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When Pope Benedict XVI visits the United States in April, he will be giving an important address to an invitation-only audience of Catholic college presidents and diocesan education officials at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Amid the general excitement about the Holy Father’s visit, his address on Catholic higher education promises to have the greatest practical importance of any of the Pope’s travel plans, except perhaps for his scheduled address to the United Nations. It is in many of our Catholic colleges and universities that we find the nation’s leading proponents of theological dissent and relativism, to which Pope Benedict has devoted much of his life dispelling with both charity and steadfast allegiance to truth. Even so, the renewal of American Catholic higher education is underway, and it is one of the signs of "springtime" in the Church for which Pope Benedict can lavish praise upon the most faithful of the Catholic colleges.

Sharing the Holy Father’s excitement about positive developments in Catholic higher education is the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS), a national organization founded in 1993 to renew and strengthen the Catholic identity of U.S. Catholic colleges and universities. CNS membership has grown rapidly in recent years to more than 20,000 members nationwide, and it enjoys the support of many college leaders, faculty and alumni who are struggling to reverse the dramatic secularization of most Catholic colleges since the late 1960s.

From support for Ex corde Ecclesiae, the Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities issued by Pope John Paul II in 1990, to calls for the reform of theological instruction and campus life, much of the CNS agenda reflects Vatican concerns for Catholic higher education. It is therefore not difficult to predict central themes of what will probably be Pope Benedict’s most influential statement yet on the direction of the Church and Catholic education in the United States. The following draws upon CNS priorities for reform and public statements by Archbishop Michael Miller, C.S.B., who was Secretary to the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education until June 2007 and a frequent emissary to U.S. Catholic college presidents.