The Modern Inquisition

While they may not specifically know his name, Charles Edward Curran has had a pervasive and profound influence on the way most contemporary Catholics, particularly those from the English-speaking world, form their consciences and act on moral, and especially interpersonal issues. Curran is a warm, generous, friendly person with a raucous laugh and a great ability to enliven a theological point with a funny story. Despite a prodigious published output, he is still amazingly generous with his time; his own bishop, Matthew Clark of Rochester, says of him: ‘He lives simply and has a remarkable ability to combine a life of serious scholarship with generous availability to a variety of persons.’ Also, unlike many academics, he enjoys teaching.

Perhaps precisely because of his influence, popularity and American nationality, the CDF began a major investigation of Curran in 1979. The US was the homeland of so-called ‘situational ethics’, which the French still superciliously refer to as ‘Anglo-Saxon morality’, and American Catholic moralists are often unjustly tarred with this brush. So Rome decided it could make an example of Curran. After a protracted process, on 25 July 1986 Ratzinger wrote to the chancellor of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where Curran was employed as a tenured professor, to inform him that Curran was neither ‘suitable nor eligible to exercise the function of a professor of Catholic theology’; the chancellor was instructed to take the ‘appropriate action’. The chancellor at the time was the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal James Hickey. On 2 June 1988, the Board of Trustees at the university declared that Curran could not teach Catholic theology at that institution. This led to a civil case, which finally came to an end on 28 February 1989, in which the judge found in favour of the Catholic University of America. After brief stints as a visiting professor at Cornell and the University of Southern California, Curran became Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1991.

Richard McCormick says that ‘the Curran affair ranks as among the most significant developments in moral theology in the past 50 years’ (Theological Studies, 50 (1989), p. 17). At the heart of the Curran case is the theological question of the right to dissent from authoritative but non-infallible papal teaching. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the CDF has attempted increasingly to constrict the role of theologians to that of apologists for the papal magisterium, and to blur the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teaching. Curran has strongly defended the right of Catholics to dissent from non-infallible teaching.

At another level, the Curran case has widespread ramifications for other moralists. Curran criticised the physicalism in some papal teaching in moral matters; for example, contraception, sterilisation, homosexuality, and the principle of double effect. The problem with physicalism comes from identifying the moral act with the physical structure of the act. Contraception, for example, according to the official teaching is wrong because it interferes with the physical act of marital relations. However, outside the area of sexuality, Catholic teaching does not identify the human moral act with the physical structure of the act. Killing is a physical act, but not all killing is wrong. It is murder that is morally wrong. One must distinguish between physical or non-moral evil and truly moral evil. In this light many theologians such as Franz Böckle, Josef Fuchs and Richard McCormick developed a theory of proportionalism: one can directly do physical or non-moral evil (e.g. interfere with the physical structure of the marital act) if there is a proportionate reason. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Curran frequently wrote about these controversial issues in sexual ethics. Hence it is not surprising that he was targeted by the CDF.

‘Charlie’, as he is generally known, begins by describing his family background and training.

I was born in Rochester, New York on 30 March 1934. There were four children in the family and I was the third. Both my parents were of second-generation Irish background, and both of them had been born in New York City. My father had gone over to Ireland as a child, but we never had strong ties with the Irish. As I got older I remember asking my father why this was, and he said, ‘When I was eighteen and my father died, I kicked all those damn Irish out of the house at midnight and would not have a wake, and they have not talked to me since, and I’ve never talked to them.’ So we had no feeling that we were Irish; we were just Americans. My mother was actually half-German.

My parents had moved to Rochester in 1926 because my father got a job there. He was an insurance adjuster; the company he worked for insured the workers of public utilities. I was educated in the local Catholic school system. I went to the preparatory seminary in 1947, immediately after grammar school. It was a different kind of seminary because in both the preparatory seminary and in college we lived at home. It was a six-and-six arrangement: you lived at home for the first six years, and then you lived in when you went to the major seminary.

The first Bishop of Rochester, Bernard McQuaid, was a strongly intellectual Irishman who had come up from Newark in 1868. He died in 1909. He started the seminary of St Bernard’s and he even got permission from Rome to give pontifical degrees there. This was withdrawn in 1930. He was conservative in one sense; he and Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York were seen as the conservatives of their time, in contrast to liberal bishops such as Archbishop John Ireland, Archbishop of St Paul, and Cardinal James Gibbons in Baltimore. But McQuaid also had a broader side to him. It was his view that in the seminary you had to be trained to be both a priest and a gentleman, and he decided that there would be no reading during meals so that students could learn to converse as gentlemen. However, the successors of McQuaid had gone the other way; in fact St Bernard’s came to be called ‘the rock’!

I was only there for two years of philosophy, and then I was sent to Rome. In Rome I lived at the North American College for four years, and was ordained in Rome in 1958, the year that John XXIII was elected. I was in St Peter’s Square the night the new pope was elected and quite frankly I was rather disappointed in him. Pius XII gave the impression of a saintly ascetic but John appeared to be a roly-poly peasant. How could such a person ever be a good pope? How wrong I was! During my last year in Rome my bishop, James E. Kearney, wrote to me to say that he wanted me to stay on in Rome and get a doctorate in moral theology in order to teach at the Rochester Seminary.

The three decades from 1930 to 1960 were the high point of Jesuit theological influence on the papacy and the Vatican. Not only did Jesuits act as confessor (Augustin Bea) and secretary (Robert Leiber) to Pope Pius XII, but they were also deeply influential as advisors to the Holy Office. One of the most influential of them was the German, Franz X. Hürth. Jesuits were also often the ghostwriters of papal speeches and encyclicals. For example, the Belgian Jesuit, Arthur Vermeersch, was one of the substantial authors of Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii (1930), and the Dutchman, Sebastian Tromp, later Curran’s teacher of apologetics, had a significant influence on Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis (1943). Casti Connubii strongly reiterated the condemnation of contraception; Vermeersch was deeply concerned with the decline in Belgium’s population, which he attributed to a ‘contraceptive attitude’. One of the important periodicals of the time published by the ‘Greg’, as the Gregorian University was affectionately known by its students, was the Periodica de re Morali, Canonica, Liturgica, usually known simply as Periodica. It was here that influential Jesuits often discussed and argued the moral and ethical issues that the pope would soon take up. Curran got to know Hürth who was a leading Jesuit moralist.

