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Qusetion: What do Marquette University and our national debate over the issue of illegal immigration have in common?

Answer: Absolutely nothing, except that Fr. Wild feels passionately enough about the subject to devote an editorial to it in the Spring issue of the Marquette Magazine.

For the most part, Fr. Wild’s editorial is more balanced than most of the rhetoric stemming from the Democrat/Wall Street Journal approach to the issue, with one somewhat minor exception:

But how much easier it is for us to say that our ancestors deserved to be treated with dignity and not derided as some sort of subhuman species than to grant the same consideration to our nation’s most recent newcomers.

Subhuman? That’s a bit over the top. I don’t think anyone in the anti-illegal immigration movement outside of Robert Byrd’s old Klan thinks that Hispanics are subhuman. I’ll chalk it up to rhetorical flourish.

Beyond that, Wild makes the standard error of equating legal with illegal immigration. Not a terribly unbalanced editorial, as it stands. But what on Earth does an editorial about immigration have to do with Marquette students/alums/etc?

I kept waiting for the editorial to evolve into a commentary on Marquette’s evolution as an institution, or something about its 125-year history, or something about a connection between specific immigrants and the school. I couldn’t even detect something in the rest of the magazine relating to immigration.

Very odd.

At least Fr. Wild is not making up theological history in this issue, as he did with last Spring’s issue of the magazine, where Wild invented a story about the local Bishop in France condemning St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching and his fellow educators coming to his rescue.

We did our homework, which we advise Marquette’s PR office / O’Hara Hall to do in these circumstances. Aquinas was dead three years before the condemnations of the local Bishop, which may have included teachings Aquinas himself had fought against, and did not include an attack on Aquinas work.

The analogy was supposed to represent, or at least in glaring fashion as read by many, a defense of Marquette’s “theology” professor Dan Maguire. Better have your historical analogies in line - especially when you claim to be a theologian yourself - before you make claims relating history to the present.

One more thing about the magazine

I really wish Fr. Wild would have made an attempt to tie his editorial into the rest of the magazine, because there are a number of great cross-cultural pieces. It just stands out so much.

Alas, I enjoyed this line from a story, titled “Dublin Curtain Call,” about a future theatre production at Marquette.

What do you think about people who know something bad is happening but don’t do anything about it?”

Perhaps we could ask Simon “They love him to death” Harak about knowing something bad is happening and not doing anything about it.

Update: For old times’ sake and because, along with three-quarters of our old posts, my original post debunking the Aquinas myth is gone, here is the saved email from Dr. John Grabowski, Associate Professor and Director of Moral Theology/Ethics at Catholic University of America:

In my understanding the condemnations of Bishop Tempier in Paris took place in 1277 (St. Thomas died in 1274). Aquinas was not named in the condemnations but rather implicated in that some of the propositions sounded like positions he (along with other theologians influenced by Aristotelian philosophy) had defended (e.g., the immateriality of angels, the unity of the substantial form in the human person). Therefore he was not defended by a University which refused to remove him (he had taught at the University of Naples from 1272-1274) as the article implies. St Thomas was canonized in 1323 and the condemnations dropped altogether in 1325.

Dr. Grabowski contended that “some of the facts in the story are accurate,” namely, the fact of the condemnations, though their focus of attack was not as Wild suggested.

Grabowski also went on to entirely dismiss the analogy by Fr. Wild of St. Thomas Aquinas to not-quite-a-St. Dan Maguire:

However, it is highly misleading to compare the innovation of St. Thomas who harmonized Augustinian theology with a newly re-introduced Aristotelian philosophy to Dan McGuire who has repudiated very authoritative and solemnly defined Church doctrine (such as the evil of direct abortion—cf. Evangelium Vitae, no. 62). In this regard Fr. Wild should know better. There simply is no parallel.

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