contrasted the older ideal to the modern view of the university as a “pantechnicon” or even a kind of Grand Hotel of Knowledge.

In his lecture on “Christianity and Scientific Investigation,” ⁴  Newman observed that merely “to take in and to lodge as in a caravanserai [an inn for travelers and merchants] all art and science, all history and philosophy” is not the goal of a “University.” Instead, he said, the University (which he always capitalized in this lecture)

“professes to assign to each study, which it receives, its own proper place and its just boundaries; to define the rights, to establish the mutual relations, and to effect the intercommunion of one and all; to keep in check the ambitious and encroaching, and to succour and maintain those which from time to time are succumbing under the more popular or the more fortunately circumstanced; to keep the peace between them all, and to convert their mutual differences and contrarieties into the common good.“ ⁵

A tall order! That is why he said that “to erect a University” is both “arduous and beneficial.”  It is the social creation of what he called “an imperial intellect.”  The University is “an empire in philosophy and research” that “bring[s] under one yoke, after the manner of old Rome, a hundred discordant peoples.” ⁶

Discordant, Antagonistic Relations Between Science and Theology?

Newman’s “arduous” version of a true university is very realistic in its depiction of “discordant” and antagonistic relationships.  While there is plenty of truth in the saying often attributed to  political scientist Wallace Sayre that “the politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low,” Newman understood that intense campus politics can also be the result of high-stakes disputes about the truth.  In the history of the university, there has certainly been a great deal of intensity when it comes to the disputes between those representing the other sciences and theology.  Is there, however, a real dispute between theology and the natural sciences, as often claimed?

Newman acknowledged at the beginning of his lecture, “Christianity and Physical Science,” ⁷ that “there exists, both in the educated and half-educated portions of the community, something of a surmise or misgiving, that there really is at bottom a certain contrariety between the declarations of religion and the results of physical inquiry… .”  This misgiving takes the form of “a suspicion such, that, while it encourages those persons who are not over-religious to anticipate a coming day, when at length the difference will break out into open conflict, to the disadvantage of Revelation, it leads religious minds, on the other hand, who have not had the opportunity of considering accurately the state of the case, to be jealous of the researches, and prejudiced against the discoveries, of Science.”

In other words, the non-religious assume with exultation that science will disprove Christian faith while religious people fear it might.  “The consequence is,” Newman said, “on the one side, a certain contempt of Theology; on the other, a disposition to undervalue, to deny, to ridicule, to discourage, and almost to denounce, the labours of the physiological, astronomical, or geological investigator.” ⁸

For his part, Newman was clear that the supposed antagonism between physical science and theology as such “does not really exist.”  Newman assured his Catholic University audience that he doubts any of those listening to him “are exposed to the temptation either of the religious or the scientific prejudice,” but offered that this was no reason not to treat of it, because an examination of the prejudice and the real relation between intellectual disciplines “may assist us in attaining clearer ideas than before how Physics and Theology stand relatively to each other.”

To begin, Newman explained how all knowledge ultimately forms a whole.  There is a unity of knowledge of which the university is in pursuit — a grand circle that encompasses things in heaven and on earth.  But, he said, the fact that all knowledge is ultimately one does not mean that it is all the same.  Newman posited in this lecture not one but two circles of knowledge: natural and supernatural.

Newman defined “nature” as “that vast system of things, taken as a whole, of which we are cognizant by means of our natural powers”.  The “supernatural world” means “that still more marvellous and awful [i.e. awesome] universe, of which the Creator Himself is the fulness, and which becomes known to us, not through our natural faculties, but by superadded and direct communication from Him.”  The natural and supernatural circles “intersect; first, as far as supernatural knowledge includes truths and facts of the natural world, and secondly, as far as truths and facts of the natural world are on the other hand data for inferences about the supernatural.”  Yet, even if they intersect, Newman said, “on the whole…the two worlds and the two kinds of knowledge respectively are separated off from each other.”  Given this separation, “they cannot on the whole contradict each other.”  “Theology and Science,” he continued, “whether in their respective ideas, or again in their own actual fields, on the whole, are incommunicable, incapable of collision, and needing at most to be connected, never to be reconciled.” ⁹

Physical science, he said, or what he called generally “physics,” is about “the sensible world.”  It is the “philosophy of matter.”  It takes the “phenomena which meet the senses” and then “ascertains, catalogues, compares, combines, arranges, and then uses” them “for determining something beyond themselves, viz., the order to which they are subservient, or what we commonly call the laws of nature.”  This particular philosophy “never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect.  Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements, principles, and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that material system with which it began… .”

