Apart from the pressing needs of my own students, of which I have seventy-seven this semester, the reason for my temporary absence from the Ink Desk over the past ten days has been a speaking trip to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This is the second year in a row that I’ve been asked to speak to the besieged students of this most “liberal” of campuses. I use the word “liberal” ironically because there is nothing liberal about the intolerant bigotry of the secular fundamentalist tyranny at UW Madison. To take but one example of the culture of persecution that Catholic students have to face, the Catholic student organization, Badger Catholic, had to fight a long and arduous court battle to earn the right to receive offical recognition by UW Madison’s secularist gestapo. Every Catholic student is made to pay $200 a year to fund student organizations, many of which promote the culture of death and the destruction of traditional morality, and yet UW Madison has fought tooth and nail to prevent these same Catholic students from having their own organization, paid for out of their own contributions. This is what secular fundamentalists call “tolerance”!

 

As stated, Badger Catholic had to fight for their rights in court, eventually forcing the UW Madison authorities to make funds available. This has not been the end of the story, however, because these same authorities, sullenly licking their wounds and sulking truculently, are now fighting a war of attrition against Badger Catholic. A week or so before I was due to arrive to give my talks, the university-owned venue became “unavailable”, forcing Badger Catholic to scurry around looking for an alternative venue. And then, upon my arrival, I was told that there had been an unexplained “delay” in processing the payment of my honorarium by the university authorities, in spite of the fact that I had made a meticulous point of jumping through all the bureacratic hoops in order to facilitate payment several weeks in advance. As I write, I still await payment. 

 

There is, however, a good reason for the UW Madison authorities to be concerned about the Catholic presence on campus. The fact is that the Catholic presence has been growing and is unabashedly orthodox. I witnessed this on this visit in several ways. Something in the region of 150 students pray a holy hour of adoration, followed by solemn benediction, every morning. An even greater number attend the noon Mass every day. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students has recently established a dynamic presence on campus and I had the honour and the pleasure to have lunch with the seven FOCUS missionaries assigned to UW Madison. My talk, “Unlocking The Lord of the Rings”, was attended by over 200 students, many of which were non-Catholics; my talk, “Finding Truth Through Beauty”, was attended by a similar number; and the talk on the Catholic literary revival that I gave to Mustard Seeds, an organization of Catholic graduate students, was attended by twice as many grad students as attended my talk to the same group the previous year, indicative of the fact that Mustard Seeds has doubled in size in the past twelve months.

 

I left UW Madison with empty pockets, due to my lack of payment, but with a heart filled to the brim with the joy of the Catholic witness I experienced in the heart of the beast. If this is the spirit of campus Catholicism in the twenty-first century, we have much to be encouraged about. Indeed, the growth of the Church Militant leads me to believe that we may be seeing a harvest of graduating St George’s, inspired by St Michael, who will be ready and willing to slay the dragons of secular fundamentalism. No wonder the tyrannical “liberals” at UW Madison are worried. They have every reason to be.