The Bishops' Surrender at CU in 1967 and the scandals of 2002:
The Importance of Implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae
There is a lot of hooting going on these days Catholic campuses when it comes to the way the theology departments are expected to respond to the requirements of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Most Catholics don't have a clue as to what this Church document is all about, and could care less. All Bishops know what it's about, and some even seem to wish it had never been issued. All Catholic Theologians teaching at the nations' Catholic universities also know what its about and most seem to despise it, and seem determined to ignore its requirements for theologians. They feel sure they can get away with this nose up attitude to this document because they sense that the bishops have effectively surrendered in advance, and will not, for the most part, really enforce any of its prescriptions. Most Catholics do not understand any of this historical struggle between the bishops and academicians over who possesses what teaching authority in the Church, and would be utterly mystified by the claim of those like myself who insist that the scandals at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first are directly linked to the complicated issues involved in this struggle.
Only a deliberately myopic mind set could deny or ignore any relation existing between the collapse of moral teaching in the Catholic Church's higher institutions of learning and the growing scandals of priests sexually preying upon children, priests having homosexual lovers, priests having heterosexual lovers, priests stealing wives, priests having illegitimate children, priests involved in pornography, priests dealing in drugs, you name it. The same Catholic institutions that have contributed to a moral relativism in the sexual area of ethics, have denied the application of the tradition of natural law to sexual morality, and have undercut the binding nature of the Church's moral teaching on contraception, abortion, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., by proclaiming the absoluteness of subjective conscience, now place all the blame for the scandals on the bishops, and have thus far refused to even consider whether their own teaching and cultural ambience has contributed to this debacle in any way. These educators, oblivious of their own contribution to this situation, seem to be concerned only with preventing any moral backlash from calling into question the moral legitimacy their teaching has conferred upon everything formerly considered to be sexually deviant, except sex with minors perhaps. There is not a hint so far that they might consider undertaking any serious kind of self examination and reconsideration of the their own role in the sexual revolution in the Catholic Church which now extends to the molestation of innocent children.
Cardinal Stafford of the Pontifical Council on the Laity once wrote that the day after the issuance of Humanae Vitae was "the pivotal day" in the life of the Catholic Church in this country during the Twentieth Century. He pinpointed this particular day because it was the occasion of the signing of a public and widely publicized letter of dissent by Catholic theologians, led by Fr. Charles Curran and other educators at Catholic University, containing a statement of dissent from authoritative Church teaching on contraception. Moreover, this letter was really a Luther-like challenge to Church authority, which would be signed on to, literally or in spirit, by educators all over this country in the succeeding days and weeks and years. Surely this was pivotal moment in that it marked the beginning of the practical, sexual revolution in the Catholic Church here in North America. It was, in retrospect, the day on which the intellectual and practical seeds of the scandals we are living through today were sown far and wide in the Church, and above all in the Catholic institutions of higher learning throughout this land. It was on this day that private conscience, ultimately guided and formed solely by purely personal and subjective norms, was set up against the objective teaching authority of the Church. No longer was the divinely conferred teaching authority of the Church's Magisterium to be understood as having any ultimate binding authority over conscience, via its commission to teach objective norms for living according to the will of God and this provide for the authentic formation of Christian conscience based upon objective truth. No longer would the teaching authority of the Church be considered by most Catholics as having any authority beyond the weight of its arguments, its ability to rationally convince each individual's mind that its teachings were true and therefore binding norms for everyone's conscience.
In July 1968, the whole effort to undermine the teaching authority of the official teachers (the official Magisterium of the Bishops) through this substitution of the subjective conscience had an immediate, two-fold, objective: firstly, to justify the growing dissent of married Catholics on the matter of contraception, which made the dissenting educators extremely popular; and secondly to raise up a parallel and equally authoritative magisterium, a "magisterium" of the intellectuals in the universities, to serve as a competing source for the formation of consciences, an objective which also made these same professors very powerful as well as popular. This latter objective immediately raised the standing and importance of the intelligentsia and their institutions in the practical lives of Catholics, and was nothing less than a revolution in itself, a power grab that altered the very life of the Church in dramatic ways.
But this other revolution, the usurping of teaching authority as distinct from the sexual revolution it produced, did not first arise with the letter of dissent on Humanae Vitae in 1968. It actually began the year before, and began at this same venerable institution of Catholic University of America. This revolution began in 1967 not so much as a power grab by teachers, as a power surrender by bishops to the teachers. This little remembered confrontation was in fact the true "pivotal moment" in the life of the Church in our day, the moment in which a powerful group of bishops, unwittingly to be sure, paved the way for the pivotal moment Stafford refers to in 1968, the dissent on Humanae Vitae, an event which did in fact give rise to the sexual revolution in the Catholic Church. However, were it not for the surrender of those bishops in 1967 at Catholic University, the teachers who led the rebellion in 1968 would not have been in place, or in a position of power, which enabled their letter to become so pivotal for the revolution that followed, the revolution which led to private conscience justifying every form of sexual disorder, including for some priests the molestation of innocent children.
