By Hilary White
MILWAUKEE, March 27, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Since the declaration last week by a US Catholic bishops committee that the opinions of Daniel Maguire, “cross the legitimate lines of theological reflection and simply enter into the area of false teaching,” two prominent Catholic organizations are calling for his dismissal as a professor of ethics at Marquette, a Jesuit university. Human Life International and the Cardinal Newman Society, have said, “The Daniel Maguire scandals must end.”
Maguire is Professor of Moral Theological Ethics at Marquette University and President of the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics where he champions the ethics not of the Catholic faith but of the sexual revolution.
Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, (HLI), said, “I call upon Marquette to stop hiding behind false ideas of tenure and ‘academic freedom’ in the face of theological malfeasance and dismiss Dan Maguire. A Catholic university should be Catholic and not tolerate false teachers like Maguire.”
The Cardinal Newman Society, a student-led group calling for greater coherence of Catholic identity on Catholic university campuses, said Marquette “students can rightly question why a Catholic university’s theology department includes a former priest who falsifies Catholic teaching and disputes infallible doctrine as the basis of his scholarly work.”
CNS president Patrick J. Reilly wrote to Marquette president, Robert Wild, a Jesuit priest, saying, “Marquette University is responsible for presenting Maguire to students and the general public as an expert in moral theology and ethics. Marquette gives Maguire the legitimacy he needs to publicly undermine the Church and secure frequent media appearances.”
Maguire has openly opposed the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life, on the meaning of marriage and on contraception for many years since taking his place as a leader in the Catholic sexual revolution of the 1960’s. He has since expanded his area of interest to include support for euthanasia.
He is the author of Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Fortress Press, 2001.
One student at Marquette wrote on his weblog that the Marquette administration has a “Dan Maguire form letter” that has expanded to a “Dan Maguire form e-mail” to deal with the not infrequent demands that Maguire be fired.
John McAdams includes in his post, dated 2005, a copy of the form letter sent by a correspondent. “At the time of his appointment,” the letter says, “(Maguire) had published no positions contrary to formal Catholic teaching, and the same situation was the case when he was granted tenure shortly afterwards.”
The letter goes on to say that Marquette University grants faculty “academic freedom as generally understood in American higher education. This means, among other things, that the university ceded the right to discipline or terminate tenured faculty on the basis of the content of their teaching or publishing.”
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
US Bishops Denounce False Abortion, Marriage Teaching by “Catholic” Theologian Maguire
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07032301.html