Word: kavanaughs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Inside many a modern Roman Catholic priest nowadays seethes a latter-day Luther crying to be born. One troubled cleric who has let the rebel inside him speak out is the Rev. James Kavanaugh, 37, a diocesan priest of Lansing, Mich., now serving as a counselor to a private mental health foundation in California. In a new book entitled A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (Trident; $4.95), Kavanaugh unleashes a bitter, searing attack on the foibles and faults of Roman Catholicism, which he still professes to love and serve. Thanks in large measure to its shock value...
Arrogant & Smug. The burden of Kavanaugh's polemic is that a church founded by Christ upon the primacy of God's love for man has degenerated into a sterile bureaucracy guided by abstract legalism. Echoing charges made by many other contemporary Catholic thinkers, Kavanaugh complains that his church's strictures against marriage for priests, birth control, and divorce have caused untold anguish and suffering to the faithful. Dominated by unBiblical superstition and decadent traditionalism in everything from its sermons to parochial schools, the church, in Kavanaugh's eyes, is pathetically outdated and corrupt...
...result of the church's puritanical approach to moral issues, says Kavanaugh, "the Catholic is obsessed with sex"-and he, for one, seems to be. About three-fourths of his examples of church-imposed agony involve sex; most of the cases are described in prose that might seem a trifle fetid for a true-confession magazine. At Catholic girls' colleges, he says, "to French kiss or not to French kiss is usually the question. Keeping the teeth closed becomes the ancient badge of the martyrs who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods of Rome. She firms...
...Father Kavanaugh's major polemical weapon is the sweeping generalization. Ignoring the fact that great juridical decisions can rise to the level of philosophy, he boldly declares: "The legal mind is a restricted and impoverished mind which cannot move without a law to support each flicker of its brain." He describes the church's code of can on law, which is now being drastically revised, as "archaic" and "reeking of drawbridges and moats." Dismissing the intellectual achievements of Jesuits John Courtney Murray and Karl Rahner, Kavanaugh insists that "Catholic theology died somewhere between Thomas and Tarzan." He scarcely...
Howie Henjyoji, 123-lb. champion in last weekend's New England AAU tournament, dropped down to 115 lbs. for the nationals and was eliminated in the first round by Steve Kavanaugh of Mississippi...