A closer look at Reverend Brian Shanley, OP
Thing about Pope Benedict XVI that most impresses him: “His mind. Every time I read something by this pope I want to sit down and study it. … The other thing that impresses me about him is that you can sense there is a kindness in him and a warmth. He’s never going to be the rock star that John Paul II was and he’s not spontaneous like John Paul II was, but you can tell by the way he carries himself that he is, fundamentally, an extremely kind and compassionate man.”
Favorite pope: “I’ve never thought about that, to be honest with you. I feel blessed to live in an era where we have people like John Paul II and Benedict. They’re the only popes I’ve really known. I think the contrast between the two of them is good for the Church. The Petrine ministry can be carried out in different ways and different people bring different gifts.”
Favorite book: The Summa Theologica “Since I’m a Dominican, I love Thomas Aquinas. But I think the greatest Catholic novel of all time is Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.”
Favorite movies: “Casablanca”
Favorite travel destination: Fenway Park.
Favorite food: “Pasta. I love pasta. I’ll eat all kinds.”
Best piece of advice ever received: “The best piece of advice that I ever received was from the Dominican priest at Providence College who told me that he thought that I had a vocation to be a Dominican and that I needed to explore that choice.” |
more deeply the principles that the pope enunciated yesterday.
CD: He also discussed the importance of engaging a student’s will, saying that true freedom is not an “opting out. It is an opting in.” Do you think most students at Providence College would agree with that idea, or do you get the impression that they’re moving in the other direction right now?SHANLEY: There is a tendency within American culture to have a distorted notion of freedom, where freedom is license to do whatever I want. That’s never been the Catholic view of freedom. Freedom is ordered towards truth and the good, as the pope pointed out, and it is a challenge for us on every college campus to counteract the tendencies of our culture toward that distorted view of freedom and toward moral relativism. There was a hint of that in the pope’s talk as well — the importance of Catholic education, the respect of value formation and of true meaning of freedom. So it is a challenge, to be sure, because it’s such a part of our culture.
CD: What do you think is the best way to convey those values to the students?SHANLEY: That’s why we have ethics classes at Providence College. I think every Catholic college requires its students to study ethics. They learn alternative ways of conceiving of their moral lives to what’s out there in the culture in their theology classes. I hope they’re getting that as well. It’s also through evangelization and preaching. One of the things I took away from the pope’s talk is that it’s not enough to have a lot of Catholic kids or a lot of Catholic faculty, or even that your course content is orthodox, but that you create a life of faith on the campus that’s embodied in sacrament and liturgy and the whole ethos of the place. I took that to be a very deep challenge on his part that Catholic education is about faith formation.
CD: Is there a way to balance evangelization, academic freedom, and the Catholic mission of the school so that you have that freedom to explore the faith, to really be an inspiration in the faith, but also to acknowledge that some students are Catholic and aren’t planning to convert?SHANLEY: I think that at a Catholic institution you embrace the Catholic faith institutionally, but you also have respect for people’s individual faiths and you hope that their encounter with Catholicism will strengthen their faith and their own faith convictions. For some folks who come to a Catholic institution it will make them think about becoming Catholic. And for some folks who come to a Catholic institution, as they think about Catholicism it will sharpen and hopefully deepen their own faith convictions from whatever tradition they come from.
CD: As far as academic freedom, are there any topics that aren’t open for debate?SHANLEY: I think on a Catholic campus everything’s open for debate. There’s nothing you can’t talk about because you’re a Catholic school. It’s just that at a Catholic school I would hope that every debate would be truly, as is our tradition, a disputed question where the Catholic side of things is studied and taught in a vigorous way. Students need to know what the alternative is and they need to argue about where the truth lies. So I don’t think anything is out of bounds to study on a Catholic campus.
CD: What do you hope is in the future for Catholic education?SHANLEY: I believe that to maintain the authenticity of Catholic higher education you have to steer between extremes. One extreme is to put the walls up with the world and say, “It’s a bad place and we’ll kind of nurture you behind walls here.” The other extreme is to, in a sense, capitulate the culture. I think an authentic Catholic institution steers in between and engages the world honestly, openly, without putting walls up. At the same time, it nurtures its own identity and gives students an alternative way of thinking about who they are, who God is, what’s right and wrong, what’s beautiful, what’s true, all of those things.
CD
Kerry Weber is the associate editor of Catholic Digest.
