Justice for Father Curran: Part 2

The first part of this entry from February 12 can be read in its entirety by scrolling down beneath today’s entry of February 19. References are to Loyal Dissent unless otherwise indicated.
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 THE ROLLER COASTER OF 1967 AND 1968:
 
On April 17, 1967, Father Charles Curran was informed by his employer, The Catholic University of America, that his application for promotion had been rejected and that his employment at CUA was terminated. Why he was fired is rather simple to explain, on one level. Some of the members of the CUA board of trustees, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, were disturbed by allegations that Father Curran was teaching heresy at the only Pontifical University in the United States. Recall that the Bishop of Rochester, New York had released Father Curran for approximately the same reasons just two years earlier.
 
No one has ever proved that most U.S. bishops wished for Curran’s firing. The decision was not made by the full body of bishops in an annual meeting. The actual vote, by a representative group of the USCCB, was 28-1 against Curran. The dissenting vote came from the much-respected Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta. At the time of the vote, Curran had lectured at CUA for just two years. From a distance it seems unusual to build such ecclesiastical animus in that relatively brief period. As I noted in Part 1, some of the complaints about Curran to Cardinal O’Boyle were, at the least, eccentric. On the other hand, the moral professor was making a name for himself in his teaching and public speaking. He published Christian Morality Today [1966, revised 1971] and contributed to several national Catholic academic journals. He recruited friends in the field to apply to teach at Catholic University. Again, from the first post, my own collegiate theological advisor in seminary utilized Curran’s theology in my personal/professional guidance.
 
What those on the USCCB overlooked was the atmosphere at Catholic University, a subtle but growing alienation of the faculty from its overlords. Of course, in the unsettled 1960’s, Catholic University was hardly the only school with issues. Recall Columbia University in 1968. When Curran was released by the university, he made a public statement that due process had been denied him, a brilliant tactical move which took the issue from religious controversy to civil rights. Curran’s claim was, in fact, true. His theological department had voted unanimously for his advancement just weeks before, and the USCCB override brought the entire lay faculty into solidarity with their religious counterparts. Within hours. emergency meetings of faculty and students were held. A campus-wide strike was called for full reinstatement of Curran, with general faculty voting 400-18 to support the theology faculty. Between 3000 and 4000 students and supporters rallied peacefully in support of Curran. The CUA standoff became national news on such media arms as The New York Times and Time Magazine.

In his autobiography Curran admits that there was concern over how long the siege could last, so to speak, [p. 38] But as he recalls, the USCCB was under much greater pressure, and its senior members such as Cardinals Lawrence Sheehan of Baltimore and Richard Cushing of Boston criticized the vote against him. Finally, senior members of the university’s administration met with Washington’s Cardinal O’Boyle and reversed its previous ruling. Curran was promoted to associate professor effective in September 1967 and would serve the University until the Vatican examined his works in 1986. [See below.] In the narrative of the 1967 events, Curran notes that over the years he has learned more of the internal discussions of his case, but that some minutes of meetings in the university archives have been put off limits to more recent historians. [pp. 43-47]
 
Curran had been on record as calling for a reexamination of the Church’s teaching against artificial birth control as taught by Pope Pius XI in 1930. With the availability of the birth control pill since 1960, there was hope among many that the teaching might be altered or reversed. However, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae [“on human life”] which maintained that all acts of marital intercourse must be open to the conception of human life. I reread the encyclical this morning and came away again, as I have in the past, with the sense that Pope Paul was trying to salvage the authority of the papacy as well as address procreative principles. This is unfortunate, because the document addresses a variety of valid concerns over which there were minimal disagreements. The pope had strong words for countries [notably China] where centralized government limited the size of families, and for marriages where husbands demanded sex from their wives without consent—an unfortunate common occurrence which we correctly address as “marital rape” today.
 
The efforts of the American hierarchy to enforce the pope’s teaching were very uneven. For Father Curran, some of the pressures must have seemed like déjà vu of the previous year, except that in 1968 the ax of obedience hung over the heads of all priests, and particularly of teachers of morality in colleges and seminaries—and certainly the theology faculty of the Catholic University of America. At least in 1968 he had much more company in the foxhole. But Curran was instrumental in organizing a nationwide statement of disapproval of Humanae Vitae from 87 of the country’s prominent Catholic theologians, the “87” became something of a slogan; eventually Curran’s name would become the handle for professional dissent. Eventually 600 professional Catholic leaders would sign the statement.
 
