The Fire Maguire beat goes on
Written by Daniel on March 27, 2007 – 8:54 pm - Welcome, if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to our email newsletter. Thanks for visiting!
If we wanted to make sure that Marquette never saw an admissions application from a student from a conservative orthodox Catholic family, I think we’ve found it.
The news of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ official notification of the false and dangerous teachings of Marquette theology professor Dan Maguire is spreading. In addition to the New York Times, the story has run in/on: Catholic.org, Catholic World News, Chronicle of Higher Education, LifeSiteNews.com, Zenit (the worldwide Catholic version of Reuters), LifeNews.com, Catholic News Service (from USCCB - the American version of Reuters), Religion News Service, California Catholic (check out that great photo), Catholic News Agency (another Reuters-style service), Colorado Catholic Herald, and an Associated Press story ran on WBAY (Green Bay), WKBT (La Crosse), WISC (Madison), and the Chippewa Herald, and the NYT story was in Saturday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (Recall the post, now lost to history, recounting Marquette’s sad past as the Associated Press’s best friend).
Well, more fuel on the fire today. A press release on Christian Newswire:
The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, STL, president of Human Life International, (HLI) said today, “Catholic parents should shudder at the thought of Dan Maguire teaching theology to their children at a Catholic University. I call upon Marquette to stop hiding behind false ideas of tenure and ‘academic freedom’ in the face of theological malfeasance and dismiss Dan Maguire. A Catholic university should be Catholic and not tolerate false teachers like Maguire.”
The good folks at the Cardinal Newman Society (frequent duelers with the Administration) have also hopped on the Fire Maguire movement (LifeSite):
Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick Reilly agreed and wrote a letter to Marquette University president Rev. Robert Wild.
“Students can rightly question why a Catholic university’s theology department includes a former priest who falsifies Catholic teaching and disputes infallible doctrine as the basis of his scholarly work,” he wrote.
“The Daniel Maguire scandals must end,” Reilly added, according to a statement he sent LifeNews.com.
“Marquette’s response to the bishops’ censure has been to assent to the censure while denying responsibility for the problem. This response is inadequate and dishonest,†Reilly writes.
LifeSiteNews.com has another particularly comment-worthy excerpt from Reilly’s letter:
CNS president Patrick J. Reilly wrote to Marquette president, Robert Wild, a Jesuit priest, saying, “Marquette University is responsible for presenting Maguire to students and the general public as an expert in moral theology and ethics. Marquette gives Maguire the legitimacy he needs to publicly undermine the Church and secure frequent media appearances.â€
This is certainly true. Maguire never fails to point out that he is a professor of moral theology at a Catholic university. Without this credential, he would be just another pro-choice Catholic crank - by providing him legitimacy, Reilly argues, and I think with some merit, Marquette is complicit in his broadcasting “false teaching.”
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Posted in Marquette Golden Chickens |
March 27th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
All issues aside, it’s a shame whenever a trend develops in which more hard-line Catholics won’t send their children to a certain school that is “not Catholic enough.”
Although you can’t find fault in their viewpoint, in the long-run it simply deepens the problem by eliminating members of the student body who might have helped shift the momentum.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:42 am
Excellent point, Katie. To take it further, however, I think it is a shame whenever that trend develops because it means those children will grow up without encountering persons of a different religion or lifestyle, an educational hole which will cripple those children for life. Adult society will not similarly shield them from other viewpoints, and children raised this way will be unable or unwilling to communicate meaningfully with others. Furthermore, many children raised in religious alienation feel betrayed when they discover that a multitude of alternative viewpoints exist, and consequently turn from their parents’ faith–extremely counterproductive, from the parents’ viewpoint!
March 28th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Katie,
I am not sure that the administration would listen to conservative Catholic students who express concern about what a professor says.
