For the good of the Church.

Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian Charles E. Curran (Georgetown University Press, 2006, 280 pp) 1589010876, $26.95

CHARLES CURRAN IS PERHAPS the leading moral theologian in the Catholic tradition in the world today. He has published 33 monographs, two co-written books and 18 edited collections since 1961. His writings cover both sexual and social ethics. His work has not just discussed a range of particular issues, but also critically probed the underlying methodology and world view of the traditional Catholic views on these subjects. He has formulated the new methodology and perspective needed for reform.

Curran is, in his own self-understanding as well as in the minds of his colleagues, a moderate. He seeks well-founded revision of the Catholic tradition, while remaining solidly within its core values. In spite of this moderation and loyalty, in 1986, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--formerly the Inquisition--declared that he was officially not a Catholic theologian, and that he was "neither suitable or eligible" to teach Catholic theology. This judgment drove Curran from his tenured position at Catholic University, where he had taught for more than 20 years. Shunned by Catholic colleges and universities, he spent four years seeking a job. After short-term positions at Cornell, Southern California and Auburn, he was hired as the Scurlock professor of human values at Southern Methodist in Dallas and its Perkins School of Theology.

This memoir of his intellectual development as a moral theologian in the Catholic tradition--and his relentless persecution by magisterial Catholicism, culminating in his official repudiation is both enormously insightful and depressing. Here is a careful and responsible thinker, revered by the vast majority of his Catholic and Protestant colleagues, whom hierarchical Catholicism cannot tolerate. Why? In Curran's own account, he started out as a quite conservative thinker, but was drawn to a path of critical modernization of Catholic thought through the work of established Catholic theologians such as Bernard Haring during his studies in Rome. He early on began to take on the controversial issues of sexual ethics, such as contraception, homosexuality and divorce. He exposed the untenable argumentation that lay behind traditional views based on outmoded biology, essentialism lacking in historical consciousness, a questionable view of natural law rooted in a concept of the design of the physical body that ignored the human person and a failure to consult the experience of people in daily life. These views were associated with a false capacity of the magisterium to attain absolute certitude, shielded from doubt or the possibility of revision.

ALTHOUGH CURRAN MAKES CLEAR that a credible Catholic moral theology or ethics must take on exactly these principles using contemporary knowledge of biology, historical consciousness, respect for human experience and an ethic of relationality, his struggle with the magisterium finally comes down to a contest between critical reason and an authoritarianism that rejects criticism. Curran does not simply challenge authority in the name of the rights of conscience. For him, both conscience and authority are subject to the norm of moral truth. Both must seek moral truth and bow to the best knowledge of truth that can be discerned by a combination of scientific knowledge and best moral values from our traditions of human experience. This best knowledge will never lead to absolute certainty; infallible knowledge is not available to fallible humans in the arena of morality. But we can attain a high presumption of moral truth if we carefully draw on these critical sources of knowledge. Authority cannot trump this best knowledge, but must be informed by it in order to be credible.

Curran evades the infallibility question by carefully distinguishing between infallible truth (doctrines such as the trinity, drawn from revelation) and fallible truths based on human reason and experience. For him, moral teachings fall into the latter category, and thus are intrinsically fallible and subject to continual revision. His conflict with the Vatican finally comes down to its rejection of the notion that its teaching on morality belongs to fallible rather than infallible knowledge. The right to dissent from moral teachings in areas such as abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality is thus rejected in principle by the Vatican.

CURRAN UNDOUBTEDLY CAME under the unforgiving ire of the Vatican for more than his questioning of its teaching on these sexual issues. What must have been most intolerable to them was that he refused to back down, to accept some face-saving statement that he had withdrawn his views. Instead, he organized protests against Vatican efforts at repression. In 1968, Catholic University. faculty and students went out on strike in support of Curran, and the university backed down and promoted him, rather than firing him. Curran has organized protests of many repressive moves, gathering thousands of signatures on petitions against Vatican decisions. When he was threatened with condemnation in 1986, tens of thousands signed petitions of protest. When the condemnation went ahead anyway, denying his right to continue teaching, Curran sued Catholic University for breach of contract.

Curran refuses to knuckle under. He maintains his positions and insists that they be dealt with rationally. He does this for the good of the church and for the good of Catholic education. For Curran, becoming respectful of truth will make Catholicism a better Christian community. Academic freedom will make Catholic colleges places of authentic education.

ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER, PH.D., is professor emerita of the Graduate Theological Union at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., and teaches at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. She is a Catholics for a Free Choice board member.