Mar
29
“Moderate” vs Authentic
March 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
According to the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Daniel Maguire of Marquette University has been “corrected”, so to speak, by the Committee on Doctrine of the USCCB for his non-Catholic views regarding contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Last June he sent out pamphlets to all the Catholic bishops in the United States called “The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion” and “A Catholic Defense of Same-Sex Marriage”. According to the Committee on Doctrine:
Since it is apparent that considerable efforts have been made to give these views the widest possible distribution as if they were a valid alternative to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the Committee on Doctrine…considers it important to offer a public correction of the erroneous views proposed in these pamphlets.
There is the usual language of proper formation of conscience, and an appeal to the Catechism of the Catholic Church for proper direction on these topics.
Daniel Maguire, a frequent Talking Head in the media when it comes to the solicitation of the “Catholic” point of view, is not widely known as the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to the intellectual defense of Catholic teaching, so his present case of foot-in-mouth disease comes as no surprise. Nor is it surprising, even while it is rather embarrassing, that he is a professor in the Theology department of Marquette University, a nominally Catholic university. Least surprising of all is Dan Maguire’s reaction to the statement by the Committee on Doctrine:
A pity beyond all telling.
His website, The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics, boasts an interview with Maguire in which he laments the “bishops’ failure to get off pelvic issues and talk about peace, poverty and other cutting-edge issues” (and yet he was the one who published a whole book with Oxford University Press in 2003 on precisely the “pelvic issues” that he accuses the bishops of being obsessed with). For those of you who may be interested, there is also a piece about Frances Kissling on the website. You’ll be glad to know that she “keeps the faith” while “backing abortion”.
There is one last item on the Maguire website that interests me. It is called a “Letter from a Catholic Theologian to All 270 United States Catholic Bishops”. It turns out that the “theologian” in question here is none other than Dan Maguire. Maguire’s training is in ethics, though he did earn a degree in “theology” from the Gregorian in Rome (more grade inflation). I have a friend here in the Math department who likes to tell me that he is a philosopher because he earned a PhD (philosophiae doctor) degree in mathematics. So I suppose Maguire thinks he is a theologian because he has the STD degree. That sort of reasoning would dovetail rather nicely with the rest of his logic.
