Welcome, if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to our email newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

Back at the beginning of this school year, in August of 2006, I did a post here on GOP3.com referencing a post on First Things by R.R. Reno, a professor of theology at our Jesuit sister school Creighton University. Reno said:

The Catholic world has it own set of difficulties. Historically, the Jesuits have dominated graduate study in the United States, and I don’t think I am revealing any secrets when I tell you that the Society of Jesus has committed itself and its institutions to a liberal-revisionist agenda. In the 1970s and 1980s, this may have seemed cutting-edge, but these days it’s pretty tired, and tiresome.

This complacent liberalism has hurt Jesuit graduate programs even at Boston College, and it has badly injured places like Marquette, Fordham, and St. Louis University. Rahnerians, feminists, liberationists—these places carry some serious ballast. In my experience, intellectual life is too easily perverted into postures of protest and a quixotic quest against the long dead Catholic ghetto. Again, some excellent faculty teach at these places: Ralph Del Colle, Michel Barnes, and Susan Wood, for example, are at Marquette. But because it is a Jesuit program, the 1970s is still going strong.

At the time, I received a bit of flack for purportedly criticizing the Theology Department unfairly. After this week, I think perhaps the critique holds up?

Brian did a masterful job yesterday reviewing the record (also) of Fr. Simon Harak, S.J., the Saddam apologist who has joined our Theology Faculty.

If leftism in the 1970s could be defined as loving Liberation Theology, then Fr. Harak is all aboard:

I began to understand Jesus in the tradition of the prophets, and I began to see that the things that the prophets insisted on — justice and liberation – are very much part of my Catholic tradition. … The liberation theology movement in Latin America has affected me, as has the Catholic Worker movement here, which has elements of liberation theology — living simply, in a community that tries to help all its members and also goes beyond its boundaries. … I think it takes courage and a certain willingness to lose status, to lose worldly power, to ask other kinds of moral questions, to challenge the oppressors with the power of liberation. … So if we want to prove, as Christians, that we have the better path to God, then how do we do that? More life, more liberation, more justice. If belief in God is justice in action, then let’s vie with one another, let’s show that we have the best way through acts of liberation and justice.

For those who keep track of such things, the Vatican’s Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith last month issued a notification against one of the primary theological proponents of liberation theology (a Jesuit no less), as part of a larger Vatican effort to bat down a resurgence of liberation theology in Latin America.

Then, of course, we have the one and only Professor Daniel Maguire, also of the Theology Department. Writing on National Review Online, Father Thomas D. Williams, LC, dean of theology at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University, author, and Vatican Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, had this to say:

Though the bishops’ committee stopped short of any disciplinary measures against Maguire himself, the statement makes amply clear that Maguire’s views “cross the legitimate lines of theological reflection and simply enter into the area of false teaching.”
One might wonder: Why censure a has-been like Maguire? The 75-year-old divorced ex-Jesuit, who currently teaches religious ethics at Marquette University, was a darling of the ecclesiastical Left in the 1970s but has since fallen into relative obscurity.
Indeed many have seen Maguire’s pamphlets as a last-ditch effort to recover a little notoriety. On June 19, 2006, Maguire sent his two pamphlets, entitled “The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion” and “A Catholic Defense of Same-Sex Marriage” to all 270 Catholic bishops of the United States. To tease out a response from the bishops, Maguire had to resort to a tactic equivalent to slapping a sleeping lion on the nose.

The chair of Theology, Fr. John Laurence, in responding to questions from the Marquette Tribune, defended Professor Maguire, saying

When the Church teaches something, theologians try to explore that teaching. People take and get different things out of it. Theologians try to teach an interpretation of Church doctrine; that’s presumably what he’s trying to do.

He is not exploring Church doctrine or teaching an interpretation of Church doctrine - he is dissenting from Church doctrine. He can do that - he can say that Church doctrine should be changed, but he should not present his stuff as just an interpretation. It is an argument for a totally different doctrine.

Later on in the interview, Laurence says:

We (the department) don’t function as the Magisterium of the Church here. The department doesn’t function as an arbiter of true and false doctrine.

In his apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, Pope John Paul the Great (whose passing we mourn today again on the two year anniversary) directed this to Catholic theologians:

In particular, Catholic theologians, aware that they fulfil a mandate received from the Church, are to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church as the authentic interpreter of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition

Moreover, I think that many students consider the teacher of their Theology 001 class as an arbiter of truth and falsehood, and they assume the professor is communicating authentic doctrine. And while the “electives only” argument is true for Maguire, right now the only class Harak teaches is Theo 001.

Let me return to Fr. Williams: “The 75-year-old divorced ex-Jesuit, who currently teaches religious ethics at Marquette University, was a darling of the ecclesiastical Left in the 1970s but has since fallen into relative obscurity.” All of a sudden, given Prof. Harak and Maguire’s comments, for Professor Reno to say that “the 1970s is still going strong” at Marquette’s Theology Department seems pretty on target.

• Why Van's the Man - January 5th, 2009
• 9th Cir. Screws up Scouts' Case - January 5th, 2009
• Favorite Moment in the Final Days - December 29th, 2008
• Over on MULS Faculty Blog - December 29th, 2008
• The Race for DPI Superintendent - December 29th, 2008