In 1959 I began work on a doctorate at the Gregorian University. I did my doctorate with a rather quiet American Jesuit, Frank Furlong, and my topic was ‘The Prevention of Conception After Rape’. I already knew most of the Jesuits teaching moral theology at the Gregorian, especially Franz X. Hürth and Josef Fuchs. Hürth and I had a funny relationship. At that time he was working for the Holy Office, and I could speak Latin very well. He was a very close advisor to Pius XII on moral matters. There was one famous occasion in 1949 when he had a commentary in the 15 September edition of Periodica on the pope’s address of 29 September! It was Pius XII’s condemnation of artificial insemination, and so we had a very good idea who had written it. Hürth had been brought to Rome by Vermeersch and the two of them worked together on Casti Connubii. There is a fascinating sidelight on the encyclical: the Latin version had mistranslated what Hürth had written for the encyclical, and there was a correction in the next fascicle of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (the official Vatican journal and documentary source). It concerned sterilisation. The original text had said that not only was punitive sterilisation wrong, but any form of sterilisation. Hürth taught that sterilisation as a punishment might be morally acceptable. What happened was that the original text was corrected to reflect Hürth’s views. It is the only time I know when an encyclical has actually been corrected. The new text said ‘Leaving aside the case of punitive sterilisation …’. Hürth did not want that condemned because he believed in it as a possibility.

As I said, I knew Latin very well and Hürth and I often chatted in Latin. One day Furlong asked me to do him a favour. He said that he had got it on good authority that the Holy Office was going to condemn the so-called ‘Doyle cervical spoon’. This had been invented by a very conservative Catholic doctor in Boston. The device was put in the vagina to protect the semen against vaginal secretions and acids which could affect the semen; the aim was to help infertile couples. Furlong was afraid that the spoon was going to be condemned. So he said to me, ‘Find out what Hürth thinks about it.’ So I went up to see Hürth. By this time he was old, but he liked to chat so I said to him in Latin, ‘I want to raise a question about this Doyle cervical spoon.’ He replied, ‘Ah Pater, habeo problema magnum de hac re’ (‘Father, I’ve got a big problem about this’). We went back and forth on the issue, and then he said, ‘In hoc casu, datur inseminatio in machinam Americanam’ (‘In this case insemination occurs in an American device’). So I put some arguments to him, and the conversation went for about twenty minutes, and then he smiled and said, ‘Tamen, non mihi pertinet. Est problema Americanum’ (‘This is not my concern. It’s an American problem’), which was his way of telling me that the Holy Office was not going to condemn the Doyle spoon. So I went back to Furlong and said, ‘Don’t worry. The Holy Office is not going to condemn it.’ In a sense, if it was not so tragic it would be very funny; these clerics worrying about such matters. At this time the whole discussion of sexuality was on the level of mechanics rather than relationship.

My thesis was largely a review of the literature, but what helped me immensely later on was that in the process of doing it I came to realise the poor biology upon which our sexual teaching was based. This, of course, was not just confined to the Church. I even came across the fact that some students of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, the perfecter of the microscope, won a gold medal from a Parisian academic society for ‘discovering’ the homunculus in the semen under the microscope. In the Middle Ages Aquinas also held that the semen was full of ‘little humans’. The tragedy was that so much of our Catholic sexual ethics was based on this primitive and incorrect biology. By definition the presumption was that the seed was all you needed and it simply required a womb; the basic word in Latin for womb was nidus, a nest. Interestingly, up until fairly recently the whole of science shared this biological primitivism. It helped me to realise that many of the problems in our sexual ethics had come from this poor biology.

In those days the Gregorian only required five courses, plus the dissertation for the doctorate for those who like myself already had the licentiate. This had been a tradition for some time. One day the rector of the North American College asked me to do some research for him. An American nun writing a biography of Bishop John Lancaster Spalding had written to him about a problem. She claimed that Spalding had three doctorates from Rome: in canon law, philosophy and theology. But he had only lived in the city for two months. Spalding had stayed at the French College so a friend and I went down there to check. My friend kidded me on the way down: ‘Well, he got three doctorates in two months. Now it takes a little longer and you have to pay a little more money!’ In other words, Roman doctorates are not worth very much.

Influenced by the writings of Bernard Häring, especially his The Law of Christ, I also did some work at the Alfonsiana [the Redemptorist university in Rome] and ended up getting a doctorate there as well. So that’s how I wound up with two doctorates in two years. However, again this latter doctorate was significant for me because my topic was ‘Ignorance of the Natural Law in St Alphonsus Liguori’. What St Alphonsus Liguori [1696– 1787] did against the rigorists and Jansenists was to admit the possibility of invincible ignorance of the natural law. This meant that his moral theology emphasised much more the subjective state of the person rather than the objective law. This was to become very helpful for me. While he was still a manualist at heart he did promote this move toward the subjective in moral decision-making. Our problem in the Church today is actually a new Jansenism or rigorism. Vatican authorities today do not want to recognise explicitly the lack of subjective responsibility nor to admit the possibility of the lesser of two evils, which to his credit Alphonsus was always ready to accept. We are moving again in an absolutist direction. It was also at the Alfonsiana that I first met F. X. Murphy.

Born in New York, Francis Xavier Murphy entered the Redemptorists (CSsR) and was ordained in 1940. He got a PhD in Church history at the Catholic University of America. He then served as a US Air Force chaplain for about ten years throughout the world. In Paris he got to know a number of people in the papal diplomatic service, including the nuncios, archbishops Paolo Marella and Giovanni Benelli, as well as George Patrick Dwyer, Archbishop of Birmingham, and John Carmel Heenan, who became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. Murphy then came to the Alfonsiana to teach patristics. Curran says that Murphy was not fluent in Latin, but he did have important connections. ‘F. X. is an Irish leprechaun, an astute politician and an entrepreneur.’ These and many other Roman connections provided the information for the book Letters from Vatican City (1963) written under the pseudonym, Xavier Rynne. Murphy kept up the subterfuge that he was not Xavier Rynne because he could say more as Rynne than Murphy. He went on to write three more books about Vatican II (The Second Session, The Third Session and The Fourth Session) which remain one of the best records of what actually happened.

