A majority of a university's faculty "must be Catholic" for a university to be Catholic, the president of The Catholic University of America said in a speech in Napa last week.

"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.

"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," Garvey said.