Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pope John Paul II began his reign eight years ago, at a time when theologians and laity alike were openly questioning some traditional teachings of the church. Since then the Vatican has attempted to restore a sense of doctrinal discipline; it removed renegade Swiss Theologian Hans Kung from his teaching post at the University of Tubingen in West Germany and silenced for a year Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, an advocate of Marxist-tinged liberation theology. Last week Rome moved against an American priest who has openly questioned the church's stance on sexual morality. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head...
American reaction to the Vatican measure was sharply divided. Some Catholic liberals, like the Rev. Richard McBrien, chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, argued that the move would have a chilling effect on theologians, many of whom might leave Catholic colleges for teaching posts at non-Catholic schools. But conservatives hailed the move. James McFadden, lay editor of the conservative monthly Catholic Eye, compared Curran's position with "working for IBM and damning computers...
Rome readily acknowledged Curran's charge that he had been singled out. A Vatican official said it was the "length and breadth and depth" of Curran's dissent that caused him to become the first American to lose his teaching license. In 1968, for example, Curran organized 600 U.S. academic and church professionals to endorse a statement taking issue with Pope Paul VI's condemnation of contraception in the encyclical Humanae vitae...
...Such a teaching -- the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, for example -- differs from what is called the ordinary magisterium, or an authoritative teaching of the church that does not have the certainty of absolute truth. But in his letter to Curran, Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that the Second Vatican Council held that any doctrine taught by the Pope and the bishops together in a definitive manner is also to be considered infallible. "The church does not build its life upon its infallible magisterium alone," Ratzinger wrote, "but on the teaching of its authentic, ordinary magisterium as well." Curran claimed...
...professor since 1965. Nonetheless, hierarchical support for the disciplinary action was as predictable as the crackdown itself. The Most Rev. Matthew Clark of Rochester, Curran's home diocese, accepted the decision as the "final word" but said Curran "always will be welcome" as a priest in Rochester. Later, a Vatican official said Clark had ! been "excessively tolerant...