Roman Catholic institution?”

Roman Catholic institution?”

University of San Diego awards honorary professorship to feminist theologian who supports abortion and contraception, and who holds variety of other dissident views

A “feminist theologian” who thinks that God can be called “Gaia,” after the Roman mother-earth goddess, has accepted a one-year honorary professorship at the University of San Diego, according to an announcement by the school, which describes itself on its web site as “a Roman Catholic institution.” Rosemary Radford Ruether will hold the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology at USD for the academic year 2009-2010.

Besides being a regular columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, Ruether holds multiple professorships, has 12 honorary doctorates, and has written a long list of books, including Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (1992), Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (2005), and America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence (2007). As Portman Chair at USD, Ruether will teach one undergraduate course in the fall of 2009 and will deliver the annual Portman Lecture.

Ruether has long been an advocate of women’s ordination and, beginning in 1985, has served as a board member for the pro-abortion Catholics for a Free Choice (now Catholics for Choice) organization. In 2000, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement saying the group “is not a Catholic organization, does not speak for the Catholic Church, and in fact promotes positions contrary to the teaching of the Church.” Catholics for a Free Choice, said the bishops, is “an arm of the abortion lobby in the United States and throughout the world.”

In an article entitled “Sexual Literacy” published by Catholics for a Free Choice in its Summer 2003 Conscience magazine, Ruether wrote that, under the old “patriarchal” social order, in which girls were expected to remain chaste before marriage, while boys could “‘sow their wild oats’, with ‘bad (lower class) girls,’” young women on their wedding night “were, in effect, raped by young husbands whose previous sexual experience came from exploitative relationships with servant women and prostitutes. The young bride went into marriage without knowledge of how to experience pleasure or prevent pregnancy.”

According to Ruether, “the Christian Right, Catholic and Protestant, is trying to roll back the sexual revolution by returning to a patriarchal puritanism based on a classist separation of females into ‘good’ girls and ‘bad’ girls, exploiting the bad girls while denying the good girls personal freedom.”

Ruether’s solution to “patriarchal puritanism” is “a two-stage process” of “sexual integration.”

“In the first stage of young people's lives they should learn how to give sexual pleasure to one another without getting pregnant,” said Ruether. “This entails adults helping them to learn about their own sexuality in a way that would endorse both sexual pleasure and contraception. It assumes that young people can engage in sexual experimentation before they are ready for reproduction, perhaps ‘going steady’ with a partner, in a way that connects sexual pleasure and contraception with friendship; i.e. accountable, responsible relationships.”

In 2005, Ruether told an audience at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles that “Christianity is not necessarily worse than other religions, but it is the vehicle of Western Civilization,” which, she said, is riddled with hierarchy and patriarchy. Christianity, she said, presents an image of a tribal war god instead of “wisdom pervading the universe.”

Such notions as human superiority over animals must also be discarded, Ruether has said elsewhere.

Ruether is not the first dissident theologian invited to USD via the Portman Chair. This year, Fr. Peter C. Phan, a theologian under investigation by the Holy See, gave the Portman Lecture. In his book, Being Religious Interreligiously, Phan downplays “the singularity of Jesus Christ as savior of the world,” said the U.S. bishop’s Committee on Doctrine in late 2007.

According to the USD web site, “The Portman Chair was established in the department in the year 2000 through an anonymous donor's generous bequest. It was named after Msgr. John R. Portman, who served as the founding chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies from 1967 to 1974. Msgr. Portman has been a pioneer in ecumenical dialogue, and served as pastor of the Church of the Immaculata and in other parishes in San Diego for over 30 years after leaving the University of San Diego. He was recently (fall 2006) honored with the title of Professor Emeritus.”

The University of San Diego was founded in 1949 by Charles F. Buddy, first bishop of the Diocese of San Diego, and Rosalie Hill, Mother Superior of the Society of the Sacred Heart.

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