I bet that if enough people felt strongly about Maguire, a petition (either electronic or paper) with a few hundred signatures could be effective, though. I don’t think the petition should read “Fire Maguire,” but something else could work.
http://www.petitiononline.com/create_petition.html
March 28th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I don’t really think you need every extreme represented on campus in order to learn about alternatives Judith. That’s the exact argument many use against religious schools in general and I think it’s bogus. Catholic schools, Lutheran schools and Methodist schools all have world religion classes along with the rest of their religious classes.
It is not necessary to have an extreme abortion advocate on campus to learn about their views, especially if that advocate is using his position as a bully pulpit to spread views under the name and letterhead of the University. That is like saying we need someone on campus who is a satanist to learn about satanism or a member of the KKK to learn about the KKK, the logic just doesn’t hold.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:42 am
A little Friedman-inspired part of me just died.
This is all very simple microeconomics. If you put out a fraudulent product, in the case of Marquette University a “serious Catholic education,” despite a lack of discipline within the organization to provide a more sound product, consumers will move elsewhere. Supply and demand is a bitch.
This is why Daniel’s opening line about Catholic students was brilliant. It’s not a matter of serious Catholic students “encountering persons of a different viewpoint,” it’s about receiving what you’ve paid for. To demand that Catholic students and their families accept whatever liberals what to shove down their throats is not only arrogant, it misses the point.
The downfall of the big Catholic schools is the primary reason that schools such as Steubenville, OH are doing so well. Catholic students and their families want a legitimate, invigorating Catholic education. Schools like Marquette continue to obsess too much about this world and not enough about the next. Education consumers will respond for them.
If you want to look at an institution that “shields [students] from other viewpoints,” look no further than your average University. Professors and Administrators who never have to compete on a job market are charged with preparing individuals for a life of work. They ought to embrace a little of their own medicine by getting off campus a bit to determine how much of society views the world as they do.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:57 am
For the record, I really wouldn’t mind (understatement) if Marquette was truer to its Catholic roots. I simply wanted to point out that progress in this direction is hindered when people who are equally true to their roots choose to go elsewhere.
I come to a Catholic school to get a Catholic experience. There are plenty of places off the campus where I can encounter persons of a different viewpoint to challenge and strengthen my faith.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[...] I am on a Fire Maguire kick this [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
“If we wanted to make sure that Marquette never saw an admissions application from a student from a conservative orthodox Catholic family, I think we’ve found it.”
Amen to that!
March 28th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Pardon me, I sometimes forget that this site is run by young people. I mean no offense by this–what young adult doesn’t think he has it all worked out?–but young people like yourselves tend to be overzealous when it comes to opinions. I was taken aback by the response to my comment until I realized how it had been misinterpreted.
I did not mean that Catholic campuses should allow “extreme” liberal teachers. Quite the contrary, I believe that Catholic schools owe it to their students to deliver a Catholic education. However, one of the best schools in the area where I grew up was a Catholic school that contained a fairly significant population of Jews. The Jews simply abided by the standards set by the school–excluding prayer, in which they obviously did not participate–and in return learned a great deal about Christianity as well as the three R’s. The Catholics were nurtured in their faith but also learned to respect and understand their non-Christian classmates, an understanding which many Christians sorely lack. For my money, it was the quintessence of true education. However, many Catholics insisted that the school was not Catholic enough because it admitted Jews.
It is schools like that that I believe should be the goal. I agree wholeheartedly that Professor Maguire or other such obviously un-Catholic professors are a bad fit for a Jesuit university, but I fail to see how a uniform student body advances education in any way. Such conformity is to be avoided as much as possible, just as extremist professors are to be avoided. But then again, I have only been a Sunday School teacher and a classroom volunteer, so my opinion is in no way expert.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Addendum: Katie, in my view a Catholic experience (or any religious experience, for that matter) can be had anytime, anywhere in the world. After all, what is a religious experience but experiencing God? And God is everywhere–every tree, every sunrise, every human being is a testament to God’s power and majesty. This is not to dissuade you from seeking out fellow believers–far from it, I encourage you to do so–but I simply couldn’t resist this chance to remind everyone that God does not only live in churches. It is a fact that seems sadly forgotten nowadays.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:48 am
Maybe it’s surprise to all y’all, but if you worked in the admissions office, perhaps you’d meet the incredible number of people who are very conservative, but don’t much care because Maguire is one professor. That’s from someone who spends too much time there.
