Series: Religionism at CU

While most seniors will savor the recklessness they are privy to after the thrill of graduation has abated, Daniel Ciucci, a 22-year-old senior majoring in business administration with an emphasis in management, will head to a seminary in Denver in August where he will study to be a Catholic priest.

“There’d be snickers, or, ‘Wow, you’re studying to be a child molester,’” Ciucci said. “It’s so funny how this campus preaches tolerance and acceptance and it seeks Buddhism and Hinduism and that kind of stuff, but when you get to that Christian thing, it totally doesn’t find a place here on campus.”

For those practicing Catholicism at CU, open devotion and adherence to Christian virtues is sometimes met with cynicism and bigotry, they say. Father Kevin Augustyn, a 33-year-old pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center, said that people are tolerant of religion so long as you keep your beliefs quiet. Some of the most vicious people he’s met, he said, are those who expounded the loudest on their quest for tolerance.

Ciucci says he has faced many reactions about his decision to become a priest, many not very open-minded.

“A lot of people are intrigued by me making the choice to live a celibate life, to live a life not having sex and living my life being in complete obedience to my bishop,” Ciucci said. “It’s definitely not normal, I’ll give the campus that, but at the same time, it isn’t very well tolerated.”

Gina Zaccagnini, a 26-year-old Catholic missionary  for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS, said that the reactions she encounters range from student apathy to discrimination against Catholics.

FOCUS is “a national collegiate outreach that meets college students where they are and invites them to examine the meaning and purpose of their lives,” according to their website.

“I mean, it’s kind of hard because at CU we find people that are totally against [Catholicism], but I find also people that really don’t care,” Zaccagnini said. “Catholicism especially has a lot of discrimination. There are just a lot of harsh feelings. And some people are very against it and have a lot of animosity towards the Catholic Church. Therefore they have a lot of hatred towards the church because of one bad experience. It’s understandable, but sometimes they take all their anger out on me.”

Generally, Zaccagnini said, there’s a bad reputation with being Catholic because many perceive Catholics as claiming that they hold the universal truth.

“I end up debating more about objective truth more than about whether God exists,” Zaccagnini said. “They refuse to engage in conversation because they don’t even know how to disagree. Once you start digging for the truth they start being defensive. It’s amazing seeing how many people run from any kind of conflict instead of talking about it and getting to the part of the truth.”

The universal search for truth is one that parallels the impressions of religious tolerance: no matter which way someone sees it, there is always going to be opposition, controversy or dissent. Ciucci said that while he spent much of his childhood in Boulder, it is definitely not the norm of things out here.

“I would say Boulder tries to reject the Christian values or even the fact that this country was founded by Christian founders, and it just kind of throws that aside and doesn’t acknowledge that,” he said. “I don’t think I see enough of that open discovery, of that open pursuit of the truth.”

Ciucci said that people have a grand idea of tolerance which entails suppressing a lot of the values this country has in search of new and exciting values, ideas and ways other people live their lives.

“And I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it,” Ciucci said. “The best way to approach tolerance is to understand the self, the environment and the context and after doing that, seeing how that fits as part of the spectrum.”

Discernment of the entire picture is definitively part of understanding tolerance. Augustyn said that while St. Thomas Aquinas has a good relationship with the university, he often hears stories of intolerance happening in the classroom.

“Professors are either lazy or ignorant of current scholarship of the other sides of the arguments,” Augustyn said. “They present biased arguments of religious faith without proper study. They don’t usually argue religion in scholarly terms or on merit. They usually just use caricatures.”

Augustyn said he hears about students whose faith has often been attacked in the classroom.

“They’re simply not equipped to encounter it,” Augustyn said.

Ciucci said he has heard the comment about studying to be a child molester twice, and that the first time he was caught so off guard that he didn’t know how to respond.

“This is a classmate that knows me, who has worked with me on group projects and that that individual would just go say that brought me great sadness and torment,” Ciucci said. “The second time again I didn’t really react in an outward fashion. If I have to deal with someone who is just harassing me for wearing a collar, for being a priest, I’ll have to deal with that too, but I’ll have to deal with that with love. Cause if I myself act violently or without charity than I’m just being as intolerant as they are.”

Ciucci said that even if it’s not a popular time to be Catholic, he’s still very inspired by the examples that have been put forward by others willing to lay down their lives in service of others.

“I really feel that tolerance first starts with the self and is then oriented outward,” Ciucci said.

Contact CU Independent News Budget Editor Sheila V Kumar at Sheila.kumar@colorado.edu.