Wearing two shirts

Richard W. Pfaff, Professor, Department of History, UNC, and Priest Associate of the Chapel of the Cross

I've been asked to say something about the ministry of this parish at and through the University from the standpoint of one who wears two shirts: a professorial button-down and, as occasion demands, one of clerical black topped with a white collar. Sartorial conventions aside, I've conceived my functioning in these two roles for the last 38 years not in the mode of "worker priest" - the so-called tentmaker ministry whereby one labors at a "secular" job to keep body and soul together while one's main concern is with "sacred" ministerial duties - but rather as two facets of one position.

In thinking this way, I'm not at all an innovator. The tradition of academic clergy is as old as the university itself in the western world. Indeed, for centuries after various groups of masters and doctors first came together around 1150 to form what we know as a university, the vast majority of those who taught in universities were ordained. Possibly this matters more to me because I'm an historian, but I don't think it's irrelevant that Thomas Aquinas was a professor at the University of Paris; I like to imagine that he even served on faculty committees there.

So my (slightly heterodox?) conviction is that the university is the natural habitat of Christians, not some alien soil on which we struggle for recognition or even survival. It follows that I regard "university ministry" as being at the furthest possible remove from any separation of "Christian" aspects, be they issues or students, from the secular rough-and-tumble of a modern university. That the one in the midst of which the Chapel of the Cross sits is a public rather than a private institution makes little difference here. As the old aphorism puts it, Magna est veritas et praevalebit, truth is great and will triumph; and the Lord whose people we are proclaim him to be the truth as well as the way and the life.

Consequently, I view this parish as being not so much a center of Christian witness in the middle of a secular university as a command headquarters, so to speak, for what the university is truly about. This means that the church, here incarnated in the Chapel of the Cross, is (at the risk of introducing another perhaps odd-sounding expression) the sacramental powerhouse for this university, no less than the great basilica in the middle of the campus at Notre Dame is for that institution. Our task, in taking seriously the challenge of "university ministry" here, is then to try to live out what it means to be that headquarters, that powerhouse.

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© 2005 The Chapel of the Cross