Catholic Identity in Universities is the Foundation of Human Flourishing

On June 10, Santiago Schnell, provost of Dartmouth and a former dean at the University of Notre Dame, stood before the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Orlando and delivered a direct challenge. Catholic universities, he said, have spent too much energy imitating secular institutions and chasing rankings, and not enough living out their distinctive mission. The result: the Church struggles to form people who can articulate their faith, and it is losing them. "You own the word Catholic," Schnell told the bishops. "We academic administrators, we don't."

The observation cuts deeper than governance. A university's working assumptions about the human person — whether stated or merely implied — function as ambient formation. Students absorb them before they can name them. When those assumptions are coherent, they provide what the Catholic intellectual tradition has always promised: a unified account of who the person is, why suffering has meaning, and what a good life looks like. When they are incoherent — when an institution calls itself Catholic but operates from a secular anthropology — students are left without that account at precisely the developmental moment they need it most.

This is the anthropological claim underlying Schnell's institutional one. The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, holds that the human being is not a collection of competing needs to be managed but a unified creature whose spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and relational dimensions are inseparable.[^1] That unity is not a theological add-on to psychological science; it is a rival account of what the person is. And it has clinical consequences.

Divine Mercy University was built on this conviction. Its graduate programs in counseling and psychology proceed from the premise that faith and reason are not parallel tracks but a single road. Clinicians trained there learn to work with the whole person — not by importing piety into the consulting room, but by refusing to bracket the spiritual dimension that secular training typically ignores.

Consider what this means in practice. A graduate student — not herself Catholic, raised in a nominally secular household — enters DMU's counseling program after years of feeling that her undergraduate psychology training gave her tools but no framework. She knew how to track symptoms. She did not know what health was for. At DMU, she encounters the concept of the person as oriented toward transcendence: wounded, yes, but not merely broken. She begins to understand her own clients' suffering differently. When a man she sees in practicum describes feeling that his life is pointless despite achieving everything he set out to achieve, she does not reach immediately for a cognitive distortion checklist. She listens for what he is actually asking — a question about meaning that no symptom-reduction protocol is equipped to answer. Her formation at DMU gave her the language and the permission to stay in that conversation.

This is the work Schnell is calling Catholic institutions to protect. Not chapel attendance as a metric, not theology requirements as a box to check, but a genuinely integrated formation in which the vision of the human person shapes everything — curriculum, clinical training, research questions, and the quality of encounter between a counselor and the person sitting across from them.

Schnell told the bishops they have been too respectful, too willing to defer to academic administrators who do not share their custodial responsibility. Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, described the presentation as "a sober moment for the bishops" and expressed hope that it would motivate them to call universities back to their ecclesial mission. That mission, at its most concrete, is the formation of people who know what they are and therefore know how to help others discover the same.

DMU's integration of faith and reason is not an attempt to make psychology more religious. It is an attempt to make psychology more honest about the person it is trying to serve.

References

[^1]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). Interpersonally relational. In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 306–330). Divine Mercy University Press.