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Posted on 06/03/2005 9:57:36 AM PDT by NYer
MANASSAS, VA June 2, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A special research report from the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS) published in the June issue of Crisis magazine documents the activities of 15 professors at leading Catholic universities who have publicly rejected Vatican teaching on euthanasia and assisted suicide. Several actively paved the way to Terri Schiavo's death by starvation, and others serve on the boards of national pro-assisted suicide lobbies.
"The danger is obvious: If the Church is going to face up to a growing movement for euthanasia and assisted suicide in the United States, Catholic universities must help in that important battle," writes CNS president Patrick J. Reilly in Crisis. "Harboring the enemy and training new spokesmen for the culture of death is not the way to do it."
The Cardinal Newman Society is a national organization dedicated to the renewal of Catholic identity at America's 219 Catholic colleges and universities. CNS recently captured national attention when its protest of pro-abortion and otherwise inappropriate commencement speakers and honorees at 20 Catholic colleges forced Marymount Manhattan College to formally declare itself nonsectarian after inviting 2008 presidential contender Sen. Hillary Clinton to speak and receive an honorary degree, and prompted Baltimore's Cardinal William Keeler to publicly boycott Loyola College's commencement ceremony featuring another presidential hopeful, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
The report published in Crisis identifies several Catholic university professors who helped convince Florida and federal courts that removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was acceptable and consistent with Catholic teaching-even while the Vatican condemned it as euthanasia. Several professors went to the airwaves and major newspapers to publicly undermine Pope John Paul II's clear statements on the moral obligation to feed and hydrate even the most severely injured patients. Six professors signed an amicus brief urging the Florida Supreme Court to overturn "Terri's Law," a measure passed by the state legislature to empower Gov. Jeb Bush to save Schiavo's life.
Professors identified in the report include:
· Charles Baron of the Boston College Law School, who has testified before Congress and Britain's House of Lords on legalizing physician-assisted suicide and serves on the board of directors of the Death With Dignity National Center.
· Carol Bayley, adjunct professor of nursing at the University of San Francisco and vice president of a large Catholic healthcare system in the western U.S., who signed a brief in the Schiavo case rejecting Vatican teaching soon after announcing that Catholic Healthcare West would "take the Pope's statements very seriously."
· Tom Beauchamp, senior research scholar at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics, who serves on the board of directors of the Compassion in Dying Federation.
· Maxwell Gregg Bloche of the Georgetown University Law Center, who signed an amicus court brief arguing that doctors' actions protected by Oregon's assisted-suicide law constitute "sound and ethical medical practices."
· Robert Free of the Seattle University Law School, who has signed court briefs arguing for assisted suicide and has served as an advisor to Compassion in Dying of Washington.
· Howard Freed of the Georgetown University School of Medicine, who signed a court brief arguing that former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's attempts to interfere with Oregon's assisted-suicide law diminished "physicians' ability to care for terminally ill patients nationwide."
· Lawrence Gostin of the Georgetown University Law Center, who has served as the health law and ethics editor of the influential Journal of the American Medical Association and on the executive committee of the ACLU board of directors, has signed court briefs supporting legalized assisted suicide in Oregon.
· Milton Heifetz of the Boston College Law School, whose book The Right to Die advocates legalizing assisted suicide and even entertains the possibility of euthanasia for severely retarded people and newborns with severe medical problems.
· Marquette University theology professor and former Jesuit priest Daniel Maguire, who has accused Pope John Paul II and Vatican officials of a "fetishism of life signs," using any sign of life as a justification for delaying death.
· Rev. Richard McBrien, theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, who proclaimed to Bill O'Reilly of FOX News that the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube was "the removal of an extraordinary means of sustaining life," publicly contradicting Vatican teaching and presenting his own view as the Church's teaching.
· Curtis Naser, philosophy professor at Fairfield University, who is touted by Fairfield as an expert in biomedical ethics and "end of life decisions" despite his opposition to New York and Washington state bans on physician-assisted suicide.
· Attorney Lawrence Nelson, who despite his unsuccessful court battle in California to euthanize a disabled but not vegetative man and his writings arguing for embryonic stem cell research, is a scholar at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and even has received a grant from the university "to explore the place of philosophical ethics in Jesuit higher education and mission."
· Rev. Kevin O'Rourke, O.P., ethics professor at the Loyola University of Chicago Medical School, who said it was "blasphemy" to keep people like Schiavo alive "as if you were doing them a favor." O'Rourke drafted a statement critical of Vatican teaching on euthanasia that was circulated at a Catholic Health Association meeting in March.
· Rev. John Paris, S.J., bioethics and theology professor at Boston College, who ridiculed Terri Schiavo's family for their ties to "the radical, antiabortion, right-to-life Christian right" and dismissed the Pope's statements on feeding tubes as "mischief-making at the Vatican."
· James Walter, chairman of the Bioethics Institute at Loyola Marymount University, did not personally evaluate Schiavo yet insisted that "any chance of self-awareness is not going to happen" and expressed certainty that Schiavo would not suffer from the removal of her feeding tube.
Sadly, may so-called Catholic universities in America are no longer really Catholic. They're just gravy-training off the title.
Ping!
More Moderist Weasels that will soon be removed from the Church and Professors that will be fired. POPE Benidict XVI will not allow this to continue. He will quietly remove these modernist from controlling positions.