After getting the two doctorates I came back to Rochester to teach in St Bernard’s Seminary. This was in June of 1961. Before I came back I had a long lunch with F. X. Murphy. He said, ‘Charlie, they are going to eat you up in that seminary, you’re too liberal for them and you are going to be in trouble. My advice is: when you go back, start teaching in Latin. They always pride themselves on doing something like that in Rochester. That will be the first thing they’ll notice, and then after that you can say whatever the hell you like.’ So that’s what I did: I taught for two months in Latin, and it was quite some time before they began to notice how progressive my views really were. Murphy also told me many interesting things about the Curia and the people who worked there. So when the articles started to come out in The New Yorker by ‘Xavier Rynne’ about the Council, I wrote him a note and said that I knew it was he because some of the stuff we talked about in Rome was in the book. I also told him, ‘I know what your mother’s maiden name is.’ He ultimately confessed to being Xavier Rynne when he wanted to go to Rome to cover the 1985 so-called ‘extraordinary synod’.

The semester in Latin at the seminary was followed by my beginning to teach in English. I also refused to follow the traditional moral theology manual. Ironically, I never really wanted to teach in the seminary even though I was there for four years. If I had wanted that I would have become a Jesuit. I really wanted to be a parish priest. Eventually there were complaints about some of the things I said, and a man named Hugo Maria Kellner got on to me. He was a German refugee with a PhD who worked at Eastman Kodak in Rochester as a chemist. He was very conservative, and he used to mimeograph diatribes which he sent to all the US bishops and to members of the Roman Curia. I was helping out in the parish where he lived in Caledonia, New York. On the basis of my preaching and writing – he also picked up a couple of things I had written in Commonweal – he decided to go after me as a ‘heretic’. Another person he pursued was Gerard Emmett Carter, who had been director of religious education in Montreal archdiocese and who had just become the Bishop of London, Ontario. Carter was to go on to be Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto. There were also complaints about me from the Bishop of Syracuse, New York, who sent his seminarians to St Bernard’s. It was around this time that I had begun arguing that we needed a change on contraception.

In the meantime I had been offered teaching jobs at Notre Dame University, Fordham and Catholic University [CU] in Washington, DC. I sent all of these invitations into the bishop’s office. In the summers of 1964 and 1965 I had taught at Catholic University. On return from Washington on 1 August 1965, I was informed that, because of my progressive views, I would no longer be teaching in the seminary. Bishop Lawrence Casey, the auxiliary who really ran the diocese, called me in and said that since Catholic University had been after me, they would write a letter and say that I was free to go to CU now. I said I would rather stay in the diocese and work as an associate pastor. He said, ‘No, you go to CU.’ So I took the job.

The head of theology at the time was Father Walter Schmitz, and he was trying to get younger people onto the faculty. At that time the image of theology at CU was terrible. Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, ‘Butch’ Fenton as he was known, had just left the faculty and was still the editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review. He was a character and almost loutish in his manner. He would refer to progressive Continental theologians like Karl Rahner and say, ‘Now listen, kid: no goddamn German theologian is going to destroy the Church of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.’ Fenton was a great friend of Cardinal Ottaviani, and during the first two sessions of Vatican II he strenuously defended the old regime. By the end of the second session Fenton was becoming an embarrassment to the university. He was a priest of the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts, and Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York got him to agree to take a parish appointment in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, had him appointed a protonotary apostolic (the highest rank of a monsignor), and gave him a big dinner at the Grand Hotel. Fenton is reported to have said, ‘The next morning I woke up and realised I was a goddamned stupid son of a bitch to have allowed Spellman to have persuaded me to do that.’

As soon as I was appointed to CU Hugo Kellner wrote a letter to every member of the faculty saying, ‘You have now accepted this heretic on your staff.’ In the meantime I had been arguing about the contraception issue which was then being debated, and I got a few mentions in the newspapers. On occasion I was called in by the vice-rector, but in 1966 my contract was renewed, and in 1967 the faculty and academic senate voted my promotion to associate professor. However, at the April 1967 meeting of the Board of Trustees, the trustees voted to fire me. (All of the archbishops of the US were automatically trustees, as well as some bishops and some ‘tame’ members of the laity.) I was called in by the rector. Being a rather suspicious character, I had a recorder in my attaché case which a friend had fixed up for me. The rector told me that the Board of Trustees at their recent meeting had agreed not to renew my contract but that no reason was given. I protested and said that I would fight it and go to the press. He finally got me to agree to think about it for twenty-four hours. A day later some of my friends and colleagues announced that I had been fired and called a meeting. Five hundred people attended. The next day the faculty of theology voted to go on strike. The day after the whole faculty of the university also voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. We closed the whole university down for a week.

It was headlines in all the newspapers. The New York Times carried it as front page news for several days. We were not sure if the trustees were going to back down, but in the end Archbishop (later Cardinal) Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, who was the chancellor, came out to meet the faculty. Basically they were going to have the trustees vote again, but the faculty said, ‘No, Curran has to be reinstated on the spot, today.’ The key archbishops who wanted me out were John Krol from Philadelphia, Philip Hannan from New Orleans, and O’Boyle. I am sure that Rome knew about the whole affair, and definitely had a hand in it. My protocol number at the Holy Office is 48/66 which means that the file was opened in 1966, and this was 1967. At the time we actually got significant support from Archbishop (later Cardinal) Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore and Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston.

The Cushing story is an interesting one: a reporter from CBS in Washington had called the Boston archbishop’s house in Brighton, and got Cushing himself on the phone. By that time Cushing had had a drink or two and the CBS reporter later told me he had ‘had to clean up the interview a bit’ before putting it to air. Substantially Cushing said: ‘I don’t know a goddamn thing about running universities, but why can’t the poor guy teach. I don’t go to their meetings, I don’t know what they’re talking about, but why can’t they leave the poor guy alone.’ The Boston chancery later tried to deny it, largely because they probably did not know that Cushing had actually said it. However, once Shehan and Cushing came out in our favour it was a sign that the trustees were backing down.

So even before Humanae Vitae I was pushed into a leadership role I should never have had. I was thirty-three years old at the time, but all of this gave me a kind of stature and position that I was not really prepared for. Linked with this was the fact that most of the older US moralists could not make the transition that was implicit in Vatican II. They offered no leadership, so there was a void that pushed me into the position of the public leader of progressive American theologians.

