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.
Comments
24 responses to “When professors deny the truths of faith”
Thank you for this. I saw the news story the other day, and then, for some reason, promptly forgot it. (One reason might be that I got caught up in a series of very slick RC “pro-life” web pages, and I was so distressed I turned my computer off!)
Of course, though, universities of any stature at all provide freedom of thought and inquiry, and I would have though that Newman himself would have approved that. He was opposed to the infallibility decision, though he did toe the line, in the end. But how else can universities claim to be institutes of higher education if teachers cannot explore ideas freely? What madness.
But what is truly worse is that this is a tattle-tale organisation attempting to get people silenced for disobedience! This just shows how very dangerous the catholic church really is. The church in New York state is already putting on pressure to get the decision of gay marriage reversed, and they will continue putting pressure on individuals and politicians until they get what they want. This is an organisation that does not hesitate to involve itself directly in political affairs. How on earth do they get away without being penalised on the tax front? Surely, for a church to act as a political organisation, they should be treated differently than as a religious organisation.
The Crisis report “Teaching Euthanasia” continues the Terri Schaivo melodrama. It really is beyond the fringe to keep harping on the “Killing Terri” theme. What is the macabre nonsense?! But it’s the power and the reach of the church that really dismays me. They have more organisations, charities, “pro-life” associations, societies and web pages — spending literally millions to get their way. It’s staggering. It’s worse that the Hydra. But to attack freedom of thought in the name of education is really carrying things a lot too far. I think I’ll go now and read that Crisis report on teaching euthanasia, now that you have pointed it out. Thanks Ophelia.
I was going to tell you about it directly, Eric, but you saw it before I got to it. Did you see the comments? Blood-chilling. Those people are scary.
I wonder what Crisis is – the Journal of the Falange Society, or what?! Good luck with your reading; I hope it’s not too hard on the system.
Hey, he’s talking about my Intro to Moral Philosophy course I took at St. Joe’s! We read James Rachels, who was in fact pro-euthanasia. My philosophy course at Notre Dame (Minds, Brains, and Persons) was also not very comforting to Catholic dogma; it opened with “we’ll spend a couple days talking about the history of dualist thought, and then we’ll dismiss it and move on”. Good course.
theman1086, you may be showing your age. The church began cracking down on higher education in the later years of the last papacy, and has ramped it up under Benedict. I remember, thirty-five years ago, staying at Catholic University in DC and recognizing it, from publications and graffiti, as a vibrantly liberal center of learning. Now they realize that can’t be tolerated.
And, to be honest, they have a point. Academic freedom is corrosive of the kind of control they want.
But I’m only 24 :( St. Joe’s is Jesuit, so they can’t do much there besides whine, but I do know the US bishops have been whining about Notre Dame’s “liberal”-ness for a few decades now; it was a constant whine-fest in our student-run paper in letters from alumni and such.
Also: whine. Didn’t mean to use that word so many times. But yes, the bishops have been lobbying for greater, ah, “oversight” at ND for decades now.
It is funny that the schools that are most heterodox are also the most elite. Just saying…
Just say more, John.
Well, it’s so kind of him to inform us that in future we can treat degrees awarded by Catholic Universities with the same respect we afford to Liberty U.
In my experience, many Catholics do not know what they ‘believe’ in any detail, nor are they encouraged to do so by the clergy, beyond a comparatively few mantras and tropes, endlessly repeated.
Catholicism is not so much a community of shared belief as a supra-national (political) state of shared obeisance.
The observations of themann1086 and Ken Pidcock above confirm that any mind possessed of reason, sound judgement and good sense (ie sanity) is a genie not easily stuffed back into its bottle. Confining independent thought within externally prescribed limits is a fraught and self-contradictory business analogous to herding cats; prone to come unstuck at the drop of a clerical pair of pants.
At its very best, the Church has only ever been partly good at it.
