Revisiting “Realities and Ideas” “Realities are greater than ideas” has become one of the signature phrases in the pontificate of Pope Francis. Said to be derived from Romano Guardini, a giant of 20th-century theology, it’s nonetheless a somewhat Delphic formulation that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Some find in it a welcome antidote to a sterile intellectualism that reduces the faith to a catalogue of syllogisms. Others worry that it could bespeak a certain disdain for theology, and for the intellectual vocation as an essential service to the Church. Still others see in it a variant on the first step in that venerable Young Christian Workers formula for discernment and mission: “See, judge, act.” Whatever “realities are greater than ideas” means to anyone, however, it ought not mean that “reality” and “ideas” are dichotomies, such that between them a great gulf is fixed that no one may cross. That would be a bad mistake with serious consequences. None of us perceives “reality” in an unmediated way – save, perhaps, for that first infant apprehension of a mother’s smile, so crucial to an appreciation of the benignity of life; and even that, I suppose, is in some sense mediated through one’s pre-natal experience. We “see” (and “judge” and “act”) through prisms made of ideas, and the acuity and perspicacity of our ideas is one index of how well we grasp reality. That acuity and perspicacity has a neurological dimension, to be sure; thus the deep wound of advanced Alzheimer’s Disease or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, which renders otherwise healthy adults incapable of perceiving things as they really are. But growth in the ability to see things as they are also has spiritual and intellectual dimensions, and those ought to be part of Synod-2018’s reflection. In the Synod’s first three and a half days of work, more than one bishop has already noted that the intellectual apostolate is largely missing-in-action in the Synod’s working document. Bishops have also observed that the Instrumentum Laboris has little to say about evangelical approaches to young adults that appeal to the mind and that integrate intellectual life and the spiritual life, which are so often sundered in post-modernity. So what to do? Pondering a remarkable bronze composition in front of the archdiocesan offices in Cologne, the capital of the Rhineland, might be helpful, as the Synod fathers and auditors wrestle with the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of “Youth, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” and their relationship. This sculpture group depicts Edith Stein – St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – at three moments in her life. In the first statue, the girl Edith, youngest daughter of Jewish parents, holds the Torah but hasn’t yet grasped its deepest meaning in the modern world. The second statue displays the young philosopher, Dr. Edith Stein, with a split head: she is academically precocious, but her brilliance has not yet been integrated with her heart and her soul in a mature, personal unity. The third statue invites us to meet Sister Teresa Benedicta a Croce , garbed in the Carmelite habit, carrying a crucifix, and proceeding toward her martyrdom in 1942 at the Auschwitz concentration camp. I found the statuary both mesmerizing and deeply moving when I first saw it some fifteen years ago. It’s an altogether extraordinary expression, in bronze, of an altogether extraordinary life: yet it teaches, I think, a universal lesson about young adults. Like Augustine of Hippo, Edith Stein was a vibrant, engaged young adult who took a while to put “realities and ideas” together. And what finally brought the two into harmony was the experience of faith, understood as the truth. Augustine’s famous description in the Confessions of the “Tolle, lege” that sent him to Romans 13.14-15 and wiped away his doubt is eerily similar to Prof. Dr. Edith Stein’s experience of spending an entire night reading the Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, concluding “This is the truth,” acquainting herself with the catechism and the missal, and quickly seeking baptism. For both Augustine in the 5th-century Roman empire and Edith Stein in 20th-century Germany, reality and the life of the mind came together in the life of faith purified by reason. Surely this is an ancient conviction with contemporary resonance that the Synod should lift up before the Church and the world, not least in terms of a reformed Catholic catechetics that nourishes young minds and enables young adults to meet the many cultural challenges of living a Christian life today. In this matter of “realities and ideas,” the Synod might also say a word about the reform of Catholic higher education in the West. Shortly before Synod-2018 convened, C. Christine Fair, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at America’s first Catholic university, Georgetown, proclaimed her non placet with “entitled white men” via Twitter: those men “...deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.” This struck some as exceptionally weird, even by the standards of a historically Catholic university that once covered up religious symbols to accommodate a speech by a President of the United States beholden to a secularist constituency. But was it really all that weird? Despite the impressive Catholic efforts underway on its campus, some of which were described in these Letters yesterday, and irrespective of a few dedicated faculty, Georgetown University as an institution ceased to be “Catholic” in anything but a vestigial sense a while ago. If you doubt that, consider the letter from Dean Joel Hellman of the School of Foreign Service, announcing that he and Professor Fair had agreed that she would “got on research leave effective immediately,” during which Ms. Fair would “accelerate previously scheduled international research travel.” Why? Because “Georgetown’s top priority is fostering academic growth and ensuring a safe and secure environment for learning.” That definition of Georgetown’s “top priority” would likely come as a surprise to Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, the school’s founder (and the founding bishop of the American hierarchy). Catholic higher education that does not take seriously both human and spiritual formation, and the integration of that formation through the life of the mind, is not Catholic higher education; and a “safe and secure environment for learning” by no means exhausts the meaning of true human, intellectual, and spiritual formation. Catholic higher education that defines its goals in Dean Hellman’s narrow, worldly terms is a hollow simulacrum of Catholic higher education. Period. And it is consumer fraud to suggest otherwise. It’s important to remember at these Synods that the Church in the West is by no means all the Catholic Church there is. Some of the most vital local churches in global Catholicism (in Africa, for example) have already made it clear in conversations at and around this Synod that western decadence and its obsessions aren’t their problems. The fact remains, however, that, in the West, “youth, the faith, and vocational discernment,” this year’s Synod theme, often interact in college and university settings that advertise themselves as “Catholic.” Perhaps the bishops of Synod-2018 could lift up a vision of authentic and integral Catholic higher learning for the twenty-first century in their Synod final report. And perhaps bishops from the West (and especially North America) could commit themselves, on returning home, to doing everything in their power to ensure that the “Catholic” brand is not abused by institutions where the curriculum, the faculty, and the mode of life on campus tend to contradict, if not falsify, just about everything “Catholic” should stand for in the life of the mind, the integration of realities and ideas, and the formation of young adults who can live for others.