(From combined sources)
Fr. Richard P. McBrien, a Notre Dame theology professor who came to prominence as a dissenter from Catholic teaching, died on January 25 in Connecticut at the age of 78, according to a report from CNA/EWTN News.
Fr. McBrien chaired the University of Notre Dame Theology Department for 11 years and chaired the Faculty Senate for three years. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1980, with the initiative of the then-president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, Fr. McBrien’s official website says.
Before arriving at Notre Dame, he taught at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Mass. and directed the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College. From 1975-1976, he was the first visiting fellow at Harvard University’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government. He was president of the Catholic Theological Society of America from 1973-1974.
He was an early signatory of a major dissenting statement against Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed Catholic teaching on the immorality of contraception.
McBrien dissented against other teachings as well.
In The Wanderer dated January 2, 1975, Fr. Eugene Lovisa wrote that, contrary to dogma defining papal infallibility, Fr. McBrien “says just the opposite. In his book Do We Need the Church? he says: ‘…infallibility applies only to the Church as a community, and to the Pope as the spokesman of the community and symbol of unity. . . . Personal Papal infallibility . . . is a theological fiction and cannot be supported or sustained’ (pp. 187-188).”
In 1978, Fr. McBrien gave a public lecture in the Diocese of Little Rock., Ark, on “Who Is a Catholic?,” asserting, in the words of The Guardian, the diocesan newspaper, that “Vatican Council II modified the concept of ‘one, true church’.”
The April 7, 1978 article continued: “Because the council recognized Protestant congregations as ‘churches’ which belong to the Body of Christ, [McBrien] declared, it can no longer be proclaimed without qualification that the Catholic Church is the one true church.”
In 1985 and again in 1996, the Committee on Doctrine of what is now the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops scored the doctrinal deficiencies in McBrien’s well-known work Catholicism.
An April 1996 U.S. bishops’ review of McBrien’s Catholicism was particularly critical of the priest-theologian’s media appearances.
“McBrien gives the press what it wants to hear,” the review said. “He can be counted on to reduce magisterial doctrine and Vatican directives to matters of opinion that can be explained away or rejected when they do not conform to modern norms or the popular culture. He does this by emptying Catholic teaching of its meaning without acknowledging his opposition to it while shifting the focus to his defense of some societal value.”
The review also criticized the book Catholicism for some “inaccurate or at least misleading” statements. Among these is its insistence that Catholics may maintain that “Jesus Christ could have sinned.” The work also appears to cast doubt on the Catholic doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the perpetual virginity of Mary, according to the CNA/EWTN report.
The text depicted as “open questions” issues related to contraception, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, and treats official Church teaching as “merely one of the options for the reader,” the review said. The text implies that Catholic teaching is “erroneous” on these issues.
The review said that Fr. McBrien’s work is intended for beginning theology students, but its presentation risks confusing them by presenting such a “multiplicity of opinion” while providing “insufficient direction for those seeking to know what is truly at the core of the faith.”
At his wdtprs.com blog, Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf wrote of McBrien:
“I hope that in his final years he had a chance to rethink and repent of his work. Enough about him. There is an old phrase, Nihil de mortuis nisi bonum. . . . Say nothing but good about the dead.”
Zuhlsdorf wrote that National Catholic Reporter published an “encomium of McBrien, featuring such darlings of the left as Fr. Charles Curran, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, and Fr. Thomas Reese. You can imagine.”
But the Reporter, he said, also cited this 1990 comment from the late Professor Ralph McInerny, “which pretty much sums up the work of McBrien”:
“McBrien has terrible ideas,” McInerny said.
“I think the demonology he works with is that once we had a hierarchical view of the church, which was authoritarian.
“Then we had Vatican II and, he believes, that model was thrown out. His view is wrong.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress