Skeletons in the Closet

As someone new to the Catholic tradition, I am constantly discovering important truths in my journey.  Occasionally, however, I stumble across a couple of skeletons rattling in the closet.  Recently I read the 1832 encylical Mirari vos, in which Pope Gregory XVI lamented the "absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone," and the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, listing among "the principal errors of our times" the beliefs that "every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true," and that "it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship." 

The Church's stance changed dramatically through the important work of folks like John Courtney Murray.  Murray's role in bringing the Church around to recognize a fundamental implication of human dignity, however, raises important questions about our Catholic legal theory project.  Should Catholic legal theorists be focused on defending the real-world implications of the moral anthropology as articulated by the Church, or should we also challenge the Church's teaching on issues where we, as individuals, believe it falls short of the truth claims embodied in the moral anthropology?  If the Church was mistaken about religious liberty, is the Church mistaken about some other aspect of the social order today?

One topic that will immediately come to mind, of course, is same-sex marriage and civil unions.  Charles Curran, for example, has written a new book on the moral theology of Pope John Paul II (HT: Open Book):

The methodological gap in Pope John Paul II's moral theology arises, Father Curran says, when his willingness to accept the capacity of the Church to learn truth in social-justice teaching is abandoned when the focus is personal and sexual morality. "In the social teaching," he says, "you have accepted much more a reality of historical development. Things develop and change over history and over time. You have also tended to emphasize much more the person as the center of things."

The pope "uses what I call a relationality model. It sees the human person in the multiple relationships with God, neighbor, world, and self," says Father Curran. "Now if you look at sexual ethics, the emphasis is on the eternal, the immutable, and the unchanging. What has always been true."

My concern here is not so much with the merits of the sexuality arguments, but with our disposition toward them.  As Catholic legal theorists, do we approach them strictly on their substance, or is there a presumption that we accept and defend the Church's position?  Is the presumption rebuttable?  In other words, are we to function strictly as Apostles, spreading the Church's Good News to the world?  Or are we to act as the Old Testament prophets, speaking hard truths to authority, including the Church itself?  Or are we to do both, and if so, how?

Rob