more on freedom and Kung

Thanks to Steve for his recent comments. Steve asks a good question on the issue of the Church teaching on religious liberty. I contributed a paper to the inaugural issue of the St. Thomas Law Journal. My paper, which was entitled "A Critique of John Noonan's Approach to Development of Doctrine," was published at 1 St. Thomas L. J. 285-306 (2003). (A link to that paper is available on the right hand side of this blog if you click on my name and then look for the paper on Judge Noonan.) In that paper, I spend 4-5 pages outlining my view that the Church has not changed Her teaching on religious liberty.

On Kung and Curran. I think Steve is correct that I may have been too sweeping in my dismissal of Kung and Curran. If Kung is responsible at least in part for Steve's return to the Church then I think we owe him a debt of gratitude.

I do think that the reason that people such Kung and Curran and lesser lights such as McBrien and Dan Maguire (at Marquette) receive a lot of their notoriety is because they are teaching at Catholic schools (or used to teach Catholic theology) and "courageously" dissenting from Church teaching. I think, and this is admittedly impressionistic, that after Curran left Catholic University that he stopped being such a big story. (I don't think that Curran and Kung were "fired." They both lost the right to teach Catholic theology from schools or programs with a specific link to the Vatican. I think Kung remained on the faculty at Tubingen (he just couldn't teach Catholic theology) and I think the same was true for Curran (although he later decided to leave CUA)). I think the same would be true if McBrien were teaching at Indiana University-South Bend of if Maguire were teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Their thought is not that interesting in its own right to demand a lot of attention. Kung, I think, is in a different league from these others, although I think that after the Vatican action in the late 197s that he increasingly distanced himself from the main currents of Catholic thought. I think Kung has most recently been spending a lot of time on a Global Religions initiative. I do think that Steve is correct that Kung still attracts large crowds when he speaks. I remember, however, reading an account of one such speech recently and the author noted that the crowd seemed to be like the crowds at Call to Action gatherings (an older crowd who came of age during Vatican II) for whom Kung still has celebrity status. The energy in the Church is not with this group. The energy in the Church, the vocations for example (see the website of the Sisters of Mary--a vibrant Dominican community here in Ann Arbor), is with the Catholics who you might find at Youth Day gatherings or Right to Life marches (the most recent of which was filled with young people) or at a family conference of groups such as the Legionaries. I don't think that Kung is a big player for these folks.

Richard