A faculty-student strike at Catholic University

It was springtime, 1967, when trustees of Catholic University of America pushed Fr. Charles E. Curran’s name and picture into newspapers and television news programs. American Catholics, enthusiastic about their church when the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965, were unsettled when those trustees announced that Fr. Curran’s contract to teach in the theology department would not be renewed.

A student and faculty strike began on April 19. Fr. Curran was cautious about talking to the press, and did not agree to my request—or anybody’s request -- for an interview. Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, the archbishop of Baltimore, intervened to assure Fr. Curran that I knew my trade and would probably not misquote him. Shehan had the political skills to become a cardinal; he had the commitment to conscience to become a saint.

So the interview went on. It was published in the April 28, 1967 issue of The Catholic Review and in the June 1967 issue of Catholic Mind. It is published below. In 1986 Fr. Curran was dismissed from Catholic U. as a dissident. A 1986 decision by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Josef Cardinal Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict XVI—declared that Fr. Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology.

The American Association of University Professors issued a report that said, “Had it not been for the intervention of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Professor Curran would undoubtedly still be active in the [Catholic University] Department of Theology, a popular teacher, honored theologian and respected colleague.” Fr. Curran accepted a full tenured professorship at Southern Methodist University, where Catholic students are said to outnumber Methodists by a wide margin. Here’s the 1967 interview:

By A. E. P. Wall

A happily harrassed Fr. Charles E. Curran poked his head into the doorway of a fellow priest’s room [on the Washington, D.C., campus of Catholic University of America]. It was the same head that had been poking its way into millions of living rooms during the previous few days.

Fr. Curran Smiled and extended a sinewy arm. The T-shirt he wore emphasized his slender build and added to the visitor’s quick impression that he was shaking hands with a senior counselor at a boys’ camp. But it was an associate professor of moral theology who spoke.

For Fr. Curran it was the end of the first day of classes following the spontaneous shutdown of the Catholic University of America by its faculty and student body. Did it mean the end of his own active concern about changes on the campus?

“I don’t think it can be,” the 33-year-old theologian said after stepping into more familiar priestly attire. “The issues involve more than just one person.

“We’re going to have to improve the situation in many ways to allow for better communication in the area of theology itself and in the academic processes here at Catholic University.”

The words came out quietly. For Fr. Curran it was a simple statement of fact.

He had another fact in mind and he leaned forward in a massive leather chair to emphasize what he had to say. The dispute that began when Fr. Curran was told his contract would not be renewed had nothing to do, he explained, with birth control or any other doctrinal matter. None of the student or faculty strikers drew the issues in terms of obedience or disobedience to episcopal authority. The question, it might be said, was purely academic.

“The unanimous reaction of the students and the faculty,” Fr. Curran said, “is proof of the fact that the issue was not doctrinal or moral. Disputed issues do not produce a unanimous reaction.

“In this question the academic community was united. You couldn’t unite this community on birth control. You couldn’t even unite the academic community on God, because the faculty is not made up entirely of Catholics.”

The issue was academic freedom, to be exercised in harmony with university statutes. As an immediate issue it was resolved when the announcement came that Fr. Curran’s contract would be renewed and that an academic promotion had been granted.

Now, Fr. Curran said, it is time to consider some long-range relationships. “These relationships will affect theology itself and the work of all theologians in the Church,” said the popular young priest whose height—more than six feet—could not be swallowed up even by the hefty chair.

“The lines of communication—you might call them conduits—with the bishops have to be opened up,” Fr. Curran said.

He paused and then added: “This is not a revolt against authority. Ever since Vatican II we have known that authority in the Church must be exercised in new and different ways.”

Does this suggest a delegation of authority?

“No,” Fr. Curran said quickly, “let’s compare it with the way society functions today and in the past. At one time there was a monarchical form of government in most of the world. Today there is a movement toward democratic government. If you look at the structure of business today, at the corporation, you find that everybody throws in ideas and that there is little one-man rule.