The year 1968 was a pivotal one in the period after Vatican II because it was the year of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical condemning contraception. Humanae Vitae was to become a dividing line in more ways than one. In the years leading up to it there was much debate in the Church over the issue of the contraceptive pill, which had only come on the market in 1959–60. One of the key figures in the development of the pill was Dr John Rock (1890–1984), a Boston Catholic doctor and a professor at Harvard University. In 1962 in his book The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposal to End the Battle for Birth Control, he argued that the pill operated in the same way as the body’s own endocrine system, and that placed it well within the bounds of a ‘natural’ process, which had already been permitted by the papacy. For Rock the pill was really a variation on the rhythm method. But it was not until late 1963 that a few Catholic theologians began to challenge the traditional teaching against contraception.

John XXIII had secretly established a commission to advise him about birth control, and Paul VI continued it. He had withdrawn the topic from the purview of the Council and handed it over to the Birth Control Commission. In 1966 reports were leaked to the press claiming to be the majority report favouring change and the minority report against it. There is good evidence that Paul VI was attracted by the majority report in favour of change. However, in the period between 1966 and 1968 intense pressure was brought to bear on the pope by Cardinal Ottaviani and Archbishop Pietro Parente of the Holy Office, the American Jesuit John C. Ford, and the Franciscan, Ermenegildo Lio. Ford’s whole argument was based on the threat to papal authority implied in any change in Church teaching: ‘Therefore one must very cautiously enquire whether the change which is proposed would not bring with it an undermining of the teaching and the moral authority of the hierarchy.’ It was this view that ultimately prevailed. (For the whole story of the Birth Control Commission see Robert Blair Kaiser, The Politics of Sex and Religion (1985)). Curran takes up the story.

But the Catholic University strike was just the overture to Humanae Vitae, which Rome published on Tuesday, 29 July 1968. That summer I was in upstate New York studying German. I got a call from Time magazine on the previous Sunday night saying that they had a copy of the encyclical and that it condemned contraception. I called people in Washington and got a flight back immediately. I was given a copy of the encyclical about five o’clock on the Monday night and about twelve of us academic theologians from CU met and discussed it. So the assertion that we had not read it before we came out against it was utterly false. By 9 pm we had agreed on a public statement. The encyclical was in the papers the next morning. During that evening CBS had taken footage of us as we discussed the encyclical. We then called around to see how many signatures we could get for our statement. We got eighty-eight signatures from scholars by the next morning. On Tuesday morning the Washington Priests Association, which was already having trouble with O’Boyle, scheduled a press conference for 10 am at the Mayflower Hotel. We took over their press conference and announced that eighty-eight Catholic scholars had signed a letter of dissent. This was all over the news by the next day. This type of so-called ‘organised public dissent’ was unheard of; it had never happened in the US Catholic Church before. However, it still annoys me that people say we had not read the encyclical; you could not have written what we wrote if you had not read it. The next day I got as many of the lay members of the Papal Birth Control Commission as I could to come to Washington, and we held another press conference.

In the statement we pointed out the positives in the encyclical, but we said that we thought that the actual decision was wrong, and we argued as to why one could remain a good Roman Catholic and disagree in theory and in practice with the papal teaching. Our arguments were that you could dissent from a non-infallible papal teaching, which is what the encyclical was, and that it reduced the human moral act to its physical components, and that it lacked a personalist context. We were also critical of the natural law arguments embedded in Humanae Vitae. We wanted to keep our disagreement very respectful, but also very strong.

The CU Board of Trustees met in September and Cardinal James McIntyre of Los Angeles wanted to fire ‘Father Curran and his followers’ on the spot. But the trustees had learned something from the strike the year before, so they instituted an academic inquiry to see if we had violated our responsibilities as Catholic theologians. At the same time a good friend of mine on the faculty, Bob Hunt, a systematic theologian, decided he was going to leave the active priestly ministry. He told the family over the summer vacation about his intentions, as well as describing the fracas over Humanae Vitae and the inquiry. His brother John was a partner with a Wall Street firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. John assumed that I was the bête noire in this whole affair and that I had influenced his poor, unwilling little brother to go along with this whole thing.

However, he told Bob he would defend us before the academic inquiry; this was really his way of keeping his little brother in the priesthood. John told Bob he should never have disagreed with the pope, that he should not leave the priesthood, and that it was clear that I was to blame! John had been the successful son in the secular world, and had become one of the first Catholics to be a partner in a prestigious ‘Wasp’ Wall Street firm. Bob was the success in the Church and had become a professor at CU. So John was going to do his best to maintain the family status quo by defending us, and in the process keep his brother in the priesthood. My first meetings with John were the frostiest I have ever experienced. But before long John realised that this dissent was not as crazy as he had thought. He and I became very good friends. He not only defended us pro bono in 1969, but he had Cravath be my lawyers in my subsequent suit against Catholic University in 1988.

The first issue that came up at the academic inquiry was the question of dissent. By this stage we had established with the trustees the fact that even in the traditional textbooks of Catholic theology dissent was seen as legitimate. The issue of dissent from non-infallible teaching arose after the definition of papal infallibility. From then onwards you had to distinguish infallible teaching from non-infallible teaching. In the debates leading to the definition of infallibility reference was made to the times when the popes had changed decisions about non-defined teaching. Even older textbook authors like the Spaniard Salaverri says that a teaching can be wrong, but you have to hold to it unless and until the Church teaches the contrary. But he does allow that a teaching can be wrong. Others, like the Austrian, Diekmann, say that ordinarily the Holy Spirit protects the Church from error through the teaching of the pope and the hierarchy, but it could happen on occasion that the teaching office could be wrong and the Holy Spirit would then raise up people in the Church who would disagree. [See Joseph Komonchak’s article in Curran (ed.): Contraception, Authority and Dissent (1969)].

So because we had already argued that dissent was possible, they changed the charge to ‘the manner and mode’ of the dissent. They were referring to our public, organised, quick response to the encyclical. There were twenty of us at CU involved in this case. John Hunt and Terry Connolly, an associate of the firm who was also a CU alumnus, argued the case for us. In the end we gathered so much detail we were able to publish our brief as two books: the first was theological and was edited by Bob Hunt and myself, Dissent in and for the Church: Theologians and Humanae Vitae [1970]; the second was the practical, legal side of the case [John F. Hunt and Terrence R. Connolly et al., The Responsibility of Dissent: The Church and Academic Freedom, (1970)]. The hearing went through various stages: establishing a process (I represented the School of Theology at this time and so was part of developing the process that was used); the establishment of a hearing committee (a professor of engineering was appointed chair of the committee, a decent man who handled the whole thing very well), and then the actual hearings. In April 1969 a report came in exonerating us.

