By Joe Murray
April 15, 2004

(AgapePress) - "O wretched men," lamented Cassandra, the Trojan seeress blessed with the power of prophecy but cursed with lack of credibility, "why rage you possessed, dragging this unfriendly horse, hasting to your last night and the end of the war and the sleep that knows no waking?" The last days of Troy must have been days of anguish for good ol' Cassandra, for Cassandra knew that Troy was doomed, had the power to thwart its demise, but all the while her prophetic pleas fell on deaf ears. In came the Trojan horse, and the rest, so they say, is history.

Rich, opulent, powerful and respected, the Catholic Church of today is on the road to becoming the Troy of yesterday. With a kingdom spanning the four corners of the Earth, the Church is an institution of insurmountable force. Its presence, not unlike Troy, is felt in political, social, cultural, and academic circles. Its word has long been respected and its doctrine is found in the hearts of over one billion people. Its gates are impenetrable.

For two-thousand years, the Defenders of the Faith have shed blood, sweat and tears to preserve and protect the gates of the Church from the worldly forces that surround it. From the Crusades of the Middle Ages to the Vatican councils of modern times, the Church has lead the battle against pornography, homosexuality, adultery, abortion, and the entirety of the secularist mindset against which its teachings are juxtaposed. And for two-thousand years, the Church has been steadfast and firm in its battles, largely because it has educated its soldiers in the Gospel of Christ.

Make no mistake, the education of Catholic warriors has been the bedrock of the Church's success in the cultural battles it has fought. I know this, the Church knows this, and most importantly, those walking in the footsteps of Agamemnon know this. Since the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Catholic theologians and Catholic academics have walked hand in hand, sword in sword. They provided many of the faithful an academic sanctuary, a place to send one's children to receive an education necessary to survive in the world, and also an armor to protect from the temptations emanating from the world.

After two millennia of solid education, the Trojan Horse has rolled up to the gates of virtually every major Catholic university in America and Europe alike, and in that horse are professors and academics who have rejected Catholic doctrine and abandoned the biblical mandate to spread the Gospel of Christ. The message of the coffeehouse clerics? Tolerance should replace tradition, the Gospel should make way for gay student unions, and faith in the Church's teaching on controversial issues should be relocated to the fiction section of the student library. The handful of Catholic universities that have already accepted the Trojan Horse, and its contents, have effectively removed Catholic teaching from its sovereign mantel of absolute truth and placed it in a marketplace of ideas in which such truths are placed beside Vagina Monologues and Sex, Lies and Videotapes. The white flag has been raised behind the walls of those schools.

While an open marketplace of ideas is ideal for a secular university, such a marketplace is detrimental to a traditional Catholic university. From the first inception of Catholic education, the goals have been twofold -- to educate the mind and sharpen the sword. If a Catholic university places the key tenets of its faith in a common marketplace of ideas, it is succumbing to the very relativism it has been battling all these years. Ask yourself this: What future Catholic warrior will sacrifice his livelihood, family, worldly belongings, or life for a faith that is being peddled in an open air marketplace? While it is true the marketplace may permit the university to win the mind of the student, the marketplace will never win that student's heart.

Doubt the severity of this indictment? Just look at Georgetown University, one of America's oldest Jesuit schools. Just last year, faculty and students walked out of the graduation ceremony when Cardinal Francis Arinze merely stated that the family unit is "mocked by homosexuality," a moral truth taught by the Church for thousands of years. Faculty went ballistic and demanded apologies for the "offensive" remarks of the Cardinal. Yes, professors of a Catholic university called an absolute Catholic truth offensive. They still, however, cashed their paychecks.

Travel a few miles north on I-95 to Pennsylvania and Mercyhurst College, a Catholic school, has professors voicing support for same sex marriage -- an idea flatly rejected by Pope John Paul II as against the natural order.

And across the Delaware River in the Garden State, New Jersey's only Catholic university, Seton Hall, will host an awards ceremony named after Sandra Day O'Connor, a pro-abortion rights Supreme Court jurist. O'Connor was a key vote in striking down a ban on partial-birth abortion. Nonetheless, Seton Hall is more than willing to open its arms, and the hearts of its students, to an ideological cholesterol that is determined to clog the arteries of the Catholic theology.

Across the country on the Left Coast, Gonzaga University's Law School has twice denied recognition to Christian groups because their requirement that the leadership be Christian was deemed discriminatory. The response from the Church when pressed on these great betrayals of the faith -- silence or spin.

Why has Catholic theology been sent to the back of its own bus? The answer: the Church has permitted those who have taken an oath to defend the faith to mutate into destroyers of the faith. This is an act of ecclesiastical treason that cannot go unpunished. Georgetown, Mercyhurst, and Seton Hall are wolves in sheep's clothing. The actions of these institutions of higher education are not only intolerable, but they are among the gravest of all offenses against the Church -- they are heretical institutions that have left the Church and the body of Christ.

The Code of Canon Law 251 §1 is clear: "Christ's faithful, conscious of their own responsibility, are bound to show Christian obedience to what the sacred Pastors, who represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith and prescribe as rulers of the Church." Furthermore, as Can. 1311 reads, "the Church has its own inherent right to constrain with penal sanctions Christ's faithful who commit offences," and impose such sanctions it must.

While it is true that the forces of Hell will never prevail against the Church, and the gates protecting the Church's teaching on the Gospel are divinely impenetrable, the stewardship of such holy protection cannot be taken for granted or the laity of the Church will suffer the consequence. Once Catholic teaching loses the cloak of absolute truth, it loses the minds of the future laity and the loyalty of future defenders. Even though some universities have gleefully accepted the Trojan horse outside its gates, some have not -- and one can only hope that the cries of Cassandra ring forever in their ears.