“The Council told us that each one has his own role to play. This involves a dialogue and a listening process. As a practical matter it involves the opening of channels.

“I think there is a realization that authority will be exercised in a different way in the future. This is indicated by the organization of modern society, which does not operate from the top down. Each one contributes. We stimulate each other to contribute to the good of all.

“This sort of thing has to happen in the Church.”

Fr. Curran spoke of a greater participation by everyone in the Church, and he was asked whether he envisions the election of bishops by priests and the laity.

“That has been proposed,” he said, “and it is not a new idea. But frankly, let’s realize that there can be problems in elections, too.

“One of the problems of today is a unilateralism, an overly simplistic approach that leads men to say, ‘All you have to do is . . .’”

Although he doesn’t see voting as a guarantee of right action or democracy as a blanket to smother all discontent, Fr. Curran does see an opportunity for increased participation in Church affairs by both the laity and the clergy.

What about newspapers, radio and television as external communications media?

“We can’t ultimately solve all of our problems on the front page,” Fr. Curran said. “We must create a structure other than headlines.

“In the long, hard pull such structures can be difficult. The danger is that some people say we don’t need structures. We do need them, and they must be flexible, adaptable to the needs of the times.”

How did we get this way?

Christians celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, the merging of the divine and human in Christ Jesus. This revelation was ahead of its time, proclaimed by Jesus and his followers to a primitive world.

We know more about everything today. The math of Herod’s time was not the math of Einstein’s. Changes are huge in what we know about agriculture, literature, medicine, law, astronomy and everything else. That includes religion.

Many leaders and followers in religious groups insist that God allows the development of every kind of knowledge except knowledge of religion. This notion of a limited God limiting the devout in their pursuit of religion, while granting unlimited growth in every other field of human endeavor,is disabling.The evolution of religious knowledge is resisted, not merely to protect a perceived franchise but in defense of convictions which are powerfully held, even if powerfully wrong.

Jesus provided a stunning revival of divinity’s eternal, perpetual adventure in humanity, an incarnation as old as Adam,and older. Incarnation may be celebrated as an event and as a process.

It might be called, with a smile, the Inplantanation and Incarnation, the divine purpose apparent in everything that lives and grows. Evidence that living plants feel injury, move toward sunshine and respond to care has been studied by scientists for decades. Incarnation began before the beginning.

Toyland, starting in 1929

At Christmas time I think of some of my favorite toys. Remember yours?

At age 4,on the last Christmas of the 1920s, I received a Lionel electric train, my dad’s choice. That same year I was given alphabet blocks with letters and illustrations on them. The only one I remember is Z for Zulu.

Age 6 brought a small cast iron truck, one of my all-time favorite toys, and space in the garden for building roads.

When I was about 8 years old I prized a toy that made lead soldiers and cowboys. The toy melted lead, which I poured into molds.

Another favorite was an electric burning tool, which burned designs and drawings into wood or leather.

A chemistry set provided hours of fun. I discovered that I could buy some of my replacement chemicals at the drug store, which was cheaper than ordering by mail.

A toy typewriter required dialing one letter at a time, and it did not know how to spell. It was succeeded by a hand-operated printing press.

A battery-powered Morse code telegraph toy, with keys for sender and receiver, allowed for the transmission of secret messages over distances of many feet.

I once envied my pal John Adams, who received 10 different titles in the Big Little Book series for Christmas. That was a whole dollar’s worth of books.

By age 11 my favorite possession was a bike, which had a speedometer. I rode it a lot and for long distances.

That period included another favorite, a small radio in my bedroom. This was before the time of FM radio and television. I heard the famous newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn report the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. I heard Adolph Hitler harangues on the rising and falling waves of sound peculiar to overseas transmissions, his strident tones bringing yells of Sieg Heil from the crowd.

