POSTED ON BEHALF OF MICHAEL MCINTIRE Father Miscamble's logic and arguments are irrefutable, as Prof. McGreevy impliedly acknowledged by his inability to engage them. But Fr. Miscamble misses the point. The point is that Notre Dame’s PUBLISHED Mission Statement is NOT an accurate statement of the “Mission” under which the University is actually operating. The true, operative “Mission Statement” is the Land O’Lakes Statement promulgated by Fr. Hesburgh and the trustees in 1967, the fullness of which has not been widely published. The Land O’Lakes Statement stands in contradiction to the Mission Statement which the University holds out for public consumption. The Land O'Lakes Statement proclaims that Notre Dame is now a "contemporary catholic university" and defines the philosophy which governs such a place. That philosophy is consistent with what Pope Leo XIII in 1897 condemned as a heresy (which he called "Americanism.") and which Pope St. Pius X in 1907 again condemned as the summation of all heresies (which he termed "Modernism."). Land O’Lakes adopted or at least accomodated most of these heretical views as the working philosophy of a "contemporary catholic university” and therefore, of Notre Dame. First and foremost, Land O'Lakes withdrew Notre Dame's allegiance to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The University was to be free to be a participant in the "total life of our times", modern "in the full sense of the word" and therefore able to provide an "education geared to modern society." In the Land O'Lakes Statement, "modern" means "permissive." Students are to learn to "understand the actual world" by being given unrestricted exposure to all aspects of it. The university is to impose "no barriers or restrictions" on this exposure, nor may any of it be "outlawed". The student is to be free to develop himself without restrictions, free from constraints of doctrine or discipline. They are to be free to "express Christianity" in "a variety of ways and live it experimentally and experientially" and thereby discover "new forms of Christian living." Land O'Lakes encourages liturgical experimentation so that students "will find the meaning of the sacraments for themselves" by the way they experience them, freed of dogmatic constraints. But in all this permissiveness, there is one absolute prohibition. Under Land O’Lakes, all religion and religious theories are to be given equal weight, to be sorted out as the student decides. Thus, as a "contemporary catholic university," Notre Dame cannot institutionally proclaim or teach as “truth” that there is an Absolute Truth, that that Truth reposes in its fullness in the Roman Catholic Church, or that the Catholic Church is the “one, true, catholic and apostolic Church” founded by Jesus Christ. Land O'Lakes brands such a teaching as "theological imperialism" and, as such, the truth of the Catholic faith is the only theological view which is expressly prohibited. There is little in the governing philosophy of a “contemporary catholic university” which is not within the definition of "Americanism" or "Modernism”. Returning to Father Miscamble’s well taken point, it is evident that a predominantly catholic faculty is neither needed for, and may in fact impede, the transformation of Notre Dame from a Roman Catholic University into a “contemporary catholic” one. The contemporary scholars, both pro and con, who wrote of Land O'Lakes in the years following its adoption by virtually all mainline "catholic" universities were clear about what Land O'Lakes was and what it intended. The Land O'Lakes Statement (1) was a formal declaration of university independence from the Roman Catholic Church; (2) proclaimed the “contemporary catholic university” to be judge, critic and counselor of the Church; (3) asserted that the university had both the right and obligation to define what is and what is not authentic catholic teaching; and (4) thereby created a schism between the magesterium of the Church and the magesterium of the University. In 1986, Fr. Hesburgh, a principal author and promoter of the Land O’Lakes Statement, defiantly wrote in a published article that a true university cannot allow the Church to define what is and what is not Catholic teaching. For greater detail and citations to authority, see McIntire, "Has Notre Dame Lost Its Catholic Credentials", St. Austin Review, Sept./Oct. 2007. The Land O'Lakes Statement is the REAL Mission Statement to which the University administration, in its actions, has been consistently faithful. There is nothing that has happened at the University, especially including the diminution of the numbers of authentically catholic faculty, reduction or elimination of courses on Catholic Apologetics, theVagina Monologues, Queer Film Festival and the rest, that is inconsistent with Land O'Lakes. Since 1967, the alumni have been infected to a greater or lesser degree with this theological virus, and are therefore unable or unwilling to perceive a problem with the character of the faculty, or even with the preservation of the Catholic character of the University, or such of it as remains.