The major event during Pope Benedict XVI s visit to Washington next month will not be the outdoor Mass he will celebrate at the new Nationals stadium, but a private meeting at the Catholic University of America (CUA). With the presidents of every Catholic college and university in the United States all 213 of them in attendance, the pontiff is expected to lay down the [canon] law. Manassas resident Patrick Reilly, founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, says Pope Benedict will likely return to a favorite theme: the crisis in Catholic education today. The former head of the Vatican s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the pope has made it his mission to revitalize Catholic culture. But he won t find much of it in these dramatically secularized institutions, where political correctness is often given more deference than church teachings. For example, Georgetown Law School now funds student internships at abortion rights groups, and the controversial Vagina Monologues has been performed (or approved) on more than 100 Catholic campuses, including Notre Dame. Reilly says the pope will remind Catholic college presidents that the bishops retain authority over their institutions, and that since 2000, canon law requires that any faculty members who teach Catholic theology must sign a mandatum indicating they are in accord with the church s teaching magisterium. Reilly believes this less publicized meeting will have the most long-term impact on the Catholic Church in America, whose members have been dwindling in recent years – and would in fact be decreasing were it not for the huge influx of Hispanic immigrants. CUA has come a long way since then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith who was nicknamed Cardinal No for his strict enforcement of church doctrine, pushed to get rid of dissident theologian Fr. Charles Curran. CUA now has the only theology department in the country that is in full accord with Catholic teaching onsuch hot-button moral issues as abortion, gay marriage, priestly celibacy, embryonic stem cell research and liberation theology. The Newman Society, a group dedicated to renewal of Catholic higher education, believes that Catholic colleges and universities are ignoring the moral traditions that Catholic parents send their children there to learn and undermining their own mission. They are the largest factor in the dissent and loss of the Catholic faithful in the United States, Reilly says. We consider this a truth-in-advertising issue. Two years ago, for the first time ever, the Vatican s Congregation for Catholic Education urged all Catholic colleges and universities, the vast majority of which are located in the U.S., to develop voluntary benchmarks of Catholicity that would be used to gauge their adherence to church dogma. But Reilly says there is no evidence that the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities has since followed suit. But after issuing a number of warnings and offering them a voluntary way back to orthodoxy, Reilly agrees that Benedict s next step is likely to be enforcement, especially at nominally Catholic institutions like Georgetown, which the Newman Society considers one of the worst in terms of fostering Catholic identity. Pope Benedict believes that a smaller, authentically faithful Church is better than one with more numbers that doesn t believe in Catholic theology, Reilly added. With the pope s cull-the-flock mentality directed at straying academics who are the most likely to challenge his authority, the pontiff may soon get his wish.