Charles Curran and “Loyal Dissent”

Abstract This chapter presents an in-depth examination of the critique of one of the most famous Catholic theologians, Fr. Charles Curran. In narrating Curran’s story, it focuses on his firing as a professor at the Catholic University of America—an event that most historians call “the beginning of the Catholic sixties.” In a thought-provoking article published after the Mayflower Hotel conference, Curran laid out a number of postclassicist paradigms of natural law that rejected what some of his colleagues saw as the fatal anomalies of neo-scholasticism, while also addressing the modern concern to engage both religious pluralism and the insights of the modern physical sciences. Curran believed that a far better model of natural law should start with an anthropology that posited that rationality was an intrinsic component of human life, rather than just one part.