Campus Notes

Last week, The Cardinal Newman Society reported that Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone S.D.B.,  issued a deadline to the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) to adapt is statutes to the Apostolic Constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae.

The Vatican has the right to strip the university of its title as a pontifical institution.

Well, it seems like PUCP has heard the Vatican’s “or else” and is responding with a “so what?”

Peru This Week is reporting that the lead attorney for the Catholic college, Jorge Avendano, is emphatically saying the college will not comply with the Vatican’s demands.

Although a formal announcement isn’t expected until the university’s assembly on Tuesday, Avendaño said the institution would not be complying with the Vatican’s requests.

According to Peru21, Avendaño said that in any case the university might be forced to remove the word ‘Pontifical’ from their name, but not the word ‘Catholic’, which is more generic, and therefore could be retained.

That’s an important legal distinction he’s making. As reported by LifeSiteNews.com, if the college loses its status as a “Catholic” college, it could also lose the land it’s built on, as the inheritance that was left to the institution in the 1940s was on condition that it function as a Catholic college.

“If you’re not a Catholic university and you don’t have the recognition of the Vatican, you cannot use that for the purposes of Catholic education. So, you have to return those properties,” Canon lawyer Fernan Altuve told the Peruvian daily El Cormercio in a recent interview.

The property, he said, would revert to the Archdiocese of Lima.

That’s why the college seems more than willing to forego its pontifical status but will likely wage a long legal battle for the term “Catholic.”

This may just get uglier and uglier for a long while.