Alice Gallin O.S.U. – författare

In the 25 years following Vatican II, Catholic colleges and universities experienced an identity crisis that closely paralleled the one taking place within the larger context of the Roman Catholic church itself. American Catholic Higher Education is a reference volume containing the documents that reveal church officials' and university presidents' collaborative efforts to answer the questions: What does it mean to be a university or college? And, specifically, what does it mean for such an institution to be Catholic?The documents in this collection have been arranged to show that in the struggle to articulate the special role of a Catholic university, Vatican officials and university presidents engaged in a dialogue that went back and forth for 25 years, beginning in 1965 with the International Federation of Catholic Universities's attempt to formulate a definitive statement, and culminating in the adoption of the apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, signed by Pope John Paul II in 1990. So that the reader can trace the development of this dialogue, various drafts of several of the documents are given. They are presented here in 4 groupings: Those which fed into the statement issued by the International Federation of Catholic Universities, "The Catholic University in the Modern World," (1972); those which have subsequently attempted to explicate and/or modify that statement, (1973–1980); the documents that dealt specifically with the development of the revised Code of Canon Law, (1977–1983); and finally, the many drafts of the Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1985–1990).

In this work Alice Gallin, O.S.U., takes on questions of the identity of Catholic colleges and institutions—those that educate young lay men and women—from a broad historical perspective: How have these institutions acclimated themselves to the standards of American higher education since the 1960s and, at the same time, attempted to retain a distinctive Catholic mission?Catholic colleges and universities in the modern world are continually negotiating, questioning, and defining their Catholic identity with four major constituencies by no means always in harmony: the Roman Catholic Church, state and federal government, the broad American higher education community, and the internal constituencies of faculty, students, parents, and administration. As in her earlier study of governance change in seven Catholic colleges, one of Gallin's primary concerns is to demonstrate the complexity of the task, which rules out any simple interpretations or answers. Gallin describes the crucial impact of theological changes from Vatican II, the threat of exclusion from government funding for higher education after World War II, issues of academic freedom from the differing perspectives, the transformations in student bodies and faculty loyalties, and the struggle of Catholic colleges and universities to become respected memebers of the American higher education community. Of special interest will be her discussion of events leaading up to the issuance of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, on which debate continues. Written by a historian with a lifelong involvement in Catholic higher education, this work will evoke in readers both an appreciation of the challenges and a sense of ressponsibility for the future.