“The physical philosopher” or scientist, Newman said, has as a scientist “nothing whatever to do with final causes, and will get into inextricable confusion, if he introduces them into his investigations.”  Indeed, “He will not come near the questions, what that ultimate element is, which we call matter, how it came to be, whether it can cease to be, whether it ever was not, whether it will ever come to nought, in what its laws really consist, whether they can cease to be, whether they can be suspended, what causation is, what time is, what the relations of time to cause and effect, and a hundred other questions of a similar character.”

Physics is what scientists do within their discipline.  While a given scientist may well have metaphysical and theological views, he does not get them from his scientific work.  Theology, on the other hand, is not about physics.  Rather than telling us how the heavens go, it deals with the substance of Heaven and how to go there.  Theology is the science of God.  It does not begin “with any sensible facts, phenomena, or results, not with nature at all, but with the Author of nature,— with the one invisible, unapproachable Cause and Source of all things.”  Rather than finite things, theology is about the infinite.

Newman summarized the differences between the tasks of scientist and theologian thus:

“[The Physicist] contemplates facts before him; the Theologian gives the reasons of those facts. The Physicist treats of efficient causes; the Theologian of final. The Physicist tells us of laws; the Theologian of the Author, Maintainer, and Controller of them; of their scope, of their suspension, if so be; of their beginning and their end. This is how the two schools stand related to each other, at that point where they approach the nearest; but for the most part they are absolutely divergent. What Physical Science is engaged in I have already said; as to Theology, it contemplates the world, not of matter, but of mind; the Supreme Intelligence; souls and their destiny; conscience and duty; the past, present, and future dealings of the Creator with the creature.” ¹⁰

While there might be some opportunities for collision, insofar as Scripture tells us “a few momentous facts, so few that they may be counted, of a physical character,” Newman observed that the way to understand these scriptural declarations, mostly dealing with the beginnings of our world, has not “received any interpretation which, as Catholics, we are bound to accept, and in the absence of such definite interpretation, there is perhaps some presumption in saying that it means this, and does not mean that.”  Newman laconically observed “that we may wait in peace and tranquillity till there is some real collision between Scripture authoritatively interpreted, and results of science clearly ascertained, before we consider how we are to deal with a difficulty which we have reasonable grounds for thinking will never really occur.” ¹¹

There is an advantage to Theology, as Catholics understand Theology, because it is not a matter of building up a set of beliefs based purely on a new reading of Holy Scripture.  For the Catholic, Science and Theology are different not just because they ask different questions but also because their methods are different.

Theology, Newman said, is like Geometry: it is a deductive science based upon truths — in the case of theology, truths revealed by God — that are set in stone.  Newman defined  Revelation as “a direct interference from above, for the introduction of truths otherwise unknown; moreover, as such a communication implies recipients, an authoritative depositary of the things revealed will be found practically to be involved in that idea.”  Thus, the progress of theology is not that of deeper research into the facts to gain more truth.  Instead, one learns the revealed Truths from the “the authoritative keepers of them” and then advances “by learning what is a matter of teaching, and by dwelling upon, and drawing out into detail, the doctrines which are delivered… .” ¹²

Physical science, on the other hand, has no revealed truths or principles (unless one counts bare logic).  It advances by continually taking in more of the facts and refining its estimation of the principles based on these new facts.  “It has to commence with sight and touch; it has to handle, weigh, and measure its own exuberant sylva of phenomena, and from these to advance to new truths,— truths, that is, which are beyond and distinct from the phenomena from which they originate.”  Given that it has no revealed dogmatic truths to which one is irrevocably drawn, physical science is attractive because it has the possibility of making progress.  Discover some new natural thing or phenomenon that does not go with one’s understanding, and one might well shift a great deal of one’s previous understanding of how things work.  Gaining a new understanding of how things work means that one can then advance even further in the ability to manipulate matter.

