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Charles E. Curran: Catholic Theologian, Priest, Prophet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Daniel C. Maguire
Daniel C. Maguire
Affiliation:
Marquette University
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Extract

To introduce so dear a friend and so esteemed a colleague, I repair for help to five distinguished, tone-setting keynoters. Each of these keynoters touches themes that reflect the life and the theological mission of Charles E. Curran.

My first keynoter is Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. In his Presidential Address to the Catholic Theological Society of America he said that Vatican II “implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of dissent.” The council, said Dulles, conceded “that the ordinary magisterium of the Roman Pontiff had fallen into error, and had unjustly harmed the careers of loyal and able theologians.” He mentioned John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and Yves Congar. He could surely add the name of Charles E. Curran. Dulles said that certain teachings of the hierarchy “seem to evade in a calculated way the findings of modern scholarship. They are drawn up without broad consultation with the theological community. Instead, a few carefully selected theologians are asked to defend a pre-established position….” Dulles aligned himself with those theologians who do not limit the term “magisterium” to the hierarchy. He spoke of “two magisteria—that of the pastors and that of the theologians.” These two magisteria are “complementary and mutually corrective.” The theological magisterium may critique the hierarchical magisterium.

Type
Editorial Essays
Information
Horizons , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 114 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2002

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References

1 Dulles, Avery, “Presidential Address: The Theologian and The Magisterium,” Proceedings of The Catholic Theological Society of America 31 (1976): 235–46.Google Scholar Eight years before Dulles' Presidential address I argued for the distinction between the hierarchical magisterium and the theological magisterium and spoke of the two magisteria as “mutually corrective” in “Moral Absolutes and the Magisterium,” in Absolutes in Moral Theology, ed. Curran, Charles E. (Washington, DC: Corpus Instrumentorum, 1968).Google Scholar The term “official teaching” is theologically defective. The question is not what teaching is “official” in the sense of what is taught by officials, but rather what teaching is true.

2 Dulles, Avery, “The Revolutionary Spirit of Thomas Aquinas,” Origins 4 (13 February 1975): 543.Google Scholar

3 Aquinas, Thomas, In 4 Sent., D. 19Google Scholar, q. 2, qua. 2, ad 4.

4 Quodlibet 3, q. 4, art. 1. Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, chap. 2.

5 Dulles, , “Presidential Address,” 243.Google Scholar

6 Ratzinger, Joseph, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” in Vorgrimler, Herbert, ed., Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 5: 116.Google Scholar

7 Curran, Charles E., Ongoing Revision in Moral Theology (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1975), 265.Google Scholar

8 Visibly missing in the reaction to Ex Corde Ecclesiae is the New Testament virtue of parresia. See Acts 4:13. This theological virtue rises “ex magna animi constantia firmaque veritatis persuasione.” One who has this virtue “non veretur aliquid aut dicere aut clare dicere.” Zorell, Francis S.J., Lexicon Graecum Novi Testamenti (Paris: Lethielleux, 1931), 1012.Google Scholar

9 “Decree on Ecumenism,” The Documents of Vatican II, Abbott, Walter M., General Editor (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), #23, p. 365.Google Scholar See also #3, pp. 345–46.

10 There is also broad and deep agreement on these issues among the world's nonChristian religions. See Maguire, Daniel C., Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).Google Scholar Of these religions the Second Vatican Council, in the “Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church” said “truth and grace are to be found among the nations, as a sort of secret presence of God,” #9, pp. 595–96.

11 See, e.g., his Moral Theology at the End of the Century, The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 1999 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

12 Brunner, Emil, Justice and the Social Order (London: Lutterworth, 1945), 7.Google Scholar

13 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I–II q. 18Google Scholar, a. 3. Throughout this Quaestio 18 Thomas makes the point that morality must be judged “secundum diversa,” according to diverse circumstances. Some circumstances “enter into the principal condition of the object in such wise that they determine the moral species” (a. 10). The rational mean of the virtues, the fulcrum for the balanced understanding of a virtue, is “according to the diverse circumstances” I–II, q. 64, a.1, ad 2).

14 Ongoing Revision, 291–92.

15 Ibid., 293.

16 Ibid., 283.

17 Ibid., 287.

18 For a study that is the empirical verification of the doctrine of original sin, see Ponting, Clive, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1991).Google Scholar

19 Ongoing Revision, 290–91.

20 Heyzer, Noeleen, The Balancing Act: Population, Development, and Women in an era of Globalization (Chicago: MacArthur Foundation, 1996), 16–17.Google Scholar

21 Cohen, Joel E., “Population Growth and the Earth's Human Carrying Capacity,” Science, 269, (21 July 1996): 34.Google Scholar

22 See Platt, Anne E., Infecting Ourselves: How Environmental and Social Disruption Trigger Disease W.P., 129 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 1996.)Google Scholar

23 Aquinas, Thomas, Omnia Opera: Sententia Libri Politicorum (Rome: Ad Sanctae Sabinae, 1971)Google Scholar, Book II, chap. 15, also, chaps. 6, 13, 17. On the thorny problem of governmental regulation of fertility, see Maguire, Daniel C. and Rasmussen, Larry L., Ethics for a Small Planet: New Horizons on Population, Consumption, and Ecology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 10–18Google Scholar, for my comments on “China and the Draconian Critical Mass.”

24 Mitchell, Jennifer D., “Before the Next Doubling,” Worldwatch 11/1 (January-February 1998): 23.Google ScholarPubMed

25 John Bongaarts of the Population Council, letter in The New York Times, 9 November 1997.

26 See Orr, David W., Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 3–5Google Scholar, and Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), 1–3.

27 Congar, Yves, Tradition et les traditions (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1960), 164.Google Scholar Congar notes that this switch is undermined by a chastening look at history. He cites: “le probleme de certaines contradictions ou divergences entre un enonce et un autre: comment etait-ce possible, si tous venaient du meme Saint-Esprit?” 165.

28 “…aequivalet revelationi vel consummat illam, ut ita dicam.” See Suarez, De Fide, disp. III, sect. 2, n. 11 (Opera, ed. Vives, vol. XII, p. 100).

29 Sacrorum concilorum nova et amplissima collectio, ed. Mansi, Giovanni Domenico, Martin, Jean Baptiste, and Petit, Louis (Paris: H. Welter, 1927), 52:1214.Google Scholar

30 Acta Apostolicae Sedis 58 (1966): 892–96.

31 This same mischievous theology is employed by D'Arcy, Bishop John M. in his “Ex Corde Ecclesiae: From the Heart of the Church,” Today's Catholic (5 September 1999), pp. 12–17Google Scholar to defend the mysterious power of single local bishops to evaluate the theology of professors from dozens of different areas of expertise in deciding their worthiness of a “mandate.” This astonishing feat is to be achieved “by the help of the Holy Spirit,” The “ultimate criterion of truth,” “the standard” is the hierarchical magisterium.

32 Summa Theologiae Moralis: De Praeceptis Dei et Ecclesiae (New York: Pustet, 1941), # 173, p. 168.

33 Davis, Henry, Moral and Pastoral Theology (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), 2:84.Google Scholar

34 Thijssen, J.M.M.H., Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris: 1200–1400, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 94.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 112.

36 Ibid., 115.

37 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodlibet VII, 404–05.Google Scholar Quoted in Thijssen, 92.

38 See Thijssen's conclusions, 112.