Remember Prof. Dan Maguire, the putatively Catholic theologian teaching at Marquette University who is an open dissenter on the whole range of Catholic teaching? Last June he sent out to every Congressman on Capitol Hill and every US bishop his pamphlet called “A Catholic Defense of Same-Sex Marriage.” (I’ve uploaded a PDF of the booklet.) He also authored another booklet called “The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion.” Both are exemplary examples of heterodoxy and dissent and the defense of evil by calling it good.
In fact, they are so bad that it pushed the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to take action. (Thus you know it has to be bad.) The USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine has issued a Statement Concerning Two Pamphlets taking them apart, point by point, which is laudable. I hope that the USCCB takes the opportunity to follow up by similarly distributing this statement to every office on Capitol Hill.
I’m left wondering, though, what action will be taken next. After all, the USCCB has very clearly demonstrated that Maguire cannot be trusted to express the Church’s teaching on many matters of sexual morality. So will he be allowed to continue to teach theology at a Catholic university “in the Jesuit tradition” such as Marquette? Or is it part of the Jesuit tradition to give a platform to heterodox distorters of the truth?
After all, we can’t expect Maguire to change based on this since he has already dismissed, a priori, the authority of the bishops.
The clock is ticking.
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