Interestingly, Newman quotes the Protestant historian Thomas Babington Macaulay to support his view of the divergence between theology and science.

“In divinity there cannot be a progress analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology, and navigation. A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being of course supposed equal. It matters not at all that the compass, printing, gunpowder, steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other discoveries and inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are familiar to the nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the smallest bearing on the question whether man is justified by faith alone, or whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice.” ¹³

Those who attempt to take the methods and drift of inductive and progressive natural science, and then transplant them to theology are, according to Macaulay (and Newman, who quotes him), deeply mistaken.  While we will not go back to the Ptolemaic universe, because we know more than Ptolemy did, we cannot say the same of theological positions.  Sir Thomas More’s belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation has not been superseded by experiments or discoveries.  Nor could it be.  More “had all the information on the subject that we have,” noted Macaulay, “or that, while the world lasts, any human being will have … No progress that science has made, or will make, can add to what seems to us the overwhelming force of the argument against the Real Presence.  We are therefore unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed respecting Transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More.” ¹⁴

“Thus,” Newman wrote, “Physical Science is experimental, Theology traditional; Physical Science is the richer, Theology the more exact; Physics the bolder, Theology the surer; Physics progressive, Theology, in comparison, stationary; Theology is loyal to the past, Physics has visions of the future.” ¹⁵

Because of these differences, we see why antagonisms have been built up.  The scientist who approaches theology and the theologian who approaches science will have to learn to think differently when they are doing the one rather than the other.  Theologians of sense were and are rightly irritated by those who claim that the Faith must be fundamentally rethought because of some purported scientific discovery based on research into Scripture, history, or natural science.  A great many people in the nineteenth century did believe that a kind of inductive theology could arrive or had arrived at a “scientific” account of faith.  Newman saw that such an approach was a bridge to nowhere.  It “has come to no one conclusion,— has illuminated no definite view,— has brought its glasses to no focus,— has shown not even a tendency towards prospective success; nay, further still, has already confessed its own absolute failure, and has closed the inquiry itself, not indeed by giving place to the legitimate method which it dispossessed, but by announcing that nothing can be known on the subject at all,— that religion is not a science, and that in religion scepticism is the only true philosophy… .”

Those who have followed the path of so-called Liberal Protestantism know the truth of what Newman is talking about.  While they began in confidence proclaiming a new scientific faith, they ended usually taking one of two paths: either taking faith in science as a dogma and proclaiming Christian dogma as revisable opinion, or returning to “that old teaching, founded on the deductive method, which was in honour and in possession at the time when Experiment and Induction commenced their brilliant career.”  The decision was and is “between the old Theology or none at all.”

The “scientific method”, i.e. the canons of empirical science, are proper and indeed required for natural science.  But supernatural science requires different instruments.

But Newman sympathized also with scientists irritated by those who claim that science must bend to “antiquity, precedent, [and] authority” and who refuse to countenance findings that do not fit their expectations.  Scientists are rightly disturbed when authorities try to dictate scientific conclusions, whether it be churchmen appealing to Scripture or secular ideologues.

This raises an interesting question: how often did it actually happen historically that churchmen attempted to dictate the results of natural science?  Newman’s brief review noted that, while there were no doubt some churchmen who did so, the authority of the Church as a whole and of the popes was used judiciously, generally speaking.  Newman noted that while the Copernican system bothered some who held the belief “that the earth was stationary, and that the sun, fixed in a solid firmament, whirled round the earth,” the considered view of the ecclesia that at length prevailed was that the “Church had decided next to nothing on questions such as these, and that Physical Science might range in this sphere of thought almost at will, without fear of encountering the decisions of ecclesiastical authority.” ¹⁶ For Newman, this episode was itself a kind of proof of the Church’s claim to divine guidance.  After all, considering how entrenched and nearly universal was the belief that the sun moved about the earth, and how it seemed prima facie to be the teaching of Scripture, it is remarkable that the Church refrained from declaring it doctrinally.