The great surrender of 1967 also involved the same Fr. Curran, and had to do with his teaching tenure at Catholic University. It is a piece of church history that has been passed over all too often, especially given its truly "pivotal" importance in all that followed in terms of the collapse of Catholic moral teaching, and the ecclesial scandals that followed in the wake of that collapse. Curran was denied tenure by the Chancellor of the university because his teachings on sexuality were clearly at odds with, truly contradictory of official church moral teaching in a number of areas. The Chancellor was ex officio the Archbishop of Washington, and he was a simple but courageous Archbishop, Patrick O'Boyle. He at least could see clearly that Curran was not fit to teach moral theology in any Catholic institution, let alone at a Pontifical Faculty of Theology in the United States Bishops' very own Catholic University of America. So O'Boyle rejected Curran's petition for tenure, and all hell broke loose on the Campus, led by the faculty colleagues of Fr. Curran. A strike was quickly called, and the students, understanding nothing but the platitudes about academic freedom that the faculty was raising as the central issue, joined with a large number of faculty in the closing down of the university. (1)
In the face of this strike and all its negative publicity, the committee of bishops who served as the Trustees of Catholic University put an intellectual arm twist on O'Boyle, and after a great deal of pressure (2) the poor man caved. Curran was granted tenure along with a kind of apology from the bishops. However, it was not a mole hill. It was a mountain waiting to crash on the heads of the American hierarchy and the whole church in this country, and it did, the following year. This surrender was, in reality, a surrender of their magisterial authority along with their governmental authority over Catholic institutions of higher learning. The dissenters read it quite correctly for what it was, and they became more not less emboldened in their dissenting, and this spread all through the Church in America, for dissenting teachers everywhere quickly understood that the bishops would never do individually in their own dioceses, dealing with their own Catholic institutions what they could not bring themselves to do collectively at the West Point of Catholic theology faculties, at a university which they owned, and supposedly they governed. In a short year, Catholic teachers who dissented along with the CU faculty, had become the de facto supreme teachers of moral principles and moral norms in their dioceses, and the universities and colleges and even many seminaries no longer worried about any effective interference by their bishop in governing in their own institutions.
In short, by the time Humanae Vitae arrived, the transfer of effective power and teaching authority was already far advanced, and the idea that it took courage to sign that letter of dissent is really something of a joke. It took real courage, by then, not to sign it at C.U., and few had that courage, and if they did they suffered for it (3). Those bishops went home in 1967 satisfied that they had averted a potential public relations disaster, while the fact was that they sown the seed of a much greater disaster, and the deadly plant began to blossom just one year later,
None of those bishops who so blindly surrendered their teaching office and governing power in the CUA debacle to the professors are around today. They certainly were not evil men, and did not deliberately surrender, but they were certainly naive at the very least, and they left their successors a very bad role model indeed, a hands off approach or a take the best PR approach to such problems, and they left their successors a mess in the institutions of higher learning. Even today, after some efforts have been made to reclaim the Catholic identity of these institutions which call themselves Catholic, in how many such institutions is a Catholic understanding of magisterial authority and its binding power on the formation of conscience taught today? In how many such institutions are moral absolutes taught, in how many is the natural law ever taught? These institutions educate the lay educators who work in the Church at large, and what do they teach them when it comes to moral principles, moral norms, conscience, Church teaching authority, etc.? They have become ecclesial islands unto themselves, counter authorities to the bishops, totally self-governing. They are more like Baptist churches in terms of their structural relations to " the Church" than anything we have traditionally understood as Catholic.
This surrender, and its effects on Catholic teaching, culture and moral life, suggests why Ex Corde Ecclesiae is not just another Church document, but is in truth another "pivotal" moment in the life of the Church here in our country. The Church has given the bishops of today a chance to take back from the universities what is theirs, and only theirs. If they enforce this document, we will know that reform has truly begun. The universities may not be capable of genuine reform, and may have to be cut loose, at least no longer allowed to be centers of Catholic teaching and sacramental life. But no real moral and spiritual reform of the Church is possible so long as these institutions stand as parallel magisteriums to that of the bishops, and as independent from any episcopal oversight when it comes to their teaching of Catholic theology. Our Protestant brethren lost many of their original institutions long ago, and we may have to suffer the same loss and basically start over.
If the bishops choose to blink again, surrender again to the universities' challenge to their authority, as their predecessors did in 1967 and 1968, then the reform will not come, and the Church in this country will continue its decline. The scandals will not end, but simply change. Ex Corde Ecclesiae obviously will not be enough to stop scandals in conduct, but it will go along way in restoring the moral authority of the Magisterium, and that will help clarify consciences and lead, hopefully, not only to removing scandals, but more importantly to genuine internal reform of the Church in this country.
Rev. B. Duval
1. A good friend who later became a priest, and a professor and defender of the magisterial authority of the bishops, actually joined the strike as a graduate student, but admitted to me years later that he had no idea what the issues really were at the time. He just bit on the academic freedom bit, and the rest escaped him, as bright as he was, a science major working on his doctorate no less.
2. The argument evidently was that this was a mole hill that they did not want to turn into a cause celebre, and that the very threat of denying tenure would have its positive effect on changing the minds of these men like Curran. Someone who was in a position to know once informed me that the Cardinal who put the most pressure on O'Boyle was the Archbishop of Boston at the time - how ironic if that was indeed the case.
3. It took even greater courage especially if they openly fought it, as did Msgr. Eugene Kavane, who was punished by his dissenting colleagues by being pushed out of his role as Head of the Education Department at C.U. Dissenters don't tolerate dissent from colleagues very well.