New criminal justice program in Steubenville ‘rooted in the Catholic tradition’

CNA Staff, Mar 7, 2024 / 12:10 pm

A newly launched master’s degree program in criminal justice at Franciscan University of Steubenville is “unapologetically and unreservedly rooted in the Catholic tradition,” the program’s director says, offering an “utterly unique” approach to criminal study that includes natural law and Catholic philosophy.

The Catholic school, founded in 1946 in Steubenville, Ohio, announced the launch of the program in a press release last month, stating that along with the university’s undergraduate program, it would “continue to answer the urgent, growing need for well-formed justice practitioners.”

The school “fully appreciates the necessary synthesis for a true criminal justice profession that blends occupational skill and best practices with a constant, unapologetic moral and ethical critique of criminal justice operations,” Charles Nemeth, a professor of criminal justice and director of the school’s Center for Criminal Justice, Law, and Ethics, said in the release. 

The school launched its criminal justice undergraduate program in the fall of 2021. “By all metrics, it is a fast-growing major on the campus and making a big impact not only on the life of our campus but also amongst the justice community,” he said. 

“Our students have learned to appreciate the natural relationship between faith in action and service in CRJ,” he said. 

The university says on its website that the criminal justice center is “grounded in the natural law.” Nemeth told CNA both the undergraduate and graduate criminal justice programs are “unapologetically and unreservedly rooted in the Catholic tradition, our Judeo-Christian heritage, and just as essentially, the jurisprudence of the natural law.”

A cornerstone of Catholic moral philosophy, natural law, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is “written and engraved in the soul” of every human being and “expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie” (No. 1954).

“In both core classes and the series of occupational and professional curricula, students are constantly challenged to weigh and evaluate the moral and ethical dimensions of human action,” Nemeth said. 

“At the same time, each function in justice operations is intellectually scrutinized and assessed in light of natural law reasoning and the moral tradition of the Catholic faith,” he added. 

The core requirements of the new program, Nemeth said, include courses in law, ethics, morality, and “natural law as a foundation for a justice system.”

Nemeth argued that “most of the [criminal justice] discipline has either been captured by pure empiricism or the forces of social justice.” Franciscan’s program, he said, is dedicated to “the task of preserving the common good.”

“I know of no program that makes central the moral and ethical scrutiny we emphasize, and I have yet to encounter any graduate program that puts natural law reasoning as the very foundation of its offering nor unreservedly affirms the wonder and wisdom of Catholic tradition,” he said.

Graduate students in the program are “exposed to heavy doses of Aquinas, Augustine, Cicero, Aristotle, and others in the classical and medieval world,” he said. “In this way, Franciscan’s program is utterly unique.”

Stephen Hildebrand, vice president for academic affairs at the university, said in the school’s press release that the program is one of a kind. 

“We’ll use the wisdom of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the best of modern research and practice to help our graduates make a profound difference in our justice system,” he said.