Sin , Sex and shots at The Tombs: My Georgetown Legacy

GU Fosters Mind, Body, But Not Soul
By
Cain Pence Feb 05 2008
Viewpoint
“For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?”— Mark 8:36
The solicitations arrive often. The alumni magazine, the annual appeal from the Georgetown Fund and, of course, the many reminders of the upcoming 10-year reunion. My goodness, has it really been a decade since we strode across the stage, with a hangover, to receive an overpriced diploma? As I recall those glory days, I can’t help but grin remembering the long hours of debate with rowdy and drunken roommates from Darnall Hall’s first floor and those all-too-short nights with the beautiful ladies I am still surprised I was able to bed.
By most accounts, my Georgetown career was a great success. I earned two degrees in political theory and classics, hosted a radio show, wrote a column for THE HOYA and won the historic Philodemic Society’s Merrick Debating Medal. I interned for both Michael Novak and Robert Novak and made many connections that served me well when I fulfilled my senior-year dream of visiting every congressional district and insular territory after graduation. Afterward, I find myself back in my native Minnesota plotting to run for political office as an independent, and I am very proud to say I graduated from the Hilltop.
Yet, I have never given a dime to Georgetown — and I never will. You see, in the decade since, I also look back on my beloved alma mater with great regret and sorrow. Georgetown is an elite institution with an international reputation that punches a card for lawyers, doctors, bankers and a good number of politicians.

It is not, however, a university that graduates many Christian gentlemen or women of virtue. The social scene at Georgetown, then as now, revolves around ever-present alcohol (a guy from New Jersey sold me a fake ID my first week of school) and always available “random hookups.” Sin, sex and shots at The Tombs are good for the temporal senses — but bad for the immortal soul.

I confess to my brother and sister Hoyas — I was no saint during the four years I attended the oldest Catholic University in America. As I once quipped to a friend, “At Georgetown, I was a conservative Catholic by day, a liberal Protestant by night.”
The failings of the student body are well-reflected in a morally bankrupt (and ever dwindling) Jesuit community and secular-minded administration. A school more concerned with endowment size than the eternal soul of its students, it is a far cry from John Henry Newman’s ideal of a Catholic University. The president of Georgetown is not even a member of the Society of Jesus.
John Carroll, founder of Georgetown, and Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, would hardly recognize the wimpy technocrats that compose an order of priests once referred to as “the Pope’s Marines.”

Larry Flynt is more at home in Gaston Hall (and a more frequently invited guest)
than Pope Benedict.

As I reflect on those days, I also recall an arrogant young man who cared more for himself than others and, while educated well in mind, was poorly taught in body and spirit.

I recall the insanity of the notorious fight with the “English” department over keeping Shakespeare in a department more concerned with gender and sexual identity than great literature, and the utter absurdity of fighting the Jesuit community over having crucifixes in the classroom.

Georgetown’s professors care more for the philosophy of the ’60s than the timeless truth of 2,000 years learned from Catholic thought and tradition.

How many Georgetown students today have ever even had a class on Catholicism or the Catechism?

Georgetown is many great modern things — yet a Catholic university dedicated to the eternal truths of man and God, it is most surely not.
It has been a decade now since last we met. A decade to learn, travel, reflect and get far away from Georgetown. A decade to go to confession and ask forgiveness for my many failings as a man and a Hoya. Yet it has also been a decade to clearly see the truth.

Georgetown University is a great school for pre-professionals and pompous Bill Clinton wannabes.

I was one of them, and it was a great time. It is a horrible place for those who want an authentic Catholic university that prepares not just the mind, but also the soul, for the hard battles that lie ahead. My advice to my fellow members of the class of 1998 — send your money and your children to Notre Dame.
Cain Pence (COL ’98) is a writer and political activist in Minneapolis.

He can be reached at CainPence.com.

An old photo of Cain on the left and his mother in the center

Link (here)