Penalties for dissent were sporadic and often implemented reluctantly. Some bishops realized that there was no way to enforce the teaching among the faithful per se. What individuals chose to disclose or withhold in the confessional was ultimately an exercise of personal conscience. Could a priest ask a penitent about contraception in the confessional? I can say that in my own seminary education we were never told to pry about anything in our function as confessors; later I learned that St. Alphonsus Ligouri and St. John Vianney, two famous confessors, held the same positions. With this in mind, it is easier to understand why, collectively, the bishops wished that priests—particularly the theologians—vigorously upheld Humanae Vitae rather than publicly question it. In the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, Cardinal O’Boyle revoked the faculties of forty of his diocesan priests who publicly dissented from the encyclical. In 1971 the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome intervened with O’Boyle, who invited the priests back to full service. Only 19 remained; the others had left the priesthood.
 
Father Curran and his colleagues fell under the civil discipline of the university, a prolonged [“glacial,” in Curran’s words] series of hearings and assessments by university officials and then by the trustees, the body of the USCCB or United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The hearings were still in progress when I showed up at CUA’s school of philosophy in September 1969. The bottom line: dissent from non-infallible teaching was tolerated, but faculty members were [forbidden? Advised not to?] make their dissent public. It was an awkward conclusion, but Curran and his colleagues were not disciplined…except for their lawyers’ fees. In concluding Chapter 3, Curran reflects upon his role as the public “dissident of the Church,” and 1967 and 1968 were difficult for him but the circumstances left him little choice but to stand on principle. [pp. 67-69] It does occur to me in 2026 that the principle of synodality—scorned by some, ignored by many bishops—may save us from future theological showdowns. We cannot ignore that, for example, 83% of practicing Catholics in the United States favor the use of artificial contraception, per the 2024 PEW Research survey. That cannot be laid at the doorstep of poor old Charlie Curran.
 
Moral theology, like all academic disciplines, falls under the rigors of academic research, but the task is harder here because of the faith element. Curran devotes several chapters to laying out his methodology [see Chapters 4 and 7 through 10]. He cites the principles that guided his work early in Chapter 4:
 
“The principal aspects of my developing methodology were the importance of historical consciousness, the recognition of historical development in many teachings and the influence of outmoded biological understandings of human sexuality, the need for a critical evaluation of the experience of Christian people, and the problematic aspects of the neo-scholastic understanding of natural law.” [p. 72]
 
Curran argues that the Church must consider “historical consciousness” or the thinking at the time a principle was first codified. This is obvious in Old Testament morality, which permitted fathers to put recalcitrant daughters to death and to stone homosexuals, to cite just two examples. St. Thomas Aquinas, the man at the heart of medieval morality, held that the sex of a fetus was assigned naturally in males after forty days, and females after 80-90 days in the womb. Medical knowledge in the twenty-first century, particularly in the realm of reproductive medicine but also in psychotropic medicine and other fields, can bring significant information to moral puzzles. As a psychotherapist myself, I often think about the moral impact of commonly used mood stabilizers and other drugs. If an angry or destructive individual softens his stance toward others after taking Prozac/fluoxetine, just to cite one drug, are we looking at a moral reform or a chemical alteration?
 
A HIGH PRICE TO PAY
 
After the confrontations of 1967 and 1968, Curran enjoyed both a high degree of respect from most of his academic and theological peers at Catholic University and opposition from those whose tactics exceeded the normal extension of peer review. The years leading up to 1986 were filled with classes and dissertation supervision, requests for lectures around the country, and prodigious writing—multiple books, journals, and contributions to the prestigious Theological Studies, published by the Jesuits.
 
