Quiz: This well-known Catholic used to be a professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America. On July 30, 1968, he was one of twenty-one members of the CUA faculty who signed a statement attacking Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae.¹ Throughout his academic career he has denounced the moral and doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church. According to this Catholic theologian, abortion, artificial contraception, euthanasia, eugenic sterilization and suicide are not intrinsically evil acts. He is past president of the Society of Christian Ethics.

His name? Charles Curran? No; Dr. Daniel Maguire, professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University.

It is curious to note, however, that all of the above statements except one do apply to Charles Curran. The exception: Curran has never been president of the Society of Christian Ethics. The question arises: Given the fact that Curran was declared unfit to teach as a Catholic theologian, should Daniel Maguire be so disciplined?

Maguire Disbelieves Dogmatic Teachings of the Church

Despite Pope St. Pius X's condemnation of the Modernist proposition that the Church hierarchy emerged from a general historical development (Denz. 2054; cf. also Denz. 966), Maguire denies the divine institution of the hierarchy: "[A] developing monarchical episcopate . . . did not become general practice until the middle of the second century."²

His rejection of a divinely instituted hierarchy necessarily entails discarding the Catholic belief that Christ bestowed upon the Apostles the threefold authority to teach, govern, and sanctify: "It was not in men of special rank that basic doctrinal security reposed, . . . [T]he Church was adequately served by the rather fluidly and sporadically developed ministries of apostolic witness, and there was room for prophecy and charism."³

"Obviously, if the Apostles did not have this God-given authority, they could not have passed it on to the bishops. For Maguire, the bishops' authority is a result of "a revolution in the notion of authority [which] occurred in the Middle Ages . . . Church officers, especially the pope . . . rather than imperfectly reflecting God's authority came to be seen as possessing it through delegation. Indeed, authority came to be seen as embodied in the officeholder. A confusion of ecclesiastical with divine authority ensured in succeeding centuries."⁴ (Maguire's emphasis.)

Genuine authority by its very nature, Maguire maintains, precludes being conferred by God because it is derived from the will of the community: "The authority to rule cannot be conceived as divinely imparted and existing independently of the will of the community . . . [A]uthority depends essentially on community will and includes in its notion the possibility of deposition or recall. Unimpeachable authority is an idol."⁵

The Council of Trent, however, teaches that "all those who have been called and appointed merely by the people . . . are not ministers of the Church but should be considered as thieves . . . who have not entered through the door" (Denz. 960).

Maguire denounces, moreover, the Catholic teaching that the Magisterium is infallible when deciding matters of faith and morals. "But when a council has done its best," he writes, "its words do not become the words of God."⁶ and: "The term infallible does not in fact aptly describe the nature or function of the moral magisterium, and . . . we should discontinue using that term . . . "⁷

Denial of the Church's infallibility is inevitable because Maguire is an epistemological and moral relativist. Consider:

Consistent with his relativism is Maguire's assertion: "Revelation is not closed"¹¹ a proposition condemned by Pius X (Denz. 2021).

Professor of Immoral Theology

Relativism is the key which opens Pandora's box. "Woe to you," warns Isaias, "who call evil good, and good evil: who put darkness for light, and light for darkness" (Is. 5:20).

This is exactly what Maguire does. He makes a mockery of Catholic teaching. For example, he writes that "prohibition of abortion is wrong because it attempts to impose a private moral position on a pluralistic society."¹² Contraception and eugenic sterilization are morally permissible because "technological man [has discovered] that he [is] morally free to intervene creatively and to achieve birth control by choice."¹³ And suicide and euthanasia are not forbidden because "it is morally right and reasonable to terminate life through either positive act or calculated benign neglect rather than to await in awe the dispositions of organic tissue."¹⁴

Christian Conscience and the Public Magisterium

Maguire denounces the moral and doctrinal teachings of the Church's Magisterium because the assertions are not "meaningful expressions of Christian experience"¹⁵—to quote his definition of dogma. Moreover, given that for Maguire true authority is vested in the will of the community, then the Christian community should determine what conforms to Christian experience. As Maguire expresses it:

To give the laity and the theologians a teaching authority on par with the Pope and the bishops is, needless to say, to undermine Christ's will regarding the very constitution of His Church. The faithful would become the judges of their divinely appointed rulers and teachers. Christ, however, bestowed upon the Apostles and their successors the authority to teach and govern irrespective of the will of the community. Nor did the Apostles take a poll to find out whether or not the faithful wanted them to teach and govern; and obviously the community did not have a say concerning doctrinal teachings to be taught.