What’s more, Newman observed, the supposed modern collisions with science were not themselves the first collisions.  Newman cited the case of the 8^th-century St. Virgilius, an Irish abbot whom history has called “the Geometer” and who came to a collision with St. Boniface on his theories about the earth.  Boniface’s complaints to the Holy See were met not with a decision on a scientific question, “which would have been going out of its place, but it passed over, in a matter not revealed, a philosophical opinion.” ¹⁷

Of course, the biggest collision was that in the 13th century.  The challenge of Aristotle’s philosophy was, in Newman’s view, much greater than Bacon’s centuries later.  And yet, even though Aristotle’s philosophy touched not just on physical but metaphysical topics, the Church did not take a “high hand” with the subject, instead letting the philosophers fight it out.

Newman drew out the lesson.  When we talk about the Church as a body, in whom wisdom is possessed as a gift, we are not talking about the loudest voices, nor “even the ablest, or wisest, or holiest of her children.” ¹⁸ When it comes to meddling churchmen, there are certainly plenty of them.  But as for the Church herself, the gift of wisdom has kept her, on the whole, from trying to adjudicate scientific questions.

What Scientists and Theologians Should Be Doing

Newman was quite right that the Church has generally held off on deciding scientific issues.  Indeed, the Church has often been a patron of scientific research.  St. John Paul II’s encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesiae took its name from the first words of the document, which speak of the modern university as born “from the heart of the Church.”  While the more spectacular developments were to happen later, the Middle Ages were a time of development as well, one in which priest-scientists, both within the universities and outside of them, were extraordinarily active.  One need only mention such figures as Nicolas Oresme, Jean Buridan, Thomas Bradwardine, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, St. Albert the Great, and Copernicus himself, a Catholic cleric whose work attracted the favorable interest of popes and cardinals.  And later as well, the contributions to science made by Catholic clergy and members of Catholic religious were immense. ¹⁹

If scientific method does not come to determinations of truth on the basis of authority and tradition, the encouragement of science as a human endeavor is certainly an authoritative tradition in the Church.  In attempting to build a Catholic University in Dublin in the 1850s, Newman was himself operating in a long tradition that he wanted to emphasize, especially given the European “custom to maintain that Catholicism has been prejudicial to abstract science and to success in secular pursuits.” ²⁰  “The establishment of a good School of Science was one of the foremost objects which I kept in view,” he wrote in “What I Aimed At,” his memoir of his time at the Catholic University.²¹

In ‘The Making of Men’: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin, Paul Shrimpton writes that, while Newman opened up both a school of medicine and engineering in 1855, he had bigger plans.  “Newman was not only intent on setting up schools of medicine and engineering, but anxious to to do the same for chemistry and physics: indeed, his longer-term plan was to set up the premier institution of physical science in the United Kingdom.” ²² Newman even proposed a school for mining and agriculture study.²³  And not only did he establish scientific laboratories (“at a considerable expense,” he says about a chemistry lab for the Medical School) and secure scientific papers for the library, he also established scholarships for students in the sciences and sent delegates to the 1857 British Association for the Advancement of Science meetings that were held in Dublin.²⁴  In “What I Aimed At,” he recounted that one faculty member “had early directed my attention to the formation of an institution for practical science, such as was to be found in Paris; but I never had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the Paris institution so as to take the idea into consideration.” ²⁵ There is a note of wistfulness here.  Newman not only wrote about the importance of science to a university enterprise, he “put his money where his mouth was” in making sure that it was really being done in his own university. And his dedication to scientific education had Church backing.  Shrimpton writes, “His instincts in fostering science were backed by the authorities in Rome, who strongly urged him to do all in his power to further the interests of physical science.” ²⁶

Though Newman is often accused of attempting to re-create an idyllic pastoral and classical Oxford in Ireland, it is clear from the above that his vision of the university was not anachronistic.  Newman’s impulses for scientific and technological education were ahead of the curve.  While engineering schools were a going concern at the universities of Glasgow, Manchester, Edinburgh, London, and Trinity College Dublin by the 1850s, they were still at least a decade away in Cambridge and much longer in Oxford. ²⁷