One negative aspect of the whole thing was that the bishop who officially represented the trustees at the hearings was the then Auxiliary Bishop of St Paul, James Patrick Shannon. Some months later, in January 1970, he was to resign as a bishop and leave the active ministry entirely, precisely over the question of contraception. But at the hearings he was terrible to us; he gave us no quarter and vigorously defended the trustees. He admits all this in his book The Reluctant Dissenter [1998], and in fact he sent me a copy when the book was published. John Hunt could not stand him at the time and he often said, ‘Give me O’Boyle any day. At least you know where he stands, and he is not pulling shenanigans the way that Shannon is!’

The committee and academic senate accepted the report, but the trustees never fully embraced it. They also never forgot what had happened, and from that time on I was a marked man. This was even more true among the activists of the Catholic right as well as arch-conservative newspapers like the St Paul-based, the Wanderer. These reactionary Catholics frequently urged people to write letters to Rome to dismiss me from the university. The organisation Catholics United for the Faith (CUFF) was founded right after Humanae Vitae, and I increasingly became one of the targets of these people as well. During the committee hearings we had a right to all Catholic University’s past documents, and one of the amusing things that came out of this was that I caught out John Patrick Cody, the then Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, in a deliberate lie. At the time of the previous attempt to dismiss me from CU, I had met Cody at a clerical party in Washington. Cody saw me, came over and said, ‘That’s terrible what they’re doing to you. If I had been there at the trustee meeting, that never would have happened.’ A year later during the committee hearings I discovered from the past documents to which we had access that John Patrick Cody actually seconded the motion to sack me in 1967!

At this point Charlie and I went off on a tangent about the origins of the Wanderer. It is typical of his approach that he has a thorough understanding of the history of reactionary Catholicism and of the people most opposed to him. He told me that the Wanderer began in St Paul, Minnesota, and was one of many German-language newspapers in the nineteenth-century German–American Catholic community. German identity and culture in the immigrant situation in the US was also strengthened through the Central-Verein, a national federation of German–American benevolent societies. A key issue for German immigrants was how to keep the second generation loyal to both German culture and Catholicism. They often achieved this through their opposition to capitalism, and by their anti-Irish and anti-Protestant stances. However, this does not mean that they were supportive of trade unions. Rather they looked backwards towards the Middle Ages and towards corporatism and the guild system. They were also pioneers in the liturgical movement. The Wanderer was originally intimately associated with all of this. Unfortunately, the paper eventually devoted itself to the negation of ‘all the terrible modern things’ that were happening in the Church after Vatican II. In the 1970s the Wanderer and other Catholic reactionaries argued that much of the abandonment of traditional Catholic ethics was due to the influence of Charles Curran.

Things settled down to some extent at CU in the period after Humanae Vitae. Pope Paul VI never mentioned the encyclical again, and there was still a sense of optimism present in the Church. Renewal still seemed a possibility. This was also the period when proportionalists began to apply the theory in earnest to the practicalities of moral life. Curran’s specialisation was sexual ethics.

Because of the public leadership role I had in the university strike and in the dissent over Humanae Vitae, I tried throughout the 1970s to keep much of my writing to a scholarly level and I published most of my books with the more academic Notre Dame University Press. While many of us in this period were disappointed with Pope Paul VI and the latter part of his papacy was not a particularly open period, there were still possibilities and a degree of optimism remained.

This was also the period when a whole group of moralists continued to rethink Catholic sexual teaching. Basically, what we were trying to do at this time was to deal theoretically with Catholic sexual ethics and its underpinning theological problems. I was the one of the first to use the word ‘physicalism’ to describe the Catholic approach to sexuality. The basic problem was that we identified the human, moral act with the physical structure of that act. As a result, the physical structure became normative. For example, we Catholics have never said that all killing is wrong; killing is a physical act. The moral act is murder. False speech is a physical reality; but not every false word is a lie. It is the deliberate lie that is the moral act. While we recognised this in other moral spheres, what happened with regard to Catholic sexual teaching was that we completely identified the human, moral act with the physical structure of the act; physicalism became morally normative.

The other problem with the Catholic tradition of sexual morality was that the faculty had become divorced from the person involved and the person, in turn, was divorced from their relationships with other persons. The usual Catholic position was that the nature and purpose of the faculty was procreation and love-union. But in doing this we had forgotten to say that the faculty should never have been absolutised in itself, but that it should be seen in relationship to the person, and the person in relationship with other persons. Thus many of us began to argue that for the good of the person, or for the good of the relationship, you can interfere with the sexual faculty.

I also began to think about some of the historical sources of the old-style Catholic attitudes to sexuality. Clearly one of these was the poor biology which I had become aware of while doing my doctoral dissertation. Second, I realised that another problem for Catholic sexual ethics was to be found in Thomistic ethics. St Thomas Aquinas distinguished three purposive levels of existence: the first and most basic, which all living things share, is the desire to keep themselves in existence. The second level, which is shared by both animals and humans, is the desire to procreate and educate offspring. The highest level, which is proper to us as human beings, is the desire to worship God and to live together in community. Aquinas defined humankind as a rational animal. The noun here was ‘animal’. This came to be understood as a layer of animality complete and independent in itself, and a layer of rationality simply placed over the top of it. In this understanding physical and animal processes became sacrosanct; they had to be observed and you could not interfere with them even for the sake of the rational. This provided a faulty basis for traditional Catholic sexual teaching.

While Curran was trying to move beyond the absolutising of the physical, he did not want to fall into the problems inherent in a consequentialist or utilitarian approach to moral reasoning. Consequentialism is the absolutising of the results or consequences of a human act as morally normative. Fundamentally, consequentialism says that the moral species of an act is determined by its results. Certainly, in the Catholic moral tradition, the consequences of an act are an intimate part of the determination as to whether that act was moral. However, when it is absolutised it becomes a dangerous oversimplification. Curran says:

I wanted to avoid consequentialism because I think it is a simplistic reduction of everything to results. It opens the door to the notion of the greatest good for the greatest number, and it ultimately does not give enough importance to the dignity and rights of the individual. In the consequentialist understanding you can sacrifice an individual for the good of the community.

