Charles Curran (theologian)
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The Rev. Charles E. Curran (b. March 30, 1934) is a Catholic moral theologian. He currently serves at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas as the Elizabeth Scurlock Professor of Human Values.
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[edit] Biography
Curran was ordained in Rome in 1958 for the Diocese of Rochester, New York. He served, as a young priest, as a peritus at the Second Vatican Council. Curran first came to prominence, however, in 1968 when he, along with a group of some 600 Catholic theologians, authored a response to Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical affirming the traditional ban on artificial contraception. Curran continued to question the Church's authoritative teaching in various moral issues, including premarital sex, masturbation, contraception, abortion, homosexual acts, divorce, euthanasia, and in vitro fertilization throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Curran was removed from the faculty of The Catholic University of America in 1986 as a dissident who unapologetically maintained the right to dissent from official Church teachings which had not been issued as ex cathedra statements, thus rejecting the concept of the Ordinary Magisterium and the teaching authority of the Pope and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Since then, Curran has taken a full tenured professorship at the Southern Methodist University, and has published personal accounts about his experience with the Catholic Church, and his viewpoint on the actions of Church authorities.
He has remained a controversial figure. His invitation to speak at St Patrick's College, Maynooth in 2006, caused something of a rumpus, with College President, Mgr Dermot Farrell forced to deny any involvement, though without actually preventing his speaking.
[edit] Education
- B.A., St. Bernard's College (New York), 1955.
- S.T.L., Pontifical Gregorian University, 1959.
- S.T.D., Pontifical Gregorian University, 1961.
- S.T.D., (with a specialization in moral theology), Academia Alfonsiana (Rome), 1961.
[edit] Selected publications
- Loyal Dissent: Memoirs of a Catholic Theologian (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2006)
- The Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2005)
- Catholic Social Teaching 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002)
- The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A Synthesis (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1999)
- Moral Theology at the End of the Century (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999)
- The Origins of Moral Theology in the United States: Three Different Approaches (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1997)
- co-editor of the twelve-volume series from Paulist Press: Readings in Moral Theology.
- For a complete bibliography of Curran, see Thomas W. O'Brien, "Bibliography of Charles E. Curran 1961-90: Thirty Years of Catholic Moral Theology," Horizons 18 (1991): 263-78, and O'Brien, "Bibliography of Charles E. Curran, 1990-2000: Another Decade of Catholic Moral Theology," Horizons 28 (2001): 307-13.
