The USCCB's Committee on Doctrine has issued a "public correction" of the writings of Daniel Maguire, a Catholic professor of theology at Marquette University, Milwaukee. The correction addresses at least four errors that Maguire published in two pamphlets addressed to the bishops. These errors are:
1. That in addition to the pope and bishops, the opinions of theologians and lay people are two other authoritative sources of Catholic doctrine. The Church thus has three "magisteria," and the agreement of all three is required for a teaching to have dogmatic authority.
2. That the Church has no official teaching on the illicitness of birth control.
3. That the Church has no official teaching on the illicitness of abortion and, in reality, has a strong "pro-choice tradition."
4. That the Church has no official teaching on same-sex marriage.
Except for the first error, which deals with the organization of authority, the fraudulence of Maguire's points should be apparent even to non-Catholics who, because they constantly hear the secular media criticize them, know the prohibitive Catholic teachings on birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage.
In an article called "Marquette and the Heretical Dan Maguire," John McAdams reproduces a preachy "form letter" from Father Robert Wild, president of Marquette, that defends Maguire's stature on the faculty of theology. The main premise of the letter is that the university requires academic freedom. The complaint against Maguire and the university, though, isn't that Marquette "has a commitment to academic freedom," but that Maguire presents his ideas as a Catholic alternative to the Church's doctrinal teachings.
Father Wild claims that since the thirteenth century, faculty members in the Catholic universities have been "encouraged to follow the evidence of their own minds in research, teaching, and publishing, subject only to the criticism of their peers." On the contrary, in the thirteenth century "their peers" included the popes and bishops, and Wild's claim is, of course, factually incorrect. True, the Church doesn't force non-Catholics to submit to the Catholic faith, but the Church can and does demand obedience from its members, especially when these members attain a public position like Maguire's. As Romano Amerio puts it, "The Church commands interior acts. She commands acts of reason. She commands assent."
Maguire's response to the bishops is typical of dissenting theologians. Just as Richard McBrien responds in The Christian Century to John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor by claiming the pope just doesn't understand current theology, Maguire claims that the bishops are "misinformed." "The bishops," says Maguire, "aren't theologians." The suggestion behind this tactic is that anyone who disagrees with Maguire, doesn't understand contemporary trends in ecclesiology. Nevertheless, the same criticism is easy to deploy against Maguire himself because although the basis of his claims is ecclesiological and stands upon his construction of the Church as having three "magisteria" (of which he, being a theologian and a layman, conveniently represents two of the three), Maguire's field is Christian ethics, not ecclesiology.
Maguire's web site, which is linked from the site of Marquette's Department of Theology, offers insight both to Maguire's aberrant ideas and to the impotence of today's Catholic Church in censuring and even disassociating itself from error. Today, when the juridical organs of the Church no longer operate and authors never receive the call to defend or recant their writings, a "public correction" of Maguire's writings is all the USCCB can muster.