Just like we must remove the Judges and Politicians from Controlling positions.
I don't know why the article calls these people "dissidents." They are the NORM at these schools. Every time a Seattle U prof writes an op-ed in the local paper, it's for abortion, gay marriage, etc.
They are dissident (their own chosen term) from the teachings of the Magisterium of the Church. A less polite term would be heretic.
Most colleges that were originally founded as Protestant religious schools became secularized over the years, and most Catholic colleges seem to be going down the same path. It's just that the Protestant colleges went earlier, and people have forgotten what their origins were.
Harvard started as a Puritan school, and most of the older private colleges had similar beginnings. What's different is that Catholic dissidents want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to part company with the Catholic Church on doctrine but keep sucking at the financial teat. There's good tuition money in advertising yourself as a Catholic college, just as there's good money working in the diocesan chancery, even though you're not really a believer.
It's time to tell these folks to shape up or ship out.
Specifically, so long as the speculation didn't leave the walls of the university, the academics were free to engage in heretical speculations, otherwise. . .
Perhaps the Latin church should revive that standard of academic freedom in its institutions of higher education.
Yes, but the old standard would either force the apostates to talk to each other behind closed doors, or let them be rooted out when they (perhaps inevitably) seek media face-time.
Unless, of course, the insitution has private trustees who are also apostate, in which case the Latin church could cut the institution as a whole loose.
RC Universities, Like Notre Dame, are no longer truly Catholic Universities. ND, for example, is run by a lay board and now sports a Gay & Lesbian club, among other major shifts away from the solid values of the past.
My view as a non Catholic is that the Church will weather this situation, shrink, and grow stronger and better in the future.
As a graduate of that once great school, I say let the abortion, euthanasia, and sodomy adherents split and elect their own Pope and solidify their "spiritual" decadence.....and good riddance!
Do you envision two Catholic Churches in America?
Roman Catholic, and American Catholic?
That's a question for the Latins to decide for themselves. I'm Orthodox, myself (hence my effusal to rhetorically acknowledge the catholicity of the Latin church by following the old Greek patristic practice of call it the Latin church and its members "Latins").
I very much hope Benedict XVI can clean house. Since his accession discussions between Orthodox and Latin on FR have gotten very civil and mild, partly because we Easterners recognize in the new Pope a somewhat kindred spirit (for example, he *gets* icons and the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and has written critiques of Western religious art which could easily have been penned by an Orthodox), partly because Benedicts actions and pronouncements thus far have been conservative, not by harking back to the Latin triumphalism of the 15th to 19th centuries (as some 'traditionalists' in his communion would like) but by looking to the first millenium, and this has some effect on those in his church.
The discussions on other threads have not touched on the problem to reunion presented by the state of "American Catholicism". So I offer no vision, only some muted advice, draw (as is customary for Orthodox) by looking at what worked in the past, on how to simultaneously preserve academic freedom (which is of immeasurable value to society) and deal with apostacy in religiously grounded institutions of higher education.
I can tell you, that were the split you suggest (without, I presume, endorsing) to take place, it would be the Romans, not the Americans we continued talking to.
Good question. Why would anyone who is a member of an anti-Catholic organization or anti-Catholic secret society want to teach at a Catholic college or university? What would embolden them to think that they could get away with it?
There does seem to be some sort of anti-Catholic liberal social engineering agenda going on. It is organized and cuts across the boundaries of a number of different organizations.
Makes you wonder what they have on some of these bishops who do little or nothing about it. VERY very strange.
...sigh...
Very interesting and cogent post. And I think I'll chime in a bit.
My personal opinion is that there is a potential for schism, but I think it will be more along the lines of the liberal Catholics leaving and joining mainstream protestant denominations, such as the more liberal episcopalean groups. What is left would be the more conservative latin-rite Catholics and the eastern Catholics.
I don't hope for this to happen, but I think there is some chance that it will. I also don't think that the more liberal Catholics make up all that large a portion of the active, churchgoing population in any case. They squeak loudly and cause more than their share of problems, but I do think their numbers are far smaller than their actual voice. If they leave, they'll leave noisily, but I wouldn't expect it to have much of an impact outside of a few very liberal diocese in the northeast and west coast.
I also have some hope that greater unity between the orthodox and the Catholic church will come about. I think it's a priority for Pope Benedict and the Right thing to do in any case.
"Good question. Why would anyone who is a member of an anti-Catholic organization or anti-Catholic secret society want to teach at a Catholic college or university?"
Wolves are normally attracted to sheep.
"What would embolden them to think that they could get away with it?"
Human nature, particularly American human nature, tends to shy away from confrontation even when confrontation is the right and moral thing to do.
"Makes you wonder what they have on some of these bishops who do little or nothing about it. VERY very strange."
I think it's more *see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.*
This organization, the CNS, is showing a very viable path and strategy for dealing with these kinds of heresies and the fifth columnists who perpetuate them. I'm waiting to see a grassroots level group that will do the same thing at the diocesan level.
I doubt that many Bishops are in fact in cahoots with this kind of stuff. I just sense that it's easier for them to ignore what they see with their own eyes than it is to muck out the stable, as it were.
This article is excellent. It is always good to NAME and IDENTIFY our enemies.
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