--Ed

When the elderly act like the youngerly

Sometime after her 80th birthday my mom asked for help with a questionnaire. The blanks she wanted to fill in were blurry and her reading glasses no longer helped. She said she had become the child and her son had become the helpful parent. In fact, little kids are just starting to grow, learn and become self-sufficient, but the elderly have stopped growing, are becoming forgetful and need help with things they’ve taken for granted. It is a time of remembered independence and unsettling dependence.

My older friends, even those who have the same medical concerns that I have, are different from me and each other, even as we all adjust to a world of canes, wheelchairs and pills.

Several times a week I trade emails with a girl I knew in high school. We were in the same graduating class in the peaceful days before Pearl Harbor. I was in touch with several boys I knew as far back as kindergarten and one by one they disappeared, all of them. I treasure other friendships, some recent and some going back a long way.
My greatest blessing is my children and their spouses, and grandchildren. I don’t really think of them that way—as a group. Each one is precious and personal.

For all blessings I thank God, who is said to be the same now and forever, but who doesn’t seem the same as when we were introduced in the late 1920’s. When I was four years old I went to bed wondering what God was writing down about my day. It had been explained in Sunday school that God recorded every jot and tittle.

Eighty years later I go to bed after reading my Kindle, not expecting that God is noting that I broke a coffee carafe this morning. I have some inquiries of my own, such as how come there are so many wars and so many hungry people and so much sickness? Maybe that’s because I’m a journalist, always ready to uncap my fountain pen and write down what I see and hear. Even when God answers one of my questions I know there’s no point in trying to get it past the city editor.

Almost everybody offers help. It is almost impossible for someone with a walker to open a door. Someone leaps ahead and holds it open. Everybody who uses a walker in public is treated like a cardinal or a rock star, for whom all doors are opened. Neighbors offer rides, share friendship, shovel snow, carry packages, phone reminders that the garage door is still open.

There are lots of jokes about getting old, because old people can be funny, and not just when they shuffle like comedian Charlie Chaplin or when they blunder blindly like Mr. Magoo. There are wisecracks about wasting youth on the young, who don’t appreciate it, and about old age not being for sissies. But stresses begin at birth, not on the day Social Security checks begin.

Babies are cute, but grandma doesn’t have to be burped.

Lyndon B. Obama at West Point

It was a little bit like listening to Lyndon B. Obama.

When President Barack Obama spoke eloquently of his goals in far-off Afghanistan that name popped into my mind—Lyndon B. Obama. Lyndon Johnson began, like Obama, earning the trust and admiration of the nation. Johnson also began his presidency as a man of high ideals. It was not his good intentions, but his rickety judgment that disrupted a generation of Americans.

While Barry Obama was smiling in his crib in Honolulu, Vice President Johnson was answering questions for journalists in an impromptu outdoor news conference a few blocks away. It is memorable for me nearly half a century later, when memory tends to be fickle, because a reporter’s cigar shed glowing ashes onto my jacket, where they continued to smolder.

Within a year or so, Johnson had become president, promising a war on poverty but drained by a war in Vietnam and the urge to escalate, like a gambler who doubles his bets each time he loses until finally he runs out of chips.

Is Obama’s idealism, which has held great promise for him and the country, blurring his judgment, which until now has been so cool? A nation in economic recession, with a creaky education apparatus, unresolved health care issues and a rusting system of highways, bridges, rail and air transport, asks such questions.

In his address at West Point, President Obama spoke of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose family home isnearby, also on the Hudson River. Roosevelt, who began his presidency in the economic gloom of the Great Depression, was commander-in-chief when bombs rained on the island that would become Obama’s home. Hindsight shows that FDR didn’t always make the best decisions, as in the scandal of Japanese-American internment camps. He did not choose to go to war. The war came to him.

President Obama has more choices than FDR, plus whatever benefit there may be in hindsight, while an anxious world wants to believe in his foresight.