Charles Curran and ACCD

Volume 9, Number 3 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Newsletter June 1986 Charles Curran and ACCD I In his letter of August 24, 1984 (N. 111) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Fr. Curran offered the following in partial defense of himself. 0 "I have never said the hierarchical magisterium is so com- pletely wrong. (See Origins March 27, 1986, p. 678.) On July 7, 1978, Fr. Curran published an article entitled Ten Years Later in Commonweal (pp. 425-30), his reflections on the anniversary of Humanae Vitae. Declaring his unwillingness to find a way to mitigate the teaching contained therein so as to avoid accusing the pope of being in error, Curran declared: "From my perspective it was important to take the more rad- ical approach. The teaching condemning artificial contraception is wrong; the pope is in error; Catholics in good conscience can dissent in theory and in practice [rom such a teaching. " (p. 426.) To anyone old enough to know what it means to be a Catholic, the responses of Charles Curran, Richard McCor- mick, Walter Burghardt, Richard McBrien, and the American Association of Catholic Universities, and their related af- filiates, to the present efforts by Pope John Paul II to restore both Catholic theology and Catholic Universities to the Church, especially in the United States, indicate how far some academic elites have departed from Catholic norms of belief and practice. (cont'd p. 3) .- Volume 9, Number 3 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Newsletter June 1986 Items of Interest More than 25,000 women have signed the Affir- One-time New York Times' Kenneth Briggs on mation for Catholic Women, expressing unity with the the Extraordinary Synod: teachings of the Catholic Church and with Pope John "... it seemed painfully clear that Rome's effort to Paul II, according to Women for Faithand Family, the pull in the reins is doomed to failure. Despite efforts to St. Louis-based organization which has been collect- shun comparisons to secular politics, the church ing women's signatures. Included among the signers must come to terms with the great human movements of the document is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. An ear- toward participatory democracy and egalitarianism. lier list of 10,000 names had been given to the Pope "Several of the local churches have begun to last June. catch this spirit-as a gift of continuing revelation- Women for Faith and Family was organized in and to incorporate elements of these movements. September, 1984, just prior to the appearance of the The vitality these days is in those places, not in the original New York Times ad. tired mechanisms of an old autocracy. As many Dates for a second national conference of WFF bishops know, the action is back at home, not at have been set for October 3-5, 1986. Contact: Helen headquarters. Hull Hitchcock, 6158 Kingsbury, St. Louis, MO "Correspondents at the synod sensed, I think, a 63112, (314) 863-1654. rather desperate attempt to reverse recent change in ecclesiology without discrediting the wellspring of continuing reformist drives, Vatican 11."(NC Reporter, January 24, 1986, p. 11.) There seems to be a growing interest in the Roman Academic Centre's STL and STD program re- cently opened in Rome in collaboration with Spain's University of Navarre. Write Fr. John C. McCloskey, Books Received 330 Riverside Drive, New York, New York 10025, (212) 222-3285. Edwin Mellen Press (P.O. Box 450 Lewiston, New York, 14092) . DonaldGrayson,Thomas Merton: The Develop- ment of A Spiritual Theologian (220 pp. $49.95) Copies of We mentioned in the last Believe, This was originally a dissertation for the Univer- Newsletter, are available from P.O. Box 4127, Herit- sity of St. Michael's College, Toronto (1980), now up- age Drive, Portsmouth, N.H. 03801. $14 soft-cover, dated. The writer is an Episcopalian from British Col- $23 hard-cover. umbia. The book has eight chapters based mostly on Merton's Seeds of Contemplation and New Seeds. God and Money is a 43 minute film, sponsored Daniel Liderback, The Theology of Grace and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for na- the American Mind: A Representation of Catholic tional telecast. It presents the Bishops' pastoral on Doctrine (158 pp. $39.95) economic life as a living process of reflections and This is another of the Toronto Studies in Theol- action by 50 million American Catholics. ogy (Volume 15) by a Jesuit from John Carroll Univer- God and Money is available in 16mm film and all sity. The five chapters deal with the Christian tradition video-cassette formats simply by writing or telephon- of grace concepts, the impact of modern an- ing California Newsreel, 630 Natoma Street, San thropological and psychological studies in the Ameri- Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 621-6196. Video rental can context. $55.00, sale $49.00. Andre Milavec, To Empower as Jesus Did: Ac- A scholarly article entitled "The Changing Na- quiring Spiritual Power Through Apprenticeship (345 ture of the 'Italian Problem' in the Catholic Church of pp. $59.95) the United States," is available from Joseph A. Var- Volume 9 of the Toronto Studies, by a professor acalli, Nassau Community College, Garden City, at the Sacred Heart School of Theology, deals with New York 11530. the transmission of religious heritage. 