PS: That was pretty grown up Brian, shouting at me on the bridge the other day. My families were pretty taken aback by your rudeness and had a bit of a laugh. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:17 am
[...] an earlier post regarding Dr. Maguire (and I have two additional posts in the hopper of my mind on that subject, [...]
March 29th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Hey Logan, it’s a LIBRARY. You were shouting, and it was completely unnecessary. By the way, I didn’t know it was you, but now that I do, I find it pretty hysterical.
March 29th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Judith Cavell,
“The Catholics were nurtured in their faith but also learned to respect and understand their non-Christian classmates, an understanding which many Christians sorely lack.”
I don’t see that being true at all. If that has been your experience you have had a very limited and poor sampling. That’s unfortunate. You seem open minded enough that I believe time and exposure will develop your experience in the matter.
Anyway, your use of the word “many” is too cautious. It doesn’t indicate anything. Knowing two Christians who lack that understanding could qualify for the term “many” since two would be two too many. Do you think that there are many people of other faiths that also sorely lack the respect and understanding for people of other faiths (Christians for example) that you attribute to Christians?
March 30th, 2007 at 2:24 am
I believe that a lack of respect and understanding is common to all religions, but far more so in religions which are the majority. For instance, the average American Muslim knows far more about Christianity than the average American Christian knows about Islam, but in, say, Saudi Arabia, the converse is true. This is actually quite understandable–adherents of minority faiths are inundated with tenets of the majority religion simply by existing in that society, whereas the majority adherents must actually seek out knowledge about other religions. One solution to this unfortunate reality would be a mandatory World Religions class in our high schools (private and public alike) which simply teaches the tenets and history of the five major world religions without proselytizing for any of them. I doubt such an action will ever be taken, however, because our conservative legislators are against teaching religions other than Christianity, and our liberal legislators are against teaching any religion at all. Shame on them both, I say!
I hope that you are correct that I have seen a particularly poor sampling. But it has been my experience that the average American has only the barest knowledge of his own religion, let alone an understanding of anyone else’s. This is more markedly true of the hundreds of Christians I have known, which I attribute to the majority/minority effect, although it also seems to me that most Jews these days know far more about Christianity and Islam than they do about their own sad history. I would love dearly to be proven wrong, however, and I have faith that it will all come out alright in the end.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I would agree with the majority/minority scenario as it applies to understanding but a good indication of the level of lack of respect would be how the religious majority in the country in question responds to the presence of the minority religions. Just Google violence against Jews and/or violence against Christians. There’s a lot there in a variety of countries. On the flip side Google violence against Islamists or Muslims with the word America and you find articles of Muslims and Islamists speaking against those who act and teach against Islamic core principles and not the plethora of articles citing Americans being violent towards Muslims. I would applaud American Christians (as a whole) for demonstrating an acceptance and deference to other religions that does not exist in several other countries.
A huge problem, as it concerns this post is the wide difference in interpretation of the same religion. Maguire is constantly presenting Catholicism in a way different from its core teachings and is doing it presenting himself as an authority of Catholicism. The same problem can be observed in other people of other religions. It is those, like Maguire, who distort the principles of a religion that cause the most damage. Like you I have faith that it will all come out all right in the end.
April 14th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[...] writes over at Catholic Culture a column about Dan Maguire and the Bishops’ reprimand. The arguments over Maguire are getting old, but Dr. Mirus takes Marquette to task as an institution: In this [...]