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“Colluding in the Sovietization of Catholic intellectual life”?

The narrative isn’t anything new.

A Catholic university or college invites a “leading Catholic theologian” to give a talk or to function as a visiting professor.  Individuals and groups from outside the institution perform a background check, uncovering facts about this theologian’s public opinions that dissent from Church teaching.  Those outsiders publicize the invitation and facts, asking “Why is this Catholic university or college inviting this person?”  Unable to defend the invitation in the face of the controversy stirred up by those outsiders, the institution’s president “disinvites” the theologian.

In response, the theologian runs to the left-of-center Catholic press.  Berating the institution for capitulating to that tiny minority who seek to silence “free discussion” about Church teaching, the theologian asserts that even worse yet is how this bullying represents a mortal threat to academic freedom in Catholic higher education.  Then, too, there’s the omnipresent Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).  How long before it steps in to quash discussion by labeling the Church’s “thinkers” as “heretics”?

All of this coalesces as the left-of-center Catholic press bandies about its one-sided version of the “facts.”  For example, it quotes other like-minded “leading theologians” who accuse the institution, among other things, of “colluding in the Sovietisation of Catholic intellectual life which many feel is one of the saddest features of the contemporary church.”

That’s the narrative.  While the script hasn’t changed for several decades, some names have changed.

Sadly, a lot of people buy into the storyline because the left-of-center Catholic press, take the National Catholic Reporter, for example, tout the latest iteration whole cloth and unchallenged.

Yet, the claims should be challenged:

  1. A “tiny minority” is seeking to silence discussion about Church teaching.  Really?  Whether it’s a minority or not is immaterial.  What is material is the answer to this question: “Who is really seeking to silence discussion?”  Could it possibly be the so-called “majority” whose leaders don’t want anyone challenging their views or control of these institutions?   What indemnifies these consummate insiders from critique?
  2. This tiny minority presents a “threat” to academic freedom.  Really?  It all depends upon definitions.  In its objective meaning, academic freedom is the guarantee that a professor possesses the absolute right to pursue the truth unfettered and wherever the facts may lead.  Academic freedom does not guarantee the right for a professor to say whatever he or she wants, that is to say, to take academic license and present as “fact” what are nothing more than mere “speculations” or personal “opinions.”  Ask Ward Churchill who learned this lesson the hard way at the University of Colorado.  This type of discussion should transpire between those who possess the competence to speak authoritatively and in a public forum where the clash of ideas and data assist in the pursuit of truth.
  3. Post-Vatican II Catholic theologians have a different, more independent relationship to the Church, its Magisterium, and the CDF.  Many Catholic theologians in U.S. Catholic higher education—and especially those touted by the left-of-center Catholic press—believe they are neither subordinate to nor are they responsible to the Church, its Magisterium, or the CDF.  Instead, these theologians believe they are subordinate to and responsible to the truth as they define it.  Why?  They possess a unique, divinely inspired, personal vocation and magisterium.  Their call is to define Church teaching and purify it from error.  Is that not precisely what the Protestant reformers argued?

Overlooking these flaws, it is interesting to note how those insiders are increasingly turning to Blessed John Henry Newman as their patron.  For example:

[Newman] criticized the “shortsightedness” of those who “have thought that the strictest Catholic University could by its rules and its teachings exclude” intellectual challenges to faith.

The cultivation of the intellect involves that danger, and where it is absolutely excluded, there is no cultivation.

Yes, Newman did criticize such shortsightedness.  But, the particular intellectual challenges Newman was addressing in his day were those raised by Enlightenment philosophy and Protestant theology.  In addition, Newman was particularly disturbed at how theology was being systematically excluded from the curriculum.  In his Idea of a University, Newman argued that the faculty of a Catholic university must address those challenges so that students, yes, would develop their intellects.  But, they’d do so in a way that would enable them to think about these matters as Catholics do.

It’s time that those “insiders” in U.S. Catholic higher education and their willing accomplices in the left-of-center Catholic press stop making a piñata of those “outsiders” who are calling them to accountability.  It’s also time to stop quoting Blessed John Henry Newman out of context.

To read the NCR article, click on the following link:
http://ncronline.org/news/theology/university-withdraws-theologians-invitation-after-pressure-financial-contributors

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Paul W. Primavera
Monday, November 5, AD 2012 11:07am

I believe that the Sovietization of Catholic Intellectual Life is happening as these liberal progressive Democrat professors and lectures and academics and intellectuals accuse, except THEY are the ones responsible for the Sovietization – they with the communist propaganda are the source of this autocratic cutailment of Catholic Intellectual thinking and life.

Clinton
Clinton
Monday, November 5, AD 2012 12:03pm

The Queen of Sciences, Theology, has been debauched and left in a ditch,
exposed to the ridicule of passers-by. I defy anyone to name a single heresy
or perversion for which one cannot find a “leading Catholic theologian” some-
where willing to jump to its defense.

Just who decides who gets to label themselves a “Catholic theologian”,
anyway? Our bishops got out of that line of work decades ago. Under the
most recent Code of Canon Law they are required to evaluate theologians for
a mandatum and theology textbooks for an imprimatur, but
those minimal responsibilities are largely ignored.

Since the bishops have mostly punted on their responsibilities in this area, it’s
been the apparatchiks in Catholic academia who have stepped into the vacuum.
Want to call yourself a “leading Catholic theologian”? You could go your entire
career without giving a fig what your Ordinary (or the Church he represents)
thinks, but you’d best be friendly with whomever is on your school’s hiring
committee. (Mind you, a fair number of those people probably aren’t even
Catholic). Ditto for the publishers of theological journals.

It is axiomatic that all organisms must eat and excrete, and organizations are
no different. Yet it appears that there is no mechanism left in Catholic
academia whereby the ‘wheat’ theologians may be separated from those who
are ‘tares’. What cannot excrete must necessarily fill up with… excrement.

I don’t think that Catholic intellectual life is in any danger of “Sovietisation”,
at least not by the orthodox minority. The enforcement of groupthink by
the PC, National catholic Reporter-style apparatchiks in academia
is another story.

solly gratia
solly gratia
Monday, November 5, AD 2012 2:14pm

I thought it was Tina Beattie you were referring to, even before I read the NCR article; it was reported over here a few weeks ago. Of course, Ms Beattie can claim that such actions are unheard of over here, because we don’t have “Such-and-Such Catholic University”. We barely have seminaries in the US model. She spends her time in secular academe, feted as a modern catholic academic who is happy to question all and anything, for the sake of academic freedom and peer review. Let’s just forget formation, the real purpose of doctrine, not incumbancies and a long bibliography of articles…

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Monday, November 5, AD 2012 5:48pm

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c matt
c matt
Tuesday, November 6, AD 2012 5:44pm

It’s barely even a flesh wound to his continued employment, much less a mortal threat to academic freedom. Sheesh, what a drama queen.

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Thursday, November 8, AD 2012 10:06am

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