2 Volume 9, Number 3 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Newsletter June 1986 Charles Curran and ACCD (cont'd) When first I read twenty years ago of Cardinal Newman's 19th century advisory, that the Catholic University would become a rival Church if it were unsupervised by hierarchy, my instinctual reaction was: "It can't happen here." But it has. Today, the above mentioned parties and others have set themselves up as a "rival Church" to the Pope and Bishops in union with him. They consider themselves entitled to teach against the magisterium of the Church and to persuade other Catholics, and the general public, that the Church is wrong and need not be followed in belief or practice when they so decide. This is a solid Protestant view since it allows contradictory positions on faith and morals to be held as "true." The position is not only unCatholic for those who believe that the Church is Christ's Church with the mission to preach the truth, but it is philosophically indefensible. A "truth" cannot be true and untrue at the same time. "Note clearly," says Curran in his response to Cardinal Ratzinger, "that I do not disagree with any dogmas or de- fined truths of the Catholic faith." (Origins, March 27, 1986, p. 666. But doctrinal truths are involved. For one, there is the entire sexual morality of Catholic Christianity, a way of sex- uallife as old as Christ's words on marriage and lust. Then, there are dogmas which pertain to the Church's very Con- stitution and to Christ's command to Peter to confirm his brethren in their faith. It is de fide that the Church is an hierarchical body, that the pope has supreme jurisdiction of the whole Church, not merely in matters of faith and morals, but also in Church government. The teaching of the Church on the indissolubility of marriage would be considered infalli- bly taught. John Paul II thinks the defiance of Charles Curran and others touches the "true and proper competence of the Church in the sphere of moral norms." In a recent address to The International Congress of Moral Theology (Vatican City, April 10, 1986) the Pope, speaking of the Church, said pointedly: "Her intervention in this area cannot be seen as the equivalent of one opinion among others, even if the opinion were granted a particular authority. It enjoys the charisma veritatis certum (CF. Dei Verbum 8); the Catholic theologian, therefore, owes obedience to it." The Pope goes on to say: "To appeal to a 'faith of the Church' in order to oppose the moral magisterium of the Church is equivalent to denying the Catholic content of Revelation." Here John Paul II directs his attention to a doctrinal problem of high order one which, he says, concerns... not only man's future on earth, but his eternal salvation. It is clear, too, that John Paul II finds the roots of the Church's sexual morality in the deposit of faith itself. On Wednesday, July 18, 1984 in a general audience he reflected on the moral doctrine contained in Humanae Vitae: "The author of the encyclical stresses that this norm belongs to the natural law, that is to say, it is in accordance with reason as such. The Church teaches this norm, although it is not formally (that is, literally) expressed in Sacred Scripture, and it does this in the conviction that the interpretation of the precepts of natural law belongs to the competence of the Magisterium. " However, we can say more, Even if the moral law, formulated in this way in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, is not found literally in Sacred Scripture, nonetheless, from the fact that it is contained in Tradition and-as Pope Paul VIwrites-has been 'very often expounded by the Magisterium' (HV 12) to the faithful, it follows that this norm is in accordance with the sum total of revealed doctrine contained in biblical sources (HV 4) "It is a question here not only of the sum total of the moral doctrine contained in Sacred Scripture, of its essen- tial premises and the general character of its content, but of that fuller context to which we have previously dedi- cated numerous analyses when speaking about the "theology of the body." "Precisely against the background of this full context it becomes evident that the above mentioned moral norm belongs not only to the natural moral law, but also to the moral order revealed by God." (Pope John Paul II, Reflec- tions on Humanae Vitae, St.

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