Newman was very clear that science, like every other discipline, needed the others to adjust its claims.  All the disciplines, since they are abstract, are radically incomplete.  Newman wanted the influence of Theology in his university to ward off what we would call the “scientistic” bigoted views that scholars might take.  In his report on the 1855-1856 year, Newman recorded his belief that “the presence, though not the interference, of Theology is necessary in the lecture-halls and theatres of Medical, as of other Science, by ways of rescuing scientific teaching, whatever be its subject-matter, from a narrowness of mind, of which indifference to religion is only one specimen.”  He wanted to “secure them against the risk of forgetting the existence of theological truth, and its independence of the teaching of Philosophy and Science.” ²⁸

Inasmuch as he wanted the scientists exposed to theology, he also wanted science to operate as freely as possible within his university.  The presence, though not the interference, of theology was what was called for.  In his lecture on scientific investigation, he affirmed his conviction “that it is a matter of primary importance in the cultivation of those sciences, in which truth is discoverable by the human intellect, that the investigator should be free, independent, unshackled in his movements; that he should be allowed and enabled, without impediment, to fix his mind intently, nay, exclusively, on his special object, without the risk of being distracted every other minute in the process and progress of his inquiry, by charges of temerariousness, or by warnings against extravagance or scandal.” ²⁹

Newman believed that what was needed was a good deal of “elbow room” for scientists. Yet Catholic scientists also needed to keep in mind their own duties as Christians and as scholars. First, Newman wanted scientists to be clear that it is no “shackle at all upon the intellect to maintain [the dogmas of the faith] inviolate.” ³⁰ Indeed, it is the duty of scientists no less than any other Christian to keep them before the mind at all times.

Nor should scientists make any “any direct intrusion into the province of religion.”  A “teacher of Science actually laying down the law in a matter of Religion” is out of the question, but he can imagine “such unintentional collisions as are incidental to a discussion pursued on some subject of his own.”  Newman’s consistent “take” on Galileo was that he was within his rights and indeed had a duty to propose scientific theories but had neither duty nor right to tell the Church how to harmonize its understanding of Scripture with them.

Finally, Newman believed that scientists needed to recall that their freedom was that of “investigations, speculations, and discussions.”  Scientists ought to be, he said, “Prophets of the Truth” and not “mere advertisers of crude fancies or notorious absurdities.” From the scientific side, Newman was worried about the professor who might “at random shower down upon their hearers ingenuities and novelties”; or, even worse who “should teach even what has a basis of truth in it, in a brilliant, off-hand way, to a collection of youths, who may not perhaps hear them for six consecutive lectures, and who will carry away with them into the country a misty idea of the half-created theories of some ambitious intellect.” ³¹ Speculative and uncertain scientific hot-takes are no doubt thrilling but ought to be handled with care, particularly in the classroom and in public.

It’s not that Newman did not favor scientists being bold.  Freedom of investigation, speculation, and discussion is absolutely necessary because, as he put it, “It is the very law of the human mind in its inquiry after and acquisition of truth to make its advances by a process which consists of many stages, and is circuitous.  There are no short cuts to knowledge; nor does the road to it always lie in the direction in which it terminates, nor are we able to see the end on starting.” ³² It is of utmost importance in science to be able to follow where evidence leads, even if it proves eventually to be incomplete or misleading.

Even more so when the topics touch on religious truth.  While Newman did not believe that scientific truth could come into collision with revealed truth, he understood that it often looked that way.  While the scientist is “not bound, in conducting his researches, to be every moment adjusting his course by the maxims of the [theological] schools or by popular traditions, or by those of any other science distinct from his own, or to be ever narrowly watching what those external sciences have to say to him, or to be determined to be edifying, or to be ever answering heretics and unbelievers.” ³³ Nevertheless, the scientist does have a duty as a Catholic “to avoid scandal, or shocking the popular mind, or unsettling the weak; the association between truth and error being so strong in particular minds that it is impossible to weed them of the error without rooting up the wheat with it.” ³⁴ While it might seem quaint to us, Newman’s advice was to work out the scientific questions that touch on theology not in “light ephemeral publications, which come into the hands of the ignorant,” but instead to conduct these discussions in serious scholarly journals.  What he sought and what he assumed in all his discussions of Catholic scientists are “good faith, honest intentions, a loyal Catholic spirit, and a deep sense of responsibility,” as well as “a due fear of giving scandal” and a realization of the “infidelity of the age” and “the moral weakness and the intellectual confusion of the majority of men.”  A good scientist “has no wish at all that any one soul should get harm from certain speculations to-day”  — even if the scientist thinks his speculations are correct.³⁵