As the author notes in Chapter 4, the academic landscape around theology was changing over the 1970’s and 1980’s. Pope John Paul II was elected in 1978, and he appointed the theologian and archbishop Joseph Ratzinger [the future Pope Benedict XVI] Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Together they sought to reinforce doctrinal discipline around the world, targeting theologians of note whose teachings were viewed by the Vatican as beyond the pale of official Church doctrine. Curran received notification as early as 1979 that his works were under review in Rome, and over the next several years he received correspondence requesting more detail. Curran objected—as he had years earlier—about the absence of due process. But under Ratzinger the Holy Office was determined to bring into line the scholars shaping the cutting edge of contemporary moral theology. Several American theologians, colleagues of Curran, had their works publicly cited as beyond Roman Catholic teaching; some lost teaching positions in Catholic institutions. In 1984 Curran, along with Hans Kung of Switzerland and two others, was cited for “robbing the encyclical [Humanae Vitae] of its intended effect by [his] dissent. [p. 112]
 
Loyal Dissent goes into considerable detail about the charges against the author, as well as the friends, churchmen, and colleagues who supported him. [Hans Kung, who had been stripped of his faculties to teach as a Catholic theologian, flew to Washington to console Curran.] On July 25, 1986, Pope John Paul II signed a letter to Curran stating that “one who dissents from the Magisterium as you do is not suitable nor eligible to teach Catholic theology.” Put simply, the pope had revoked the priest’s right to teach theology for any Catholic institution around the world. Curran would appear on “Meet the Press” on the following Sunday to explain his reasoning not to recant his position on due process owed to theologians, but the game was up. Chapter 6 describes Curran’s subsequent civil suit against CUA, arguing that the university, as a civil chartered university, had violated his rights by breaking his contract. The court ruled against him on February 28, 1989.
 
WHAT NEXT?
 
The Vatican’s ruling against him did not in any way invalidate his teaching degrees. His doctorate in theology, for example, was still civilly valid. Thus, any non-Catholic institution of higher learning could offer him a position, and this is what happened in 1987 when Cornell University of the Ivy League offered him a one-year position as holder of the Kanab Chair in Catholic Studies, endowed by a Catholic donor on the board of trustees. Cornell, incidentally, is in the Catholic Diocese of Rochester, where Curran was ordained and remains incardinated, as far as I know.
 
[I should explain here that many excellent non-Catholic colleges and universities—state and private--offer courses and degrees in Catholic studies, and it goes without saying that Catholic bishops have no legal right to interfere with such employment. One of my Catholic colleagues years ago—a teacher in a Catholic high school—had earned her degree at Vanderbilt.]
 
The following year Curran taught at Southern Cal University—yes, the school with the football team. His next year found him at Auburn—yes, the school with the football team. [I have never researched whether the Tigers and the Trojans ever played each other in football during Curran’s tenure at either school.] By this time, however, the traveling professor was looking to set roots for a long-term professorship and residence. Southern Methodist University, as it turned out, had its eye on the former Catholic University professor for some time. Except for opposition from the Dallas Catholic bishop that was quickly put to bed by SMU’s governing hierarchy, Curran was offered a tenured position which allowed him the opportunity to teach, research, write, and honor invitations to lecture.
 
Is there anything odd about a Catholic priest theologian unpacking his library and suitcase for a long term stay at a Methodist University? Not at all. Over the twentieth century Catholic and other Christian theologians came to appreciate—in scholarly circles, at least—that their research and propositions were bringing them closer together; they were, in many cases, looking for answers to the same question. [Pope Pius’ 1943 instruction allowed Catholic Biblical scholars to interact with Protestant Biblical scholars on methods of Biblical study.] Curran’s historical background in Catholic moral studies would have been invaluable to his colleagues. The reverse was also true: Curran received at SMU what every academic must have for credibility: peer review from fellow faculty and researchers. This is probably a primary reason why Curran wished to settle in a long-term residence near other working theologians.
 
In recent years, since about 2000, I have not been able to stay afloat with Curran’s most recent writings except for occasional journal pieces. However, in general, I have the impression that moral theology as a faith discipline has evolved in all Christian traditions, toward Biblical, political, and social concerns. I also sense that the best Catholic students of theology are lay, not clerics, studying in “safe havens,” i.e., away from Catholic denominational schools. Massimo Fagioli, professor at Vilanova in 2024, produced an excellent book on the future of religion in the classrooms of our colleges and universities. [See my review here.] The last three moral books I read were written by women scholars. The same is true of Biblical studies. Times are changing.
 
When historians look back a century from now, I believe they will evaluate the role of Charles Curran and his works on morality as a major factors in a transitional time, between excessive legalism and a new age of subjective human acceptance of the Word of God and the pillar of a new morality structure, a greater sensitivity to Jesus’ command, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
 
Good health to you, Father Curran, and thanks.