George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that "a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms." While the party-line response to Shaw is that the term "Catholic university" is instead a tautology, those who work, study, and teach at such institutions often find themselves pondering Shaw's oxymoron, asking themselves: how are they a university, and what kind of university are they? Conversely they ask, how Catholic are they? This article is an examination of how Salve Regina University's philosophical, pedagogical, curricular, and social characteristics offer religiously affiliated institutions a model for preserving both academic freedom and religious identity.