Vatican Punishes U.S. Theologian Over Sex Views

The Vatican has revoked the credentials of Catholic University of America Prof. Charles Curran to teach Roman Catholic theology, church officials said Monday in the climax of a long dispute over his views on birth control, abortion, divorce and other sexual issues.

It is the first time that such a punishment has been meted out to an American and the first time the rarely used action has been taken publicly against anyone since 1979, when the Vatican punished internationally known Swiss theologian Hans Kung.

Curran, the most prominent and most controversial Roman Catholic moral theologian in the country, will no longer be deemed “suitable nor eligible to exercise the functions of a professor of Catholic theology,” said the announcement, which was released in Washington by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dissented Publicly

Curran, 52, has been under investigation since 1979 by the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--formerly known as the Inquisition--for publicly dissenting from the church’s official position on a number of sexual ethics issues, including abortion, contraception, masturbation, premarital intercourse and divorce.

Curran has long been a thorn in the side of church officials and conservative Catholics. In 1967, he was dismissed by the school for leading the theological dissent against Pope Paul VI’s encyclical banning the use of all artificial birth control devices by Catholics but was reinstated five days later after a student strike that virtually shut the school down.

Since then, Curran his outlined his scholarly views on a number of controversial issues involving sexual ethics, including comments that neither contraception nor sterilization is “intrinsically evil,” that abortion may be permitted in some instances and that homosexual acts “in the context of a loving relationship striving for permanency can in a certain sense be objectively morally good.”

Curran had been told last fall--and again in a personal meeting with Vatican officials in Rome last March--that his church authorization to speak as a Catholic theologian would be lifted unless he retracted views that are in disagreement with those of church leaders in Rome.

A ‘Committed’ Believer

The theologian refused, arguing that he can be a man of faith at the same time that he questions church teachings. “I want to underline the fact that I am a committed Roman Catholic believer,” he said in a Los Angeles Times interview last spring. “But faith and reason cannot contradict. That is at the core of the Catholic tradition.”

Curran could not be reached for comment Monday.

School officials have told Curran that the action, approved by Pope John Paul II, means he can no longer serve Catholic University in his current position as professor of moral theology.