Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Moose mouth muffled

After so much negotiating about the non-negotiables, this was music to my ears:
The Congregation [for the Doctrine of the Faith] said that Father Haight, a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, should be barred from teaching Catholic theology.
Note that the Jesuit in question is a former president of the CTSA--which is about all I have to say about the CTSA. It's also nice to see that at least a few American Catholic theologians agree with the Vatican:

At a 1999 discussion of Haight’s book organized by the Catholic Theological Society of America, for example, William Loewe of the Catholic University of America suggested that by treating the second and third persons of the Trinity as “symbols,” Haight ends up with “a Unitarian God and a merely human Jesus.” Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini, a consulter to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, wrote in Commonweal in the same year that “there is a difference between rendering Christian faith intelligible to a culture, and reducing its central theological claim to a statement that even an atheist can affirm.” Haight’s fellow Jesuit Fr. Gerald O’Collins, widely considered among the church’s most eminent Christologists, told NCR in 2005, “I wouldn’t give my life for Roger Haight’s Jesus. It’s a triumph of relevance over orthodoxy.”
If you can't recall what Roger Haight thinks, just listen to Barack Obama for a while: one is the Moose and the other is the mouth.

Final random thought: what an odd last name for a man who promotes tolerance!

2 comments:

"Father Barry" said...

I like the Cavadini quote a great deal. And I must have missed that Obama link before. Scary stuff.

Ignoramus said...

Oh yes--add the Obama stuff to our list of "need to discuss this in person some time" items.