Why do "Catholic" universities wish to associate themselves with the Church if they are utterly contemptuous of everything she stands for?

Truly a question for our age. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. of Human Events On-line offers an apologia.

The poet Robert Frost once described a liberal as someone who refuses to take his own side in an argument. He could have been speaking about all too many Catholic universities today, where you’d have about as much chance of hearing a commencement address delivered by a prominent Catholic who loves the traditional faith as you would Ted Nugent doing a public service announcement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Nice opening.

Last week, the Archdiocese of New York finally withdrew the Catholic designation from Marymount Manhattan College, which refused to rescind its invitation to New York Senator Hillary Clinton to deliver its Commencement address and receive an honorary degree. It was Senator Clinton’s support for abortion that brought down the archdiocese’s ire, though of course her entire ideology renders her completely unfit to address a Catholic institution.

That was overdue.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, built Western civilization as we know it. The university system, a unique contribution of the West to the world, grew out of the Church. The modern idea of international law developed from the work of Fr. Francisco de Vitoria and other sixteenth-century priest-professors in Spanish universities. No longer do historians of economic thought date the origins of the “dismal science” to Adam Smith and the eighteenth century; more and more it is sixteenth-century Catholic philosophers who are being called “the founders of modern scientific economics” (in the words of the great economist Joseph Schumpeter).

BAM!

We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, such that the mainstream view is now that the Church played an important role in the development of modern science. Some scholars, like Stanley Jaki, even say that it was certain aspects of the Christian worldview that account for the unique success of science in the Western world.

Take that!

How many people know that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was a priest, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli? Or that the man who discovered the diffraction of light, and gave the phenomenon its name, was another priest, Fr. Francesco Grimaldi? Or that to this day the American Geophysical Union honors exceptional young geophysicists with an annual medal named after yet another priest, the great seismologist Fr. J.B. Macelwane?

Likewise, how many people know that 35 craters on the moon are named after Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians, or that it was the Jesuits who spread Western science to places ranging from India and China to Ecuador and the Philippines?

Modern scholars like Brian Tierney are now saying that even the idea of individual rights, one of the distinguishing features of Western culture, can be traced back to Church lawyers of the twelfth century!

Take no crap from heretics and schismatics! (This is fun.)

Then there is Catholic charity. Catholic charity did not simply surpass the charitable work of the ancient world, though of course it did. It totally transformed the world’s outlook on helping the poor. No longer, as in ancient Greece and Rome, was charity dispensed in order to call attention to oneself or to place others in your debt. With the Church’s emphasis on the sacredness of human life came the idea of serving the poor with a cheerful heart, expecting nothing in return.

Yep.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of what we as Westerners owe to the Catholic Church.

Amen to that, brother.