John Garvey, President of the Catholic University of America, and Andrew Abela, dean of the School of Business and Economics, take to the Wall Street Journal today to defend CUA’s decision to accept a $1 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation. 

The Koch Foundation has made gifts to 270 universities in the U.S., including 25 Catholic ones. So why the fuss in this case?

No doubt it has something to do with our institution’s unique status. The Catholic University of America is the national university of the Catholic Church, established by a papal charter in 1887. Its business school, which received the donation, was founded a year ago with the explicit mission of being guided by the Catholic Church’s teaching on economics, which is that the economy exists to serve humans and not the other way around.

Critics of the gift have argued, as one of the petitioners put it, that if we accept gifts for improper purposes we “send a confusing message to . . . faithful Catholics that [a bad cause] has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.” The question is: Does the Koch donation represent such a gift?

See their full response here. 

Matt Emerson's essays have appeared in a number of publications, including America, Commonweal, and the Wall Street Journal. The Catholic Press Association named his September 2012 essay "Help Their Unbelief," published in America, as the "best essay" in the category of national general interest magazine for 2012. He is the author of the book Why Faith? A Journey of Discovery (Paulist Press 2016).Articles:Fruitful Searching (Jan. 5-12, 2015)Preambles for Faith (May 13, 2013)Help Their Unbelief (Sept. 10, 2012)Posts at The Ignatian Educator