"Jesuitical" --Still Alive and Living at MU

The Triumvirate thought it smelled funny (as did a friend of mine, who is NOT part of this group)--and they went to work.

Sure enough, Fr. Wild, SJ, is just being a Jesuit:

Wild attempted to compare Daniel Maguire (ex-Jesuit all-around jackass) with Thomas Aquinas, which on its face virtually begs for an examination of Wild's office for traces of illegal substances. Oh, never mind. Here's the quote:

The bishop, disturbed by what he read and heard, began to believe that what this theologian was teaching his students was at odds with traditional Catholic doctrine. With that decided, his duty was clear. He would publicly condemn these teachings as false, an action that would lead, he presumed, to the university removing this professor from the faculty since he was not teaching authentic Catholic doctrine. And so the bishop did. But the university faculty, upon receiving the bishop’s decree of condemnation, refused to expel the theologian from their membership since they were not convinced by the bishop’s arguments and believed that decisions about faculty membership were theirs alone to make.

That sounds so much like what we hear from time to time these days, doesn’t it? But in fact these events took place in 1270; the bishop was the then archbishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier; the university was the University of Paris; and the theologian in question was Thomas of Aquino, better known as St. Thomas Aquinas.

Well, that's ONE view. Too bad it has little to do with the pertinent facts, as reported by a Catholic U. prof:

In my understanding the condemnations of Bishop Tempier in Paris took place in 1277 (St. Thomas died in 1274). Aquinas was not named in the condemnations but rather implicated in that some of the propositions sounded like positions he (along with other theologians influenced by Aristotelian philosophy) had defended (e.g., the immateriality of angels, the unity of the substantial form in the human person). Therefore he was not defended by a University which refused to remove him (he had taught at the University of Naples from 1272-1274) as the article implies. St Thomas was canonized in 1323 and the condemnations dropped altogether in 1325.

There's another point to be made:

It is highly misleading to compare the innovation of St. Thomas who harmonized Augustinian theology with a newly re-introduced Aristotelian philosophy to Dan McGuire who has repudiated very authoritative and solemnly defined Church doctrine (such as the evil of direct abortion—cf. Evangelium Vitae, no. 62).

But hey--what's a few dead babies in comparison to the Sacred Tenure question?