{"id":5056,"date":"2006-10-24T14:01:29","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T14:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/lott-on-curran.html"},"modified":"2006-10-24T14:01:29","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T14:01:29","slug":"lott-on-curran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/lott-on-curran.html","title":{"rendered":"Lott on Curran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Lott reviews Fr. Charles Curran’s autobiography:<\/a><\/p>\n

Read it – (the review, that is). Good stuff, and one pities Lott for having to take on the book. What’s interesting is Curran admitting that he and his supporters worked very hard to keep procedural, rather than substantive issues at the fore in regard to his position at Catholic University and as a Catholic theologian:<\/p>\n

\n

After the CDF contacted Curran in 1979, he stalled and tried again to play the procedural card. The initial letter was accompanied by 16 pages documenting the \u201cerrors and ambiguities\u201d in his writing and a request that he reply to them in the next month. When he did get around to responding, Curran again \u201cpointed out the serious flaws in the [CDF\u2019s examination] process,\u201d claiming that the \u201cprocedure violates the basic principles of justice in that it does not recognize the right of the accused to hear specific charges, to know who are the accusers, to have a copy of all the files against one, and to have representation of one\u2019s own choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exchange continued in the same vein, with the CDF trying to wring answers out of Curran, and with the professor continuing to lecture them about the unfairness of the process. At one point, an officer of the CDF wrote to Chancellor Hickey to ask if he could please find some way to hurry Fr. Curran along. I don\u2019t know how to adequately convey to readers how tedious the back-and-forth is except to say that reading about this episode made me pine for martial law.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And although the review frames the story in terms of the "decline of liberal Catholicism" – one can’t help but wonder , considering the little nugget at the end of the review –  what helped set the stage in the first place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Lott reviews Fr. Charles Curran’s autobiography: Read it – (the review, that is). Good stuff, and one pities Lott for having to take on the book. What’s interesting is Curran admitting that he and his supporters worked very hard to keep procedural, rather than substantive issues at the fore in regard to his position…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLott on Curran - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/lott-on-curran.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lott on Curran - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jeremy Lott reviews Fr. Charles Curran’s autobiography: Read it – (the review, that is). Good stuff, and one pities Lott for having to take on the book. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}