When John Garvey was inaugurated as president of Catholic University last Tuesday, the school rejoined the ranks of a growing number of Catholic colleges and universities — including Georgetown — whose current presidents are not members of the clergy.

Garvey is Catholic’s third lay president, and the first since 1982. The new president, who has been performing the duties of the office since July, is seen by many as a liberal figure due to his political centrism. He sanctioned the university’s invitation to a congressman who had supported abortion rights to speak at the university’s law school commencement in 2007, drawing criticism for multiple religious hardliners. Additionally, he used profanities in a recent classroom lecture on controversial speech, according to The Washington Post.

In his inaugural address, Garvey discussed the role that Catholicism should play in a modern university. He reflected on the tension between reason and religious beliefs but also emphasized the ways in which religion can enhance education.

“The intellectual life of a Catholic university is something that is unique among institutions of higher education,” Garvey said in the address. “The Catholic University of America is a university, a community of scholars united in a common effort to find goodness, truth and beauty. … The intellectual culture we create is the product of our collective effort.”

Garvey’s words echoed those spoken by University President John J. DeGioia when he was inaugurated 10 years ago as the first lay president of the school.

“As a Catholic and Jesuit university, we heed the Church’s call to powerfully engage the world, human culture, the environment, all ways of knowing. This creates a second set of questions and dynamic tensions … the relationship between faith and reason, nature and grace, reason and revelation, natural and the supernatural,” DeGioia said during his inaugural speech. “But I believe at the deepest level of reality of our tradition is a spirituality with a deep resonance with the mission of a university.”

According to Fr. Alexei Michalenko, a chaplain at the Georgetown Law Center who graduated from Catholic University with a master’s in theology in 1969, appointing a lay president to run a Catholic university raises questions among students and faculty about the role that religion will play in university life, themes present in both Garvey and DeGioia’s addresses.

“Some people will see it as some sort of loss … but there is nothing un-Catholic about having a lay president,” Michalenko said. “Instead, I think that a layman who can combine faith with education and science is a very powerful symbol.”

Director of Campus Ministry Fr. Kevin O’Brien, S.J., agreed that lay administrators positively contribute to Catholic schools.

“It is a sign of vitality for a Catholic university to appoint a qualified lay president,” O’Brien said. “It shows that the gifts of the church are shared.”

Other Catholic universities that have recently named lay presidents include Seton Hall in New Jersey, Loyola Marymount University and the University of Detroit Mercy. The latter two schools welcomed their first non-clergy leaders at the end of 2010, while Seton Hall hired its first lay president in over two decades on Jan. 11.

Catholic University’s first lay president, Clarence Walton, began his term in 1969, more than three decades before DeGioia took the presidency at Georgetown, according to the university’s website.