By DONALD DeMARCO
After the release of Humanae Vitae in 1968, dissent became rampant in the Catholic Church, especially in America. Undergirding dissent was the presumption that dissenters were expressing their freedom and their courage in speaking out against traditional Church teaching.
These two presumptions, however, must be called into question since the dissenters, if they were sincere, would have extended these two qualities to anyone who expressed his freedom and courage to assent to Church teaching. Such, to a large extent, was not the case. Dissent was not only allowed but applauded if it opposed the Magisterium.
But dissenting from the dissenters, in many cases, was a punishable offense. In fact, dissent became the litmus test for job security in certain Catholic universities.
Every injustice sparks heroes. Perhaps the most war-tested among those who had the temerity to speak against the dissenters was Dr. William E. May, who concluded his formal teaching career at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C. His odyssey from outcast to recipient of the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice medal, the highest honor a lay person can receive from the Pope, demonstrates the fact that true freedom and courage are on the side of assent to Church teaching.
Dissenter Fr. Charles Curran’s trajectory, on the other hand, did not fare so well. After a 17-year investigation, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith concluded that Fr. Charles Curran should no longer be eligible to exercise the function of a professor of Catholic theology. As a result, Curran was suspended from his duties as a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America.
I had the pleasure and honor of knowing Professor May. He had a rare condition called heterochromia, characterized by the irises of his eyes being of different colors, an anomaly shared by celebrities such as Jane Seymour and Dan Aykroyd.
But there was nothing anomalous about his vision. He saw clearly the reasonable grounds on which Pope Paul VI established his controversial encyclical, Humanae Vitae, and expressed his agreement clearly, often convincingly, to his students, readers, and various associates.
I once asked him what it was like teaching alongside of Charles Curran and other dissenters in the theology department at Catholic University. “Trench warfare,” was his immediate and candid response. No doubt, it was in that battlefield that his understanding of why the Church objected to contraception, abortion, euthanasia, technologically assisted forms of reproduction, and homosexual acts was refined and sharpened so that he could better share his wisdom with others through his teaching and through his writing.
One of May’s former students, who became a professor of moral theology at a Catholic seminary, was not indulging in hyperbole when he said of his mentor that “he inspired a generation of younger moralists, including myself, to follow his courageous example in defending and explicating Catholic moral teaching in its entirety, including in its more unpopular dimensions.”
John Finnis, a scholar and close friend, credited May with a basketful of virtues, including “frankness, energy, quickness of mind, hard work, zeal for the Lord, and courtesy to all.”
Nonetheless, his teaching was not appreciated by everyone. When he refused to stop teaching in support of Humanae Vitae, the department at Catholic University fired him five years after he had been hired. However, he was awarded tenure by a single vote in the Catholic University of America’s Graduate School of Theology.
May was a sound thinker and an excellent scholar. He cited an argument against contraception from the writings of St. John Chrysostom: “Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit….Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with His law?” From the writings of John Calvin, he culled the following: “The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between a man and a woman is a monstrous thing.”
After marshalling an extensive list of pertinent citations from various authors, May came to the conclusion that “contraception, we have now seen, is the ‘gateway’ to the culture of death.”
In an article entitled, “Charles E. Curran’s Grossly Inaccurate Attack on the Moral Theology of John Paul II,” May delineates several “utterly false” premises upon which Curran mounts his arguments. He concludes, with the support of a list of sociologists, that Pope Paul VI was truly prophetic: the use of contraception does, in fact, lead to greater infidelity within marriage and more sex outside of marriage, despite what Catholic dissenters predicted to the contrary.
In a book which May edited, Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent, he reminds his readers that public questioning by a theologian of Church teaching on a particular issue does not “usurp the teaching authority of the Magisterium.” Dissent, therefore, is merely dissent, and does not replace Church teaching. Some of the dissenters, nonetheless, wanted their dissent to provide a “second magisterium.”
Moreover, while May was applying scholarship to the issues at hand, Curran was utilizing the media to propagate the presumed glamour associated with being a dissenter.
May became well known and highly respected. He participated in scholarly meetings and/or gave public lectures in Rome, Vatican City, Barcelona, Pamplona, Toronto, Oxford, Manila, Singapore, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ireland, Austria, India, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as in many venues in the United States. He was a member of seven scholarly organizations and was president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars from 1985-1987.
In our final telephone conversation, he told me how pleased he was to be able to teach a group of residents at the retirement home in which they resided, though from a wheelchair and despite being handicapped with various other infirmities. He mentioned, with justifiable pride, that all of his seven children became medical doctors.
One of his former students, who visited May on a nearly daily basis, recalled Bill’s trust in God amid great physical suffering over the final seven years. “I can still hear his voice saying, ‘God is so good to me’.”
William E. May passed away on December 13, 2014, at 86 years of age. It was the 57th anniversary to the day when he and his future wife, Patricia, first met.
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