As in all things, Newman’s Catholic impulse was to desire the both/and.  He wanted the greatest freedom for Catholic scientists and also the greatest responsibility from them.  He wanted them to achieve true mastery of their own subjects while remembering that they do not by virtue of that become masters of the entire truth.  Instead, they are partners with everyone else in their university in the work of creating a synthesis of knowledge, one that demonstrates that faith and reason are not in opposition but the deepest partnership.  They may well argue with the other scholars, not because the stakes are so low but because the task of building the imperial intellect is so high and the stakes for their fellow Christians, who might be scandalized, are even higher.  They must do in a way that befits that task and their realization that they form a community of service to the truth and to Christ, who is the Truth.

“Gentlemen,” Newman said in the lecture on scientific investigation, “I am making no outrageous request, when, in the name of a University, I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists, geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, and in a neighbourly way, in their own respective lines of speculation, research, and experiment, with full faith in the consistency of that multiform truth, which they share between them, in a generous confidence that they will be ultimately consistent, one and all, in their combined results, though there may be momentary collisions, awkward appearances, and many forebodings and prophecies of contrariety, and at all times things hard to the Imagination, though not, I repeat, to the Reason.” ³⁶

Science is an integral part of knowledge.  When pursued with all the scientists’ might and integrated with those other lines of inquiry from scholarly neighbors, it can become something better—an integral part of wisdom.

[David P. Deavel is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas (Houston). He holds a PhD in theology from Fordham, is a winner of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award, and is a former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. With Jessica Hooten Wilson, he edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West (Notre Dame, 2020). Besides his academic publications, Dr. Deavel’s writing has appeared in many journals, including Catholic World Report, City Journal, First Things, Law & Liberty, and The Wall Street Journal. This article is adapted from a talk he gave at Christendom College in August, 2026.]

References

1. Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II
   on Catholic Universities https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae.html
2. 2. Ex Corde Ecclesiae, par 12.
3. Ex Corde Ecclesiae, par 16.
4. The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman (first published 1852; University of Notre Dame Press reprint, 1982), Part 2, Lecture 8.
5. The Idea of a University, p. 344.
6. ibid.
7. The Idea of a University, Part 2, Lecture 7.
8. The Idea of a University, p. 322.
9. ibid., pp. 323-4.
10. ibid., p. 326.
11. ibid., p. 330.
12. ibid., p. 335.
13. ibid., p. 328.
14. ibid., p. 329.
15. ibid., p. 332.
16. ibid., p. 352.
17. ibid., p. 353.
18. ibid., p. 354.
19. One may read short biographies of thirty-two Catholic priests and religious (as well as a much lareger number of laymen) who made major contributions to science in “Important Catholic Scientists of the Past” on this website https://catholicscientists.org/scientists-of-the-past/
20. The ‘Making of Men’: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin, Paul Shrimpton (Gracewing, 2014), p. 477.
21. My Campaign in Ireland, Volume 1: Catholic University Reports and Other Papers, John Henry Newman (Forgotten Books, 2018), p. 298.
22. The ‘Making of Men’, p. 203.
23. ibid., p. 113.
24. ibid., p. 477.
25. My Campaign in Ireland, p. 298.
26. The ‘Making of Men’, p. 477.
27. ibid., pp. 222-3.
28. My Campaign in Ireland, pp. 66-7.
29. The Idea of a University, p. 354.
30. ibid., p. 355.
31. ibid., p. 356.
32. ibid., p. 357.
33. ibid., p. 357.
34. ibid., p. 356.
35. ibid., p. 361.
36. ibid., p. 360.