Catholic thinkers brace for more scrutiny

After a busy week in which the Vatican forced out the prominent U.S. editor of a Roman Catholic magazine and then put an American in charge of enforcing church doctrine for the first time, many Catholic intellectuals in the United States are feeling the spotlight of papal scrutiny swinging this way.

It is safe to say some of them welcome the attention more than others.

"Oh, boy," the Rev. Robert Drinan, a Georgetown professor and former congressman from Massachusetts, said with a sigh upon learning that the archbishop of San Francisco, William Levada, was bound for Rome to take over as chief doctrinal officer.

Drinan, a Jesuit, already was ruing the departure of the Rev. Thomas Reese, the editor of the small-but-influential Jesuit weekly America and one of the sought-after commentators during the recent papal changeover. Reese resigned May 6.

Several Catholic officials in the United States said his dismissal had been ordered in March by Levada's predecessor in the doctrinal office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

The Rev. Thomas Reese resigned his post as editor.

Ratzinger was said to have received complaints from U.S. bishops about articles in the magazine that questioned official church positions on gay marriage, stem-cell research and salvation for non-Christians.

Bernard Prusak, chairman of the theology department at Villanova University, said Reese's ouster raised "concerns about the kind of theological dialogue that we should have in the church."

Levada, as head of the American bishops' committee on doctrine, had a role in affirming the Vatican's official condemnation of the Rev. Roger Haight in February. Haight's 1999 book "Jesus, Symbol of God" considers, among other things, the possibility of non-Christians being saved without Jesus' help. He has been banned from teaching at Catholic universities.

Some conservative Catholic thinkers said they were seeing signs of a overdue housecleaning.

"Pope Benedict XVI is clearly attending to lots of administrative and housekeeping concerns in the church," the Rev. Joseph Koterski, chairman of the philosophy department at Fordham University in New York, said Friday. As for Reese's removal, Koterski said: "There's a great desire for clarity about church teaching. A religious magazine that offers itself as a Catholic magazine does have to have clarity about what the church holds and why it holds it, and not simply be a lobbying force for changing position."

What else is on the pope's agenda for the United States, a bastion of what he has denounced as the "dictatorship of relativism," remains to be seen.

Some liberal theologians said they feared the enforcement of a requirement, urged by Pope John Paul II and approved in 1999 by the U.S. bishops but never fully implemented, that professors of Catholic theology at Catholic universities obtain a certificate of doctrinal purity from the local bishop.

But the Rev. Joseph Fessio, a conservative Jesuit and provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, said the nation's bishops lacked the unity to make the policy stick. "John Paul II was pretty clear about what he wanted and hoped and desired, and we have 20 years since the idea came up, and I haven't seen many changes in the theology departments of Catholic universities," Fessio said. "A pope can't do everything."