I do wonder: how can anybody expect to build a bridge to such people? I imagine that if we did our half would be complete and we’d be standing out in the middle, looking at our watches and tapping our feet while the clerics were still arguing over how many angels can do the Hustle on the head of a rivet (and excommunicating anyone who spat out a holy cracker laughing at the prospect).
#7:
It’s my experience that people who say “just saying” usually have a lot more to say than they’re actually just saying … so just say it already.
Well and besides I have no idea what John’s point is, so I wish he would say more.
Isn’t Jonathan simply saying that ND and Georgetown are superior academically to “orthodox” schools like Ave Maria University?
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Should’ve gone to an elite-r college :D
I should note that ND has some, ah, interesting rules on the books regarding its “Catholic mission”. The one that gave people trouble is that all student groups have to (paraphrasing) “comport with the Catholic Church’s teachings” or be related to it in some way. Of course, we had a Gay-Straight Alliance, non-Catholic religious groups, and several other “questionable” groups. Amnesty International, however, was officially banned due to their support of abortion rights. That was pretty much the only real rule ND tried to enforce, and even that could be circumvented: there was a human rights club which, coincidentally, was run by the people trying to get the AI chapter up and running…
I think Jonathan is just saying that Money Talks. You can keep your independence so long as trying to reign you in could cost the Church the support of the affluent. Otherwise…
And from my limited experience, woe unto any college affiliated with a women’s religious order. The slightest deviation will bring wrath, ’cause the bishop never did like your attitude in the first place.
Be fair, Ophelia; the Catholic Church only ‘owns’ its agencies when they are solvent and providing revenue. When they get sued and accrue huge liabilities then suddenly they ‘own’ themselves.
Eric wrote,
The RCC should be treated differently, and so should any other religious organization that directly attempts to influence legislation, such as repealing a just-enacted law. But the tax-exempt status of “religious organizations” and the subset “churches” is closely connected to First Amendment / Free Exercise Clause principles, and this has resulted in fairly weak rules, lest the federal government be perceived as interfering with the free exercise of religion.
There is even a special provision in the Internal Revenue Code, section 7611, that applies just to churches and that states the special procedures that must be followed if the IRS is to audit a church for possible tax law violations. Again, both Free Exercise Clause principles and craven political expediency were at work when section 7611 was enacted in 1984.
U. S. tax law and IRS policy prohibit a church or other religious organization (like any other section 501(c)(3) organization) from:
(1) participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office, and
(2) engaging, as a substantial part of its activities, in attempts to influence legislation.
The first prohibition is always worded in absolute terms, and so any violation (by any priest or pastor in the pulpit, for example) should be enough to jeopardize the tax-exempt status of that church and the ability of parishioners and donors to claim income tax deductions for gifts to the church.
The key phrase in the second prohibition is “subtantial part of its activities.” In practice, and as a result of lax or half-hearted enforcement and the cowardly reluctance of Congress to press the IRS or to tighten the standards, some churches engage in overt, forceful lobbying (think: the LDS Church and Proposition 8, or the RCC and abortion-related skirmishes over the Affordable Care Act), and there are no consequences, because defenders of such church lobbying can say, “Well, it’s not a substantial part of the church’s activities as a whole.”
For what it’s worth, a couple of IRS publications are here:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf (longer general publication)
http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=163395,00.html (statement on political campaign intervention)
From the first linked IRS publication:
The tests developed by the Congress and the IRS essentially set a fairly high bar, which, in practice, allows churches to engage in much more than “some” lobbying without any negative consequences for their tax-exempt status. This is just as well, because most members of Congress, and most Treasury Secretaries and IRS Commissioners, are shared shitless at the prospect of doing anything that could be perceived as “attacking a church / the church.”
“just as well” being ironic, I take it?
[…] “an exclusive report,” is entitled, tellingly, “Teaching Euthanasia.” Ophelia Benson is discussing these over at Butterflies and Wheels, where I first became acquainted with Patrick Reilly and his “petulant […]
“just as well.” Yes. I strike while the irony’s hot.