So I tried to find a path between Catholic physicalism and consequentialism. My view is that there is a distinction between physical and moral evil, and that you can commit a physical evil if there is a proportionate reason. So if your lower leg is gangrenous, you can cut it off to save the whole body. Cutting off the leg is not a moral evil; it is a physical evil. You can do that if there is a proportionate reason.

Let us take contraception in this context. You can begin by saying that contraception is a physical evil. But it can be done for a proportionate reason. But the problem is that most people nowadays would even have difficulty calling an act of intercourse between a loving couple a ‘physical evil’. So I tend to call contraception an ‘imperfection’ rather than an ‘evil’. Part of the problem is that people often think that theories come first; they are there to be applied to particular cases and thus come up with a moral answer. I would argue that theory comes afterwards to explain already existing teachings. I do have some problems with proportionalism, but I don’t have a better theory at the present time. It basically arose out of trying to deal with the flawed inheritance of Catholic sexual ethics, and specifically the fallout from Humanae Vitae.

With thoughts such as these it is inevitable that the CDF would be after Curran. They had begun a file on him in 1966, and with the advent of John Paul II inquisitorial processes increased in intensity. First there was the CDF’s dreadful treatment of Jacques Pohier, then there was the Edward Schillebeeckx case and then Hans Küng. Curran was the first American tackled publicly by the CDF.

My troubles with the CDF began on 2 August 1979. They came via a letter that Cardinal William Wakefield Baum of Washington, the chancellor of the university, passed on to me. The letter had been signed by Cardinal Franjo Seper, the then prefect of the CDF, on 13 July 1979. In essence, the sixteen pages of Observations contained in the letter outlined the CDF’s concerns primarily with my views on the possibility of dissent in the Church, and my views on sexuality, specifically contraception, sterilisation, homosexuality and divorce. It was the worst kind of critique: I had never denied that I dissented from non-infallible teaching, but they would cite passages out of context and conclude that my arguments did not add up.

However, I took the letter very seriously. I wrote back to them on 26 October 1979 sending twenty-one pages of response dealing with the primary question of dissent from non-infallible teaching. What I said substantially was that there was no possibility of dialogue on the basis of what they had written to me. I formulated five questions and I suggested that we use these as a basis for discussion. I told them that I would say how I answered the questions, and I requested that they tell me how they would answer them, or how they disagreed with me. Then, on that basis, we could come up with some kind of conclusion. The questions were:

1. Does the teaching of the ordinary, non-infallible, authoritative, hierarchical magisterium constitute the only factor, or the always decisive factor in the magisterial activity of the Church?

2. Does there exist the possibility or even the right of public dissent on the part of a theologian who is convinced that there are serious reasons?

3. Is silentium obsequiosum the only legitimate response for a theologian who is convinced that a teaching is wrong?

4. Can the ordinary faithful make a prudent decision to act against the teaching?

5. In the course of history have there been errors in the teaching of the ordinary, non-infallible magisterium which have been subsequently corrected?

Of course, they would not respond to my questions. I knew then they were not going to take any form of dialogue seriously.

There was a kind of interesting overture to this. In February 1979 I was scheduled to give a talk at the Catholic Campus Ministry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Even before I got there I had a call to tell me that there was trouble with the bishop and the talk had to be moved off Catholic property. On the day of the talk there was a snow storm and I was actually lucky to get there. In the meantime, the then bishop, Joseph Sullivan of Baton Rouge, held a press conference where he said that I was ‘heretical’, that ‘I was not in accord with Catholic teaching’, and he released to the media an article out of the Wanderer which compared my position to that of the official Church. In response to Sullivan’s action, Archbishop Jérôme Hamer, OP, then secretary of the CDF, wrote to him thanking him for pointing out my erroneous positions on moral issues. What really angered me was that the protocol number on Hamer’s letter to Sullivan was my protocol number – 48/66! So on 29 August 1979 I wrote to Rome to protest. I said:

Your Sacred Congregation has already violated its own principles by publicly condemning me. As a result any fair-minded person could readily conclude that I cannot receive a fair hearing from the same Congregation. I refer specifically to the letter of J. Hamer (copy enclosed) to Bishop Joseph V. Sullivan of Baton Rouge, dated April 24, 1979, with the same protocol number as the letter you sent to me. This letter was published in two national Catholic newspapers as well as in others, and copies were sent to many priests in the US.

In my 26 October reply to the CDF’s letter of 13 July, I also pointed out that nowhere did they mention my most substantial writing on dissent, the book Dissent in and for the Church. I told them that they should have a look at that book. In August I also wrote to several European moralists, including Franz Böckle in Bonn, and Josef Fuchs and Bernard Häring in Rome. Now, Fuchs is a real fox; he is very knowledgeable about what is going on in the Vatican but has been a leader in the revision of Catholic moral theology since 1950. He was also my teacher at the ‘Greg’ and has been a friend and supporter, especially in my problems with the Vatican. Prior to my first hearing from the CDF, he had sent me an aerogram which was filled with one long sentence in Italian. He told me that he had been able to observe ‘from a distance’ that it might be that there were some people in Rome who were ‘somewhat interested’ in me. In November I went to Rome to talk to Fuchs, Häring and others, and I asked Fuchs, ‘What the hell was that letter about?’ I also showed him the August letter that I sent back to the CDF. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘do you know why they did not cite that book of yours on dissent? It is because you never gave me a copy, and its not in our library. What I was referring to in the letter was that the librarian of the “Greg” came to me and said: “You have some of Curran’s books out of the library and you have some yourself. The Holy Office would like them.” You never sent me a copy of that book. That is why the Holy Office does not have it. My letter was an oblique warning that they were on to you.’

