The majority of a university’s faculty “must be Catholic” for a university to be Catholic, the president of the Catholic University of America has said. “I want to make one point. Building a Catholic university is not a complicated thing,” John Garvey said during the Napa Institute’s annual conference last week. “The plan was laid out in 1990 by St John Paul in the apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a document that runs to about 50 pages. But the kernel of the argument is in four short lines near the end. St John Paul says for a university to be Catholic a majority of its faculty must be Catholic. “He did not say he and the other bishops should superintend the Catholic character of a Catholic university.” That was John Paul’s “way of saying bishops are not academics,” Prof Garvey said, paraphrasing the pope’s message as: “We don’t know how to build university faculties. The only thing we insist on is that you choose Catholics to do it.” Prof Garvey said this was “a fairly simple plan. If the university follows it, the university will be Catholic. If it doesn’t, it won’t.” In the introduction to the apostolic constitution on the Catholic university, St John Paul II wrote: “A Catholic university’s privileged task is ‘to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.” Prof Garvey said that requiring commitment to a Catholic intellectual tradition and culture by staff was not in opposition to academic freedom. “The defence of originality does not demand the rejection of orthodoxy,” he said.