SAN DIEGO, October 25, 2012, (Cardinal Newman Society)—The University of San Diego (USD) will host a lecture series by a radical theologian from England who not only supports abortion but has used just war theory and the imagery of the Trinity to support killing the unborn, advocated sacramental same-sex marriage, and even compared the sacrifice of the Mass to homosexual intercourse.
USD’s stated mission includes being “committed to the dignity and fullest development of the whole person.”
Just last month, Bishop Declan Lang of the English Diocese of Clifton cancelled a lecture by theology professor Tina Beattie, the Director of the Digby Stuart Research Centre for Religion, Society and Human Flourishing at the University of Roehampton in London, because of her radical views. But that isn’t stopping USD’s Center for Catholic Thought and Culture (CCTC) from proudly hosting her as a visiting fellow for the fall semester.
Ironically, the University uses the CCTC as evidence of the university’s Catholic identity on its website, saying “the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture articulates the message of the Catholic intellectual tradition through thought-provoking lectures, programs and cultural events.”
On November 8th, Beattie will speak on “Visions of Paradise: Women, Sin and Redemption in Christian Art.” On November 12th, she’ll speak on “Women in Catholic Education since Vatican II.” And on November 29th, she’ll speak about “The Catholic Church and Human Rights: Debates, Dialogues and Conflicts.”
The University touts Beattie’s “main areas of teaching and research” as “Christian ethics, theologies and theories of gender, theology and the arts, and religion and human rights.”
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Beattie, in her book God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, compared the Mass to homosexual intercourse:
In the early Middle Ages the focus of the Mass was not just the sacrificial death of Christ but the incarnation as a whole, in the late Middle Ages it came to be understood more explicitly as a sacrifice, today it has become an act of (homo) sexual intercourse…
Christ’s kenotic self giving has become implicitly associated with the male orgasm…
I have already argued that the phallocentrism of neo-orthodox theology risk reducing the Mass to an orgasmic celebration of homosexual love from which the female body is excluded.
In defense of her pro-abortion rights position, Beattie wrote:
The idea of ensoulment serves as a reminder that the coming into being of a human person is not an instantaneous event but a gradual process, not only in terms of the biological process of fertilisation, implantation and cellular division, but also in terms of the developing consciousness of the mother and her relationship to the child.
Given that in Christian theology the understanding of personhood is fundamentally relational because it bears the image of the Triune God, it is hard to see how an embryo can be deemed a person before even the mother enters into a rudimentary relationship with it. As many as one in four pregnancies may spontaneously abort during the first eight weeks of pregnancy, often without the woman knowing that she was pregnant. As some Catholic ethicists point out, the logical corollary of this position is that a woman should baptise every menstrual period – just in case.
In that same piece, she also compares pregnancy to war, saying, “To acknowledge that there are cases when early abortion is the lesser of two evils is not to be pro-abortion, any more than to acknowledge that sometimes war may be a necessary evil means that one is pro-war.”
In The Tablet, she wondered why marriage couldn’t “become an inclusive rather than an exclusive sacrament?” But not only does Beattie think homosexual “marriage” is equal to traditional marriage, she seems to say homosexual “marriage” might even be better because it doesn’t involve subordinating women. She wrote:
In these times of radical change in our understanding of sexuality and human dignity (especially the full and equal dignity of women in this life and not just in the life to come), maybe we heterosexuals need the marriages of our homosexual friends to help us to understand what marriage looks like when it’s not corrupted by traditions of domination and subordination.
As The Cardinal Newman Society recently reported, USD recently urged undergraduate students to register for a course called “Using Adolescent and Children’s Literature to Explore LGBTQ Issues” as an approved elective for minors in Education, Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Peace and Justice Studies.
USD’s law school supported a bill along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights that would allow judges to establish that a child may legally have more than two parents.
And USD also hosted an “educational drag show” for students earlier this year. It was this outrageous event that inspired USD alum Charles LiMandri to form a group called Alumni for a Catholic USD which has worked to raise awareness that USD’s Catholic identity has been severely diminished.
H/T: Protect the Pope for some research on Beattie.
This article originally appeared on Campus Notes, the blog of the Cardinal Newman Society, and is reprinted with permission.