There was intervening correspondence with the CDF where I objected to the process saying that it was unfair, and then fifteen months later, on 9 February 1981, another letter arrived from them. The CDF addressed these letters to me, but they actually came through the Archbishop of Washington. They told me that they had examined the book Dissent in and for the Church and that their earlier observations still remained pertinent. Then, on 10 May 1983, Ratzinger sent another letter with a further eight pages of Observations, and he asked me if I wished to revise my dissenting positions. From that time on I took it as a matter of course that I would take as long to respond to them as they took to respond to me. I responded on 10 August 1984. As a result things were dragged out. To be honest, at the very beginning I did not think that they were really serious, or that much would come of it. There were other people in other parts of the world saying many of the same things as I was saying. Also I thought they would have to move, just like CU, from the dissent itself to the manner and mode of the dissent. But basically that did not happen. I had not really gone public even at this time, although Le Monde had carried an article saying I was being investigated. The London Tablet picked up this story, and I said that I ‘was in correspondence with the Vatican’. At that time I felt it was not helpful for me to go public.

But as time went on things became worse and I started to realise that it was not going to go away. For instance, in the summer of 1984, Pope John Paul II started giving his famous addresses at papal audiences to pilgrims in Rome on the theme of sexuality in Genesis. After his talk one Wednesday, there was an official press conference given by the then Monsignor Carlo Caffarra [since 1995, the Archbishop of Ferrara]. He said that unfortunately there were four theologians in the world who were responsible for the lack of acceptance of Humanae Vitae. They were Hans Küng, Franz Böckle, Marc Oraison and myself. Oraison was dead by this time, but I suddenly realised that Rome was serious. I wrote to Häring and Fuchs, and they both agreed.

After that, in the fall of 1984, came Ratzinger’s famous interview, which was originally published in the Italian magazine Jesu. There it was called ‘The Crisis of Faith in the World’. [It was later published as a book entitled The Ratzinger Report (1985).] Ratzinger said that each part of the world has a different problem: in Europe it was supposedly indifference to religion, in Africa inculturation, in South America it was liberation theology. ‘Across the Atlantic’ it was ethics. He said that scripture and systematic theology in North America was derivative from Europe, but that the specifically American contribution was ethics. But, he argued, unfortunately the American ethos is so opposed to the Catholic ethos that Catholic ethicists ‘across the Atlantic’ felt they either had to dissent from Church teaching or from the American ethos, and unfortunately too many of them choose to dissent from the Church. I was pretty sure then that the dye was cast.

Throughout the period 1983 to 1985 letters went back and forth, and finally on 17 September 1985 Ratzinger wrote ‘concluding the inquiry’ and asking for a final reply, saying that ‘one who holds such positions cannot be called a Catholic theologian’. Right through the whole affair the core issue was that of dissent. In my very first response to them I focused on dissent, and simply did not respond to specifics about sexuality. Fundamentally, I argued that responsible dissent from the non-infallible magisterium is legitimate. Basically, the CDF has responded that there can be no dissent from the non-infallible magisterium. But the problem is that they never argue their position; they simply state it. They never engage in any form of dialogue. I have been sometimes asked who the consultor was who wrote the observations, and I have a fairly good idea that it was the Spanish Jesuit, Marcellino Zalba. The reason why I think it was him is because references to my writings began appearing regularly at this time in footnotes in his articles.

It was at this time that I started negotiations with Hickey, who by now had become Archbishop of Washington and university chancellor, and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, the chairman of the Board of Trustees at CU. Ultimately I had four meetings with the two of them, trying to work out what we could do. Joe Bernardin loved nothing better than a compromise, so I made the offer to them not to teach sexual morality. I told them honestly that I had not taught it for fifteen years anyway. The CDF could declare the errors that it perceived in my works. In return I would maintain my position on the faculty of CU and I would remain a Catholic theologian in good standing. If that offer was satisfactory to Rome, then the problem for Catholic University and the Church in the US would be removed. We went back and forth on this deal, and I had hoped that it would be Bernardin who would take it to Rome, because he would at least have his heart in it. But it was actually Hickey who took it to Rome in January of 1986. He saw both the pope and Ratzinger. I am not sure about this, but my guess is that he saw the pope first and realised the compromise was not going to be accepted. I have a feeling that he might not have even mentioned the compromise to Ratzinger, or if he did, it was the briefest of mentions. In fact, there was a rumour that Ratzinger had said that the hardest case he ever had to handle was my case, but in the end ‘it was taken out of his hands’.

Hickey returned to Washington and said the compromise would not work, but that Ratzinger was willing to have an informal meeting with me. I said that I would go, so I flew to Rome for a meeting on 8 March 1986 with Ratzinger. Häring came to the meeting with me in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio. He was recognised throughout the world as the leading proponent of renewed moral theology before and after Vatican II. He was the most influential person in my own theological development, was my teacher, and was a constant source of support for me. He, too, had had his problems with the CDF. Ratzinger was accompanied by Archbishop Alberto Bovone, Monsignor Tom Herron, the English-language secretary, and the Canadian Jesuit moralist from the Gregorian, who insisted he was only there as a translator, Father Édouard Hamel. Ratzinger was friendly, cordial and courteous in a formal kind of way. We went for about two hours, but there was no real dialogue of any type; just talking back and forth. Before we went in Häring had advised me strongly not to get angry, but as soon as proceedings opened he began with a blistering attack on them with all guns firing. He denounced the Holy Office and all their mistakes over the years. Ratzinger heard him out, and then gave him the back of his hand and said, ‘Are you through now, Father Häring?’ Ratzinger said that he did not want to speak in English and that he would speak in Latin. I said that was okay with me. I used a little Latin with him, and then we went into Italian. He said, ‘Oh, you know Italian?’ I said, ‘Yes, I lived in Rome for a number of years.’ This obviously surprised him; he clearly did not know that I had studied in Rome for six years.

He was always polite and he maintained a kind of fixed smile on his face; he had a role to play and there was no way he was going to enter into genuine dialogue. The two testy parts were when I said to him, ‘You are a respected German theologian, and are on a first name basis with six German moralists whom I could name, and you know as well as I do that they are saying the same things as I am saying.’ He replied, ‘Well, if you would want to delate these people, we will open a dossier on them.’ I replied, ‘I’m not here to do your dirty work.’

The other testy time was when poor Bovone, a product of the worst of the Roman system, was drawn into the conversation. He had sat there for over an hour and said nothing, and then finally Ratzinger turned to him and said, ‘Archbishop Bovone is a canonist and he will explain to you the canon law involved here.’ Bovone began speaking in Italian and he said, ‘You are supposed to teach in the name of the Church, and if you are not teaching what the Church teaches you should resign. It’s just like me. I work for His Eminence here. If I disagree with His Eminence I should resign and go back to my diocese and be just a parish priest.’ I got angry and said, ‘That’s the trouble with you people. Just a parish priest! Don’t you realise that is the most important thing you can be in the Church?’ Ratzinger said, ‘You misunderstood him.’ I said, ‘I did not misunderstand him!’ Thank God Bovone died. If he had ever been pope I would have been in hell!

