How Catholic University Rid Itself of Fr. Curran

A lawsuit charging Catholic University with discrimination because the school has gone back to single-sex dorms has been tossed out. With that victory, the school goes one step closer to undoing the legacy of its most notorious priest, Fr. Charles Curran.

Curran came to Catholic University in 1964 after coming under the influence of some liberal priests in Rome. He was both highly intelligent and a master of evasion.

Something of a con man and obviously obsessed with sex, he made the authorities at Catholic University look like doddering saps. In September 1966, the National Catholic Reporter ran an article about him based on lectures he had given and also a phone interview. In the piece, Curran predicted the end of the Church's authoritarian moral teachings; future morality would be based on "the experience of Christian people."

Then this: "We today are beginning to break away from absolutism; and this is precisely where the risk, the danger, the insecurity, the name-calling starts coming."

For most of its history, Catholic University had been a docile campus run by conservative clerics. Students and faculty followed the mainstream and the Board of Trustees. Liberals who in 1905 supported "Americanism" -- openness to democracy and religious tolerance -- were driven from campus. When Bishop William J. McDonald was made Rector in 1958, he warned against modernism, telling the students not to be "dazzled by the claims of the so-called enlightenment and of the other more recent movements and philosophies which promised to be harbingers of a bright new world."

In 1962, the first year of Vatican II, McDonald prohibited the Canon Law Department of the university from sending suggestions to the council. In 1963, McDonald cancelled lectures by Church liberals John Courtney Murray and Hans Kung. He also cancelled a symposium on Darwinism. In 1963, McDonald also dismissed Reverend Edward McBrian, a liberal, from the school of theology. The faculty of the school objected in a written letter, but didn't follow up with anything stronger. The campus newspaper, The Tower, barely commented on the firings.

Yet, in the 1960s things had changed.

Many of the students who came to Catholic University in those years were children of Vatican II, which ran from 1962 to 1965. They had also been inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, and the bourgeoning rock music, free speech, and anti-war movements. (Among their number was Susan Sarandon, who would enter Catholic University in the early 1960s before going on to a Hollywood career and a lifetime of liberal activism.) These were kids profoundly affected by pop culture and the media -- and the media in the 1960s had grown increasingly hysterical, unreliable, and hostile to Catholicism.

While Bishop Sheen and G.K. Chesterton had once been media celebrities, the press now elevated Church critics.

In 1963, Newsweek characterized the Church's position as "blindly archaic," even if there were signs that it was becoming more "modern." The media also tended to give prime space to dissenters on contraception and ignored defenders of orthodoxy. Notre Dame's Father John A. O'Brien was featured on the front page of The New York Times after he wrote several articles about family planning and asked for a White House conference on population control. Newsweek quoted members of Planned Parenthood saying that Father O'Brien's views were "a source of joy". Front-page coverage was given to a Notre Dame conference, funded by the liberal Ford Foundation, that aimed at changing Church teaching.

The faculty at Catholic University had also become more liberal in the Vatican II years.

In the School of Theology, conservatives Joseph Fenten and Reverend Francis Connell left in the mid 1960s, and the new Dean, Reverend Walter Schmitz, hired liberals, including Father Curran.

It's important to note, however, that many of the liberals of the 1960s were not of the New Left, a much more radical wing of American politics. Dissident theologians who had been barred from Catholic University's campus like John Courtney Murray and Hans Kung were often faithful to the Church in ways that today would be considered conservative. Thus in 1964, America, the liberal Jesuit magazine, rebuked those who thought Vatican II would bring an end to the ban on contraception.

The buzzword at the time was "aggiornamento," an Italian word meaning "to modernize and bring up to date." The Church, opined America, would "disappoint those who think that aggiornamento is the Italian word for contraception."

It is important to note this, because for many of those who would protest the dismissal of Father Curran, the issue wasn't contraception: it was academic freedom.

