Theology Chairman’s Same-Sex Wedding Begins ‘Flood’ of Challenges to Catholic Identity

Cardinal Newman Society ^ | July 7, 2015 | CNS staff

[Pecos]

It would seem that if the Catholic Church wanted a simple solution, it could be executed in two steps:

1. Remove from all activities associated with the university all faculty members, tenured or not, and continue their current levels of pay and benefits. Those costs would cease at their deaths, making that a predictable cost.

2. Insert a clause in all new contracts that deviations from Church teachings would supersede any tenure and that penalties could include suspension or contract termination.

These steps would separate Caesar's laws from God's laws. I will freely admit that I am not a Catholic. I only suggest that this may be a way out of this and future similar problems.

[NYer]

With few exceptions, I am talking about the church as a whole, not just the RCC. Christians let their message get diluted and controlled by the world in order to attract more of the world and its money.

Good observations. The issue now, however, is that with the legalization of gay marriage, it is no longer possible to dismiss individuals from their positions of power as a result of their lifestyle. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Hornbeck intentionally scheduled his wedding for the day after the SCOTUS decision.

Hornbeck’s Fordham faculty page states that he has received grants to study “the legal, ethical, and theological dimensions of the relationship between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons and the American Catholic Church.”

Whatever the source, those grants are intended to find a wedge to drive into the Catholic Church. It's been tried in the past. We're still here.

[iowamark]

The seemingly odd thing is that a non-Catholic leftist is the chair of the theology department at a traditionally Catholic college. Unfortunately, this is not unusual at all as most US Catholic colleges have become thoroughly secularized.

[iowamark]

Thank you that for that link:

Wall Street Journal, January 2 2009: “How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma” by Anne Hendershott
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123086375678148323
“”In some cases, church leaders actually started providing “cover” for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.”

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue.” It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians “might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order.”

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: “The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion.””

[FateAmenableToChange]

Hillsdale College, and I believe Grove City also, both refuse all federal funding in order to avoid that type of government intervention into their university message. I don’t know of any religious colleges or universities that are similarly careful, and that’s exactly how the wedge gets driven in.

This is part of what drives me crazy about cultural Christians in general and cultural Catholics in particular. (There are cultural protestants, but since there are so many protestant denominations they can hide more easily). Where is church discipline? Nancy Pelosi slaps the church in the face every time she claims to be a catholic and argues for abortion, homosexual rights, etc. How is she still not excommunicated?

Acquaintances of mine who claim to be Catholic nonetheless promote not just a secular lifestyle, but actual heresies and apostasies that were burning offenses at one point. The trinity is optional, Jesus was just a good teacher, women have a right to an abortion, the Bible doesn’t really mean it’s sinful for two guys to engage in sodomy as long as they really “love” each other, and Dan Brown really nailed it with his expose on Leonardo DaVinci’s conspiracy with Constantine to conceal the grave of Jesus. And they get upset when I suggest that it sounds like they don’t hold any orthodox beliefs sanctioned by the church. Are the priests just not seeing this? People can believe what they want, but they remain completely comfortable claiming to be Catholic despite rejecting all of the church’s teachings.

[Unam Sanctam]

If the Pope wanted to do something really useful, perhaps he could thoroughly reform his own Jesuit order to bring them back to orthodoxy. Not going to happen, I know, but one can wish.