Religion & Law

Thank you, Fr. Robert, for providing a link to the program for the four-session colloquium, "More Than A Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church," being sponsored by members of the academic communities of Fordham and Fairfield Universities, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary.  I had a look.  It seems pretty clear that the colloquium itself is designed to be a monologue---members of the choir preaching to the choir about how the Church's teachings on sexual morality and marriage are all wrong and need to be changed.

Unless I'm missing something, the speakers seem to be drawn exclusively from the pool of people whose views line up with the editorial positions of the New York Times, not the firm and constant teachings of the Catholic Church, at least when it comes to homosexual conduct and the nature and meaning of marriage.  I hope I'm proven wrong, but it doesn't look to me as if arguments in support of the Church's teachings will be presented or even seriously entertained.  It certainly doesn't look like anyone has (yet?) been lined up to defend those teachings.  Perhaps I'm missing something, but even if I am, the program looks lopsided.

If the folks organizing the colloquium are looking around for institutions where discussion is stifled and diversity of opinion on sexual morality and marriage has given way to a "monologue" on those subjects, I would be happy to give them a very long list of universities, newsrooms, professional associations, and other institutions they could organize colloquia about.  I would suggest that "monologue" is a much more serious problem in those institutions than it is in the Catholic Church.  But I suspect that the organizers' real objection is not to monologues as such.  Their real objection is to the teachings of the Church. That, I further suspect, is why the colloquium itself is designed, or so it appears, to be . . . a monologue.