(7 of 10)
This expectation extends to theologians. The dissenting Hans Kung, who has questioned the personal infallibility of the Pope, among other dogmas, has been denied the right to teach as a Catholic theologian, though he remains a priest and is still a professor at the University of Tubingen in West Germany. John Paul combats the radical strains of Latin America's liberation theology, even while endorsing some of the terminology, because he believes Marxist concepts like the class struggle conflict with the message of the church. One liberationist, Brazil's Leonardo Boff, has been asked to justify his views.
One long-running dispute between Rome and a dissenting theologian has resulted in a partial settlement. The subject: Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx's 1980 book, Ministry, which argued on historical grounds for a more democratic church that to some looked suspiciously like Protestantism. The Vatican announced in January that in his next book the liberal theologian will declare support for the church's teaching that only validly ordained priests can celebrate the Mass. Schillebeeckx insists he is not retracting his views under Vatican pressure; he simply changed his mind. In the ongoing quest for clarity, perhaps the most controversial aspect since Vatican II has been the family and personal morality, particularly the stricture against birth control. Last year John Paul drove home this teaching in a series of weekly sermons delivered at his general audiences in Rome. The widespread rejection of that papal view by lay Catholics in Western nations is the most glaring instance of what U.S. gadfly Priest Andrew Greeley calls the arrival of the "do-it-yourself Catholic." Father Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America, a frequent critic of the birth-control tenet, could well be the next theologian summoned to Rome for questioning. Curran says only that he is "in correspondence" with the Vatican. John Paul is not budging on other issues. In his 1979 U.S. tour and since, he has condemned abortion, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality and all sexual activity outside marriage.
Opposition to abortion, a burning issue in the U.S., is one of the most deeply held commitments in Catholic tradition. There was consternation when 28 , U.S. sisters, priests and brothers signed a New York Times advertisement that countered what the ad called the "mistaken belief" that the abortion stance of the Popes and bishops "is the only legitimate Catholic position." The Vatican response: Retract or face expulsion.
The Catholic condemnation of homosexual behavior underlies Archbishop O'Connor's resistance to a New York City executive order demanding that the archdiocese, as a contractor receiving city funds for child care, must pledge nondiscrimination against homosexuals. The church hires "homosexually inclined" people, O'Connor says, but wants the right to do so on a "case-by- case basis, to find out whether an individual would be able to operate in a Catholic agency within the strictures of Catholic teaching."