Nick Healy Helping to Start New Catholic College in Ireland
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- Published on Thursday, 16 May 2013 15:49
Former Ave Maria University President Nick Healy is somber as he cites example after example of how Ireland is slipping farther and farther away from its Catholic heritage.
"Ireland once supplied priests, missionaries and educators all over the world," he said, "Now, there are only 21 seminarians in the entire country – not even one for each diocese. There has been poor catechesis for two generations, and the country was unprepared for the secularization pressure brought on by membership in the European Union. Then the sex abuse crisis caused a further loss of faith in the Church in Ireland."
He sees one way to partially counteract that trend would be the establishment of a private, faithful Catholic college in Ireland, and he's signed on to help in an Irish group's effort to do that.
Mr. Healy said in an interview that he was approached over a year ago by "a group of priests, educators and lay people in Ireland" who were impressed by the type of American Catholic colleges that, like AMU and 21 other schools, are recommended by the Cardinal Newman Society in its Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College as offering a faithful, Catholic education.
"They saw the intellectual and moral foundation of these schools, and there was nothing like that in Ireland," he said.
"The deeper I got into it, the more convinced I was of the need."
Mr. Healy spent decades involved in Catholic higher education in the United States after leaving a successful career as a maritime lawyer, beginning at Franciscan University in Steubenville and then working with Tom Monaghan during the first phase of the founding and development of Ave Maria University.
Mr. Healy will be spending his time on the school's initial challenge of raising enough money to purchase a facility and begin recruiting staff and faculty. A site with appropriate buildings has been identified in the Cork area, he said, but he said that the group now needs to raise at least $8 million by the end of September, of which it currently has about $1 million committed, most of it from an anonymous donor in the United States.
The U.S. will be the focus of the fund-raising campaign, Mr. Healy said.
There are about 40 million people in the U.S. who have Irish heritage, he said, and he'll be targeting those who are "grateful for the faith handed down by their Irish ancestors and grateful for what Ireland has done for the world."
If established, the school would be different from most higher education institutions in Ireland, and not just because of its religious affiliation, Mr. Healy said.
"The type of liberal arts education with a core curriculum, such as what is used at Ave Maria University, is virtually unknown in Ireland," he said. "And Ireland needs a Catholic intellectual center," which Mr. Healy said was part of Tom Monaghan's vision for what Ave Maria University could become. Mr. Healy said he's spoken to Mr. Monaghan about the Irish project, but the AMU founder has no involvement in it.
The school likely would be named Newman College, for Blessed John Henry Newman, who started the Catholic University of Ireland in the mid 19th century, an effort that Mr. Healy said lasted just eight years when it failed to win support of either the Irish bishops or the British Crown.
A lot is at stake for Ireland, he said.
"Irish culture has been so Catholic. If the country loses the Catholic faith, eventually it will lose the culture."