When professors deny the truths of faith

Patrick J. Reilly has written an article about the heterodoxy of ethics and law professors at several Jesuit universities. Who is he?

Patrick J. Reilly is founder and president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a national organization to advocate and support the renewal of genuine Catholic higher education.

Ah. So he’s someone with a clear agenda, and one that is a contradiction in terms. “Genuine Catholic higher education” clearly means orthodox Catholic “education” that adheres to established dogma, which means it is fundamentally opposed to genuine education. What he means by “education” should better be called information-stuffing, or just memorization.

Here’s his beef. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops – the one that subscribes to the bishop of Phoenix’s policy that preganant women’s lives must not be saved if it takes an abortion to do so, no matter what, including even no matter if the fetus won’t survive in any case – has a position on assisted suicide, which of course is that it’s evil.

…as with so many moral issues, the bishops need look no further than our Catholic institutions to find that the “nationwide campaign” in opposition to Church teaching has been ongoing for many years.

Suicide’s legalization has been advocated by prominent professors in Catholic universities including Georgetown, Marquette, Santa Clara, and Boston College.

In other words, faculty in “our” Catholic institutions are being disobedient. They are defying authority. They are using their own judgement. This is scandalous.

As reported in “Teaching Euthanasia,” an exclusive report in the June 2005 issue of Crisis, multiple professors at Catholic universities had taken positions on end-of-life issues that seemed to conflict with Vatican teaching.Today, some of those professors are no longer teaching at Catholic universities, but others remain perched in Jesuit law schools and theology and philosophy departments.

Which is an outrage, because they are Catholic universities, therefore the Vatican owns them, therefore the professors are forbidden to take positions that conflict with Vatican teaching. Yet there they still are.

Catholic universities are partly responsible for such professors’ influence by virtue of their employment. Academic freedom protects professors’ rights to seek truth according to the methods of their discipline. But when professors deny the truths of faith and disregard the common good — especially of those whose lives are snuffed out prematurely — they violate the mission of a Catholic university.

When professors deny the truths of faith they violate the mission of a Catholic university.

That’s on the record. Helpful of him to make it so very unambiguous.

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