The Coup at Catholic University: The 1968 Revolution in American Catholic Education by Peter M. Mitchell (review)

This book was initially a dissertation submitted to the Church History faculty of the Gregorian University, Rome, in 2009 by a priest of the Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The “coup” of the title is the author’s colorful one-word description of the takeover of two schools of the University founded by the U.S. bishops, namely Sacred Theology and Education, by proponents of a secular or non-religious orientation in higher education, replacing the religious one that had characterized the institution from its founding in 1889. The charge by those who resisted this move was, in effect, that The Catholic University of America had been robbed of the validity of its self-designation as “Catholic” by capitulating to a secular spirit. The author has been diligent in his research into published and archival sources in mind-numbing detail. Regrettably, however, he allows himself the frequent expression of editorial opinions that have no place in modern scholarly research.

The bulk of the work is devoted to the cases of two faculty members somewhat cognate, one following the other in immediate succession but not in content. The academic office-holders were Charles E. Curran, a priest of the Diocese of Rochester, New York, who, without explanation, was denied promotion and tenure in the School of Sacred Theology and Eugene E. Kevane, a priest of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, who was removed from the deanship of the School of Education on the count of his lack of administrative skills, but not his dismissal from the faculty. That was to come later. The result in that case had been two embittered sides of instructors and graduate students combined locked in disagreement over whether he should stay or go from a second term in that office.

When Charles Curran resigned from the University faculty, he gave as the reason the continued failure of the trustees to tell him what lay behind their initial inaction in his regard, a demand he made throughout his search for an appointment elsewhere. No explanation was ever given him, even when the trustees voted to restore him to faculty status of a higher rank and salary. He refused the settlement because no response to his demand was ever made.

Throughout the narrative that is the burden of this publication, the term Magisterium is used to describe the bishops and the pope corporately in the exercise of their teaching office as if the content of the teaching on all matters of faith and morals were readily available; also, that dissent from the teaching in any one matter is inadmissible.

The ambiguities that surround cases of this sort should have been self-evident. Uncertainty in the Curran case came to an end with a declaration by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that identified a short list of men who could no longer call themselves Catholic theologians. Curran’s name was on the list. The reason for its appearance there seemed to be that in five matters of human sexuality – abortion, masturbation, and contraception among them – all retained their quality as objectively sinful even when not viewed as such subjectively, that is, in the mind of the performers of such acts. Nothing of these differences of opinion among moral theologians is dealt with in the Curran case, but rather only the justice or injustice of the board of trustees in their initial and sustained silence in conveying to Curran the reasons for their action. Especially refreshing in the narrative treatment of the case was the citation of certain bishop-trustees who, against the majority of their colleagues, maintained that a grave injustice had been done. The careful cataloguing of who said or wrote what in the prolonged dispute over 1964-1967 makes for tedious if instructive reading.

This is equally the case regarding the two later chapters of the book devoted to the charge of Professor Kevane that...