A year before Curran was dismissed, the campus was the site of a small protest against Rector McDonald's unilateral decision to move the undergraduate Religion Department, which had been in the School of Arts and Sciences, into the Theology Department. It was a move intended to ensure that McDonald could have more control over what was taught in the undergrad Religion Department. Small groups of protestors popped up around campus, but their numbers were too small to win the day.

This would change, as would the nature of American liberal Catholicism, when Catholic University attempted to let go Fr. Curran. When the news of Curran's firing arrived, years of pent-up anger at the iron rule of McDonald and other conservatives erupted on campus. Yet many of the protestors would be moderate faculty members and students who were fighting for academic freedom more than sexual license; one eyewitness wrote in Commonweal that there were no wild, irresponsible demands, and that the leaders even encouraged the student protestors to dress properly.

The Curran affair broke right after 1966, the year after Vatican II ended and a pivotal year in the culture of the Church. It was here that resentment, and sexual obsession, began to creep into mainstream liberalism. While the Second Vatican Council had allowed for some small changes in the Mass -- while still allowing for Latin, Gregorian chant and the veneration of saints -- progressive activists called into question the legitimacy of the Mass itself.

During the 1966 Liturgical conference in Houston, reports surfaced of unorthodox "Masses" being conducted in the hotel rooms. That same year Colman Grabert, a Benedictine monk, suggested that the Mass should have "the fun of a successful cocktail party." Jesuit John Allen called the Mass a breeding ground for atheism because it separated man from God. Popular Catholic writer Mary Perkins Ryan called the Mass archaic and irrelevant. All of this was on the heels of the 1965 book The Secular City by Harvey Cox, which claimed that modern man was secular and uninterested about "ultimate reality."

This was all a shift from classical liberalism. As Catholic historian James Hitchcock has noted, "The complacently pragmatic and optimistic spirit of the New Frontier began to give way more frequent and more obvious manifestations of angst, identity problems, and the search for meaning, all of which seemed to lead away from pragmatism and politics and back into the soul, to the spiritual life, to metaphysics, even to ritual."

In the end, Fr. Curran won his battle with Catholic University -- at least for a few years. A week after being dismissed he was reinstated, made an assistant professor and given tenure. The fact that Curran's orthodoxy was not questioned was the loophole that allowed him to be reinstated. Several Bishops came to the defense of academic freedom. On April 26, 1967, Rector McDonald called a press conference to announce that they had rescinded their action in letting Curran's contract expire. But as is often the case with liberal sexual obsessives, Curran kept pushing the issue, and made enough mistakes that he was driven off campus in 1986 -- by Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict.

There was one real casualty of the Curran affair. Msgr. Eugene Kevane, an orthodox priest and the Dean of the Catholic University School of Education, had defended the bishops, writing that "the embodiment of knowledge and wisdom on religious matters is not to be found in the group of scholars and specialists in the sacred science, but rather in the successors to the apostles." As a result, Kevane was accused by the department of theology of libel.

At meetings of the education department young radical priests who supported Curran were disruptive, and even attempted to delay Kevane from grading papers on time so that students would consider him incompetent. One witness, Sister Mary Verone, who had taught at Catholic since 1939, wrote that Msgr. Kevane "is literally enduring a persecution and a martyrdom."

A reporter for the National Catholic News Service noted the obvious irony: professors at Catholic University were willing to tolerate dissent by Charles Curran, but when Kevane dissented from their dissent, the same professors "were not able to be equally indulgent."

Despite being reelected as dean in 1967 -- despite what one witness called "highly unethical and irregular procedures [that] were used to apparently intimidate certain faculty members prior to the election" -- Kevane was canned in February 1968. The school rector, James Whalen, said that the faculty of the school of education was divided about Kevane, "with no strength of leadership in between."

Msgr. Kevane decamped for another school, and was forgotten. There were no editorials about his dismissal in America and Commonweal, which had both loudly supported Fr. Curran. The New York Times was silent. Kevane himself never named the priests who had been harassing him, and they remain unknown to this day.

With Catholic University's small step back towards sanity with single-sex dorms again, he must be smiling.