Curran Will Teach Theology at USC

Father Charles E. Curran, the moral theologian banned by the Vatican from teaching theology at Catholic universities, will teach the subject at USC during the 1988-1989 school year.

Curran, one of the best-known contemporary U.S. Catholic theologians and a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington for more than 20 years, has accepted the post of Brooks Visiting Professor of Religion at USC’s School of Religion, according to Roger Stewart, assistant dean of humanities at the private institution.

In a telephone interview from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he has been a visiting professor of Catholic studies for the 1987-88 academic year, Curran said that at USC he will teach a graduate course on Catholic social teaching and an undergraduate course on “human values--a very broad-based class.”

Curran taught social ethics in the theology school at the Vatican-chartered Catholic University until January of 1987, when Washington Cardinal James A. Hickey suspended him following a 1986 Vatican declaration that Curran was unfit to teach Catholic theology because of his views on some sexual teachings.

In addition to disagreeing with the church ban on contraception, Curran has challenged the absolute nature of the Catholic prohibition on abortion, divorce, premarital sex and homosexual acts.

A tentative agreement with leaders at Catholic University that would have allowed the outspoken professor to teach social ethics there again--but outside its school of theology--fell apart last May, Curran said. School trustees said he could teach courses in Christian ethics in the university’s sociology department as long as he promised not to teach “Catholic theology.”

But the priest said that arrangement was “tantamount to dismissal . . . because they have not assigned the courses in the area of my competence.”

Curran has since sought to regain his faculty position through a civil suit.

“I claim I am still a member of the faculty and have a right as a professor of moral theology,” Curran said in the telephone interview. “That’s precisely the principle of academic freedom I’m fighting for.”

Meanwhile, Curran said, five graduate students at Catholic University last week filed suit in the District of Columbia Superior Court alleging that their rights as students were violated when Curran was suspended from teaching students seeking degrees under the university’s civil charter, which is separate from the school’s Vatican-regulated ecclesiastical-degree program.

Saying he would arrive on the USC campus in late August, Curran added: “I’m looking forward to the assignment very much.”