Scratch a Myth, Find a Jesuit

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 22, 2010

They’re at it again. In direct defiance of a directive from New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Fr. Joe Costantino, pastor of the Jesuit-run Saint Francis Xavier parish, is insisting that the parish remain involved in promoting and participating in the Gay Pride march in New York on June 27th. The Catholic Lesbians Conference has listed St. Francis Xavier as a “Gay & Lesbian Friendly Parish”, and the parish website maintains that “through our efforts at handing out flyers about our welcoming parish, a number of people find their way to St. Francis Xavier and back to the Catholic Church.” Apparently conversion isn’t required.

A couple of weeks earlier, in the “no help from Rome” department, we found the quasi-official Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica publishing an article praising the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as “a needed and long awaited beginning of bringing greater justice to all citizens, especially the most vulnerable.” The author, Andrea Vicini, SJ, used to teach moral theology at Boston College. Funny how the US Bishops lobbied against the bill because of its financial support for the murder of those who are most vulnerable of all.

But the connection with Boston College is revealing. Boston College Law School is the place where the brand-new President of Catholic University of America made his administrative reputation. While there he backed the scores of faculty who protested faculty member Scott Fitzgibbon’s efforts to make the case against legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Former Dean and now CUA President John H. Garvey also once answered questions about academic freedom at Boston College by saying “No school that regulates ideas can justly call itself a university.” I guess his BC Law School faculty never got the memo.

But really the point isn’t so much regulating ideas as hiring people who possess both a fairly clear idea of the truth and a serious interest in applying the truth in their particular line of study—and, of course, firing those who don't. Why would a Catholic university, which supposedly believes the highest and most certain truths are found in the teachings of the Catholic Church, think that it can successfully “search for truth in an atmosphere of academic freedom” by constantly hiring those who neither accept nor even respect the highest and most certain truths known to man?

Garvey’s argument cannot be made among Catholics, because Catholics have a leg up on the whole question. Those whose minds already conform to reality in the most fundamental respects are presumably incapable of doing something as stupid as seeking to hire teachers whose minds do not conform to reality in the most fundamental respects. They’d also be reluctant to obfuscate by calling this, as John Garvey called it, “the search for truth.” Well, admittedly, John Garvey is not a Jesuit, but he was largely catapulted to fame by a Jesuit school. It’s a double shame because the previous president, Vincentian David O’Connell, had made real progress in getting Catholic University back on track.

Unfortunately, following the most prominent contemporary news stories about the intellectual oddities—not to say queerness—of the Society of Jesus nearly always leads one back into the labyrinth of the modern crisis of Faith. There are good Jesuits out there, of course, but they are often marginalized by their own Order. What to do? Though we’ve suffered this for half a century, the apparent answer thus far is that nobody knows. Prayer perhaps?