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The Catholic Historical Review 91.4 (2005) 714-742


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A "Final Disposition . . . One Way Or Another":

The Real End of the First Curran Affair

Samuel J. Thomas*

In 2003, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opened its June meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, the clergy sexual abuse scandal was obviously at the top of the list of continuing concerns. The President of the Conference, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, musing, perhaps lamenting, his leadership role at such a uniquely difficult time, told a Washington Post reporter that he wished his mentor, the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, "or the late John Cardinal Dearden were around to help guide the church."1

Gregory might as easily have added one more name to his wish list: Alexander Zaleski, Bishop of Lansing from 1965 to 1975, confidant of Dearden and admirer of Bernardin. For four crucial years (1966–1970), he was also the first chairman of the singularly important Bishops' Committee on Doctrine (COD), one of the busiest and most essential of some two dozen standing committees for what was then the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). As chairman, Zaleski was an insightful and highly respected leader of the American hierarchy. He was also an effective conciliator between the bishops' conference and the American Catholic Theological Society. Together with bishops like Dearden and Bernardin, he was a moderate and cautiously optimistic proponent of aggiornamento (renewal or updating) and the principles of collegiality and subsidiarity endorsed by Vatican Council [End Page 714]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Most Reverend Alexander M. Zaleski, Bishop of Lansing (1965–1975) Courtesy of the Archives of the Diocese of Lansing
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II (1962–1965). In cases of internal dissent from church doctrine, he proved a staunch supporter of due process during the heady and critical half-decade that followed the Council. Zaleski was a highly competent, fair-minded, and collegial chair of an extremely active committee that confronted and worked through a myriad of often daunting internal controversies and crises that shook the American church in the late 1960's.2

Among those controversies, several reflected the era's preoccupation with the limits of authority and dissent. Most significant were challenges to the nature and scope of the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority on matters of faith and morals. Two episodes, in particular, had lasting consequences for the study of theology and for Catholic higher education. In both instances the key protagonist was Father Charles E. Curran, a young moral theologian at The Catholic University of America. He is best remembered for the lead role he played in the second controversy that began at a press conference in late July, 1968. There, on behalf of eighty-seven theologians, he read a statement of dissent from Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On the Proper Regulation of the Propagation of Offspring), in which the pontiff reaffirmed the Church's proscription of artificial contraception. Within weeks, more than six hundred individuals "qualified in the sacred sciences" had personally endorsed the dissent. Curran's leadership role in asserting that a Catholic theologian had a right to disagree with the Church's non-infallible teachings helped lay the groundwork for decades of controversy over the moral authority of the Magisterium.3 [End Page 716]

Eighteen years later, during the summer of 1986, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), sent Curran a letter that would end his career at the Catholic University of America. After at least seven years of investigating his teaching and writing, and after failing to get Curran to agree to change his stance on contraception and other issues related to sexual morality, CDF declared that he was "no longer . . . suitable nor eligible" to teach Catholic theology. Ratzinger mailed a similarly worded directive to the Chancellor of the university and Archbishop of Washington, James Hickey. Hickey wasted no time initiating "the withdrawal of [his] . . . ecclesiastical license," but it was not until the winter of 1987...

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