Furthermore, supreme power in the Church was conferred directly upon St. Peter only. Not even the Apostles, either individually or collectively, shared this supreme power; and therefore neither do their descendants. The Pope exercises his authority independently of all others in the Church. As Vatican I put it, the infallible "definitions of the Roman Pontiff are . . . irreformable because of their nature, but not because of the agreement of the Church" (Denz. 1839).

Maguire: Doctor of Death

Because Maguire neither believes that the Church's authority to teach and govern is from God; nor that we have the corresponding obligation to accept her teachings and obey her precepts (Mk. 16:16; Lk 10:16), he can rightly be called "Doctor of Death." The title is appropriate for three reasons: 1) As an advocate of abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, he approves of murder. 2) By promoting disbelief in the Church's doctrinal teachings and disobedience of her precepts, he is causing scandal—the spiritual ruin or death of another—on a vast scale. 3) He is leading people to eternal perdition by denouncing what is necessary for salvation: membership in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.

1. John F. Hunt and Terrence R. Connelly, The Responsibility of Dissent: The Church and Academic Freedom (New York: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1969), pp. ix, xi.

2. Daniel Maguire, "The Spirit and Church Authority," in God, Jesus and Spirit, edited by Daniel Callahan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 333.

3. Ibid., p. 332. This view is renounced by Pius XII in Mystici Corpora (1943). As Dr. Ludwig Ott explains in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Tan, 1974), Pius XII "rejected the distinction between a Church shaped by charity, and a Church consisting of juridical elements, for such a distinction postulates that the Church founded by Christ was originally merely one kept together by the invisible bond of charity, a religious society endowed with charisma, which only gradually, under the influence of external conditions, developed into a legally organized society with a hierarchical constitution (juridical Church)" (p. 277).

4. Maguire, ibid., pp. 336-337.

5. Ibid., p. 344.

6. Ibid., p. 346.

7. Maguire, Moral Absolutes and the Magisterium (New York: Corpus Publications, 1970), p. 24.

8. Ibid., p. 26.

9.  Maguire, "The Spirit and Church Authority," op. cit., 346, 347. This relativistic understanding of dogma is rejected in Mysterium Ecclesiae: "The faithful are in no way permitted to see in the Church merely a fundamental permanence in truth which, as some assert, could be reconciled with errors contained here and there in the propositions that the Church's Magisterium teaches to be held irrevocably, as also in the unhesitating assent of the People of God concerning matters of faith and morals . . . . It must be stated that the dogmatic formulas of the Church's Magisterium were from the beginning suitable for communicating revealed truth, and that as they are they remain forever suitable for communicating this truth to those who interpret them correctly." (J. Neuner, S. J., and J. Durpis, S.J., eds. The Christian Faith (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, Inc., 1975), pp. 680-681, 682.)

10. Maguire, Moral Absolutes and the Magisterium, p. 25.

11. Maguire, "The Spirit and Church Authority," op. cit., p. 346.

12. Maguire. "Abortion: A Question of Catholic Honesty,"  in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Bonnie Szumski (St. Paul, Minn.: Greenhaven Press, 1986), p. 101.

13. Maguire, "The Freedom to Die," quoted by William E. May, Human Existence, Medicine and Ethics (Chicago, Ill.: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), p.78.

14. Ibid., p. 134, 139.

15. "The Spirit and Church Authority," op. cit., pp. 346-347.

16. Moral Absolutes and the Magisterium, p. 49