Judge John T. Noonan Jr. has been chosen to replace Mary Ann Glendon. It will be curious to see if he shares her integrity. I suggest that if he does not, he does not deserve the award.
The choice of Noonan to replace Glendon shows, unfortunately, that gross infidelity to the Magisterium as well as an agenda of dissent reside at the highest levels of Our Lady’s University. Why? Because Noonan has written works that dissenters from Humane Vitae, Evangelium Vitae, and the Church’s other teachings on sexual morality and marriage love to cite for the following false propositions: first, that the Church has “erred” in the past and “reversed itself”–on slavery, usury, freedom of conscience and the indissolubility of marriage–; and that, therefore, second, the Church’s teachings today on abortion, contraception, homosexual acts and same-sex marriage cannot be taken as true, correct, authoritative or binding moral teachings. These works by Noonan include, “A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching” (Notre Dame University Press [surprise surprise]: 2005); and “Contraception” (1965).
Noonan is wrong, of course. First, on slavery, the church did not “err” and later “reverse itself.” Noonan is not alone in the error he makes on this score. It’s rooted in a failure to recognize the fact that there have been many, many different forms of servitude over the centuries, all called “slavery” - some of which, including labor by captives in war and indentured bond service - were not condemned by the Church. What Noonan misses is that racial slavery was fundamentally different – the kidnapping and forcing into slavery of people solely based on their race, and holding them in that condition – and that, from the time that racial slavery first appeared in the 1400s, and continuing for the next 500 years, the Popes unequivocally and consistently condemned it. Fr. Joel Panzer demonstrates the Popes’ consistency on racial slavery in his book, The Popes and Slavery; a distillation of which appears here:
cfpeople.org/Apologetics/page51a003.html
Noonan is also wrong in his claim that the Church “reversed itself” on usury and religious freedom, and that it is supposedly signalling a reversal on the indissolubility of marriage, as the late Cardinal Avery Dulles demonstrated in his review of Noonan’s 2005 book, published in the October 2005 issue of the journal, First Things. As Cardinal Dulles put it, “Noonan manipulates the evidence to make it seem to favor his own preconceived conclusions. For some reason, he is intent on finding discontinuity –but he fails to establish that the Church has reversed her teaching in any of the four areas he examines.” And as Fr. Dylan James wrote elsewhere, “Few matters of Church history and doctrine have been as significantly and disastrously misrepresented as the so-called ‘changes’ in the Church’s teaching on morality. [Noonan’s 2005] book stands as a part of this tradition of misrepresentation.” (see second book review at:
faith.org.uk/Publications/Magazines/Sep07/Sep07BookReviews.html )
So, we have a faithful Catholic scholar, Mary Ann Glendon, “replaced” by a dissenting author with an agenda to discredit and undermine the Magisterium. The choice of Noonan thus comes right out of the same playbook of dissent that motivated the conferral of honors on President Obama.
Cardinal Newman, pray for us. Our Lady, Exterminatrix of Heresies, pray for us.