At the end Häring said, ‘What about the compromise?’ Ratzinger replied, ‘What compromise?’ Häring started talking, and Bovone quickly said, ‘Oh, you remember, Eminence.’ It was then that I realised that Hickey had never put the compromise to him. So Häring and I then explained the compromise. Ratzinger did not make any comment one way or another. Nothing came of it.

I was already planning a press conference when I got back to the US, but I did not want them to say that I was the first one to go to the media. So while we were having coffee at the end, I said that people knew we were meeting and I thought that it was appropriate that we issue a joint statement to the media. Surprisingly, Ratzinger agreed to it. It appeared in Osservatore Romano and in other ecclesiastical outlets. But I was covered for not going to the press first. When I returned to the US I had a press conference on the second day back. I announced publicly for the first time that I was under investigation. Among other things I said: ‘I have never been told who my accusers are. I have been given no opportunity of counsel … The Congregation itself has performed the roles of both accuser and judge.’ Ratzinger’s later specious response to this was: ‘Your own works have been your “accusers”, and they alone.’

I sent a final reply to Ratzinger on 1 April 1986 and I said that I could not change my positions. I told him:

I respond expeditiously to your request for a final written reply so that you can bring this reply and the results of our informal meeting to the Cardinals of the Congregation as soon as possible … I remain disappointed with the dialogue that has ensued between the Congregation and myself on this matter. Good theology and justice demand that the Congregation explicitly state what are the norms governing the legitimacy of the possibility of dissent from such non-infallible teaching, and then indicate how I have violated those norms. In January I proposed five questions; you never gave a response to them. Later I expressed my willingness to accept the criteria for dissent proposed by the US Bishops in 1968, but again the Congregation was unwilling to accept those norms … In conscience I cannot and do not change the theological positions I have taken.

Ratzinger’s final letter was given to me by Hickey at his residence at 4 pm on 18 August 1986. The letter was dated 25 July. In it Ratzinger stated that I was no longer ‘suitable nor eligible to exercise the function of a professor of Catholic theology’. Hickey admitted that he had given it to the press earlier that afternoon before he had given it to me; he wanted to beat me to the media. Hickey, as chancellor, had also received another letter from the CDF instructing him to take ‘appropriate action’ now that I was neither ‘suitable nor eligible’ to function as a professor of Catholic theology.

A long process followed involving a faculty committee which eventually decided that: ‘If the canonical mission is withdrawn, the rightful autonomy of the University, and the tenure rights of Professor Curran as understood in the American academic tradition, must be safeguarded. The withdrawal of the canonical mission cannot be allowed to abrogate Professor Curran’s right to teach in the field of his academic competence … namely … in the area of moral theology and/or ethics.’ In other words, the university could only take away my canonical mission provided I was still able to teach in the area of my specialisation. This pleased neither Hickey nor the Board of Trustees. As a result there were a number of offers and counter-offers to teach various subjects in different faculties, but finally on 2 June 1988 the Board of Trustees bit the bullet and said that it accepted ‘the declaration of the Holy See as binding upon the University as a matter of canon law and religious conviction’. Therefore, I was not able to teach theology at all at CU. I would have been able to teach something else, but I replied that I could only really teach in the area of my expertise. When the board made that decision I decided to take them to court, arguing that I had academic freedom at CU and that no external body could make a decision that would take away my job.

Fortunately, in this case I again had the services of the Wall St firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. My friend John Hunt had always said that if anything happened he would always take care of me. At this time John himself was ill, so the lead was taken by another member of the firm, Paul Saunders. Paul is a litigator, and he, John and three associates worked on the case. They always said they were going to send me a bill, but they never did. The cost of it would have been probably close to one million dollars.

The details of the court case are not immediately relevant to the story of Curran’s dealings with the CDF. A detailed description can be found in Larry Witham’s Curran v. the Catholic University: A Study of Authority and Freedom in Conflict (1991, pp 139–278), a book that sets out to be balanced and ends up simply acerbic. But the civil case does illustrate the problems inherent in arguing complex issues about academic freedom and Church authority before the state courts. Curran maintained that the Catholic University had violated his contract because it guaranteed academic freedom. He had been denied this because of the unwarranted intervention of the CDF.

The case was heard in the Superior Court in the District of Columbia. Curran himself says that: ‘If there were no laws against drugs and prostitution, there would not be a Superior Court of the District of Columbia. It’s all they ever hear.’ As a result, two of the top ten law firms in the US (the university was defended by the prestigious Washington firm of Williams & Connolly) ended up arguing the case before a court that specialised in drugs and prostitution. The judge was a Frederick H. Weisberg. The premier American Catholic Church historian, John Tracy Ellis, told Curran that he was sure it was the first time that two cardinals had testified in a civil lawsuit. He was referring to the testimony of Bernardin and Hickey. The case was held in Washington in December of 1988.

The university argued that the ‘Curran affair’ was an internal Church matter and that the case should be thrown out on the grounds of the separation of Church and state. Weisberg refused this, but Curran eventually lost because the judge handled the matter largely as a contract case. Curran’s lawyers argued that CU had sent documents to the university accrediting association (the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools) in which CU had emphasised its care to protect academic freedom, and it asserted that nothing could take it away. But Weisberg ruled that these were not official documents of the university; the only official documents were those that had been actually passed by the Board of Trustees. He held that there was nothing in those documents that would guarantee that there would be academic freedom in a case of conflict with the Vatican. In other words he found that there was no academic freedom at Catholic University. In the end Curran lost the case because the judge admitted that the university does have a special relationship to the Holy See, and therefore they had to accept the Vatican’s decisions. He further said that there was nothing in Curran’s contract, nor that of any other faculty member at CU, that guaranteed academic freedom. As Curran himself says the result was that: ‘He not only decided against me, but he also cast a pall over the whole university by saying that they don’t have academic freedom.’ The judgment was handed down on 28 February 1989.

CHAPTER 3

Loyal Dissent and Freedom: Charles Curran