by NATHAN M GREENFIELD
The publication in mid-July of a letter from the Pope on the value of literature as part of one’s path to “personal maturity” has been welcomed by some academics as an unexpected invitation to reflect on the importance of literature and humanities in education around the world.
Described by Father Professor Andrea Spatafora, who teaches theology at St Paul’s University in Ottawa, Canada, as a “bit of a bombshell”, the “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation” started out as guidance to seminaries but was reworked into a pastoral letter.
Its contents also surprised Peter Kilpatrick, president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. “The whole Catholic world was asking: ‘Where did this come from?’”, he noted, before calling the letter an “unexpected treasure”, which he underscored has caught the attention of the secular Chronicle of Higher Education and of these pages.
Neither St Paul’s University, which is a pontifical university, meaning the Vatican evaluates its programmes and the rector is confirmed by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, nor the Catholic University of America, which was a pontifical university but since the 1970s has been a private university, is bound by the letter in the way that the almost 7,000 Catholic seminaries (in which seminarians earn a “licentiate”, roughly equivalent to an MA) are.
Yet, the letter “invites us to reflect on the place, the importance of literature, of the humanities in education”, said Father Andrea.
Accordingly, he and Kilpatrick expect their universities and the other 1,360 pontifical and Catholic universities around the world will interrogate their curriculum in the light of the Pope’s letter about the role of literature in a fulsome education for Catholics as well as those outside the orbit of the Catholic Church.
With 11 million students worldwide, the network of Catholic colleges and universities is the world’s largest.
The decline of humanities
The letter comes at a critical time for literary studies and, as readers of these pages know, for the humanities in general. In the past two years, the proportion of liberal arts majors in the United States has fallen dramatically.
At Ohio State (Columbus, Ohio), for instance, between 2012 and 2020, the number of students who graduated with humanities degrees fell by 46% while Boston University recorded a 42% drop.
From a high of 17.2% of all BA graduates in 1967, the percent of students graduating in the humanities in the US fell to 3.3% in 2020. This past summer, Delta State University in Mississippi eliminated 21 degree programmes, including history and English.
In the summer of 2022 in Britain, both Roehampton and Wolverhampton universities announced drastic cuts to their humanities departments. Other countries too have seen cuts to their humanities programmes.
The letter has several theological sections. It opens, however, with the Pope laying down his marker on a surprising square: he speaks of the all-too-human experience of “moments of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer does not help us find inner security” (emphasis added).
In these times of stress, he continues, “a good book can help us weather the storm until we find peace of mind”.
Reading opens, Francis continues, “new interior spaces that help us avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of our personal growth”.
A common experience
Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church’s 1.3 billion adherents, is, by definition, a moralist. But he is hardly a stereotypical one, like the evangelical ministers who condemned the Harry Potter series for its positive description of magic. Nor does the letter rail against the less salubrious parts of the internet.
As befits the Jesuit who cut his theological teeth on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola written in the early 1520s, the Pope points his finger at the “obsession with ‘screens’ and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news”.
This problem is so prevalent in some seminaries, Francis writes, that they have set aside “time for tranquil reading and for discussing books, new and old, that continue to have much to say to us”.
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