Of course, with a few notable exceptions, many Catholic colleges in the United States seem to jettison their Catholicity whenever it's inconvenient, or to choose only those parts of being Catholic that appeal to donors, students, and faculty. Their administrators seem often to be afraid of alienating anyone who thinks doctrine old-fashioned or intolerant, or, perhaps, to think those things themselves.
It is a scandal when Catholic colleges compromise the faith to appeal to the elite tastemakers of secular academia, or when chronically dissenting campus ministry programs and theology departments are more likely to alienate students from faith than to form them as disciples. It's discouraging when "serious" universities seem to be embarrassed by serious Catholicism. It's tempting to simply write them off.
But the CINO label isn't helping the problem. In part because it isn't true. And in part because it lets college administrators off the hook.
In a juridic sense, a Catholic university is Catholic because it is recognized as such by an appropriate ecclesiastical authority, and, as such, it is accountable to the mission and norms for Catholic universities outlined in John Paul II's Ex corde ecclesiae. Being a mediocre Catholic university, or a dissenting Catholic university, doesn't change the thing itself: in a juridic sense, a university is Catholic because the Church says it is, even if, by failure to live up to its mission, or to observe those norms, it is a failing Catholic university.
In a deeper sense, a Catholic university takes its identity from the vision, hope, and faith of the Catholic people who built it.
The majority of Catholic colleges in the United States, Villanova and Notre Dame among them, were built mostly with the pennies of immigrants, who hoped to found institutions to educate their children without compromising their faith. They were commissioned and supported by bishops who hoped they'd do just that. They were founded, at least many of them, by the pioneering missionary priests and sisters of religious orders.