Rosemary Radford Ruether Loses To The Catholic Anonymous Donor

From website Higher Ed

Activist groups that try to pressure Roman Catholic universities to adhere to certain measures of fealty are praising the University of San Diego for telling a prominent theology professor that the invitation for her to teach there next year was being rescinded and that she would not hold a visiting endowed chair.

The professor is Rosemary Radford Ruether, who currently teaches at the Claremont Graduate University and has also taught at the Pacific School of Religion and Holy Names University, and written a column for many years for the National Catholic Reporter. Ruether’s numerous books about theology have strong pro-feminist positions (she advocates the ordination of women, for example) and she identifies herself as a “progressive Catholic,” but very much as a Catholic thinker.

This fall, the New Press will publish her latest book, Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican: A Vision for Progressive Catholicism, in which she challenges Vatican teachings on a range of issues. In the forward to the book, Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, writes: “In a truly just world, Rosemary Radford Ruether would be pope.”

While Ruether has no expectations of becoming pope, she did think she had an endowed chair. San Diego announced in June that Ruether would be named as the next Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology, a position that involves a one year appointment, teaching, and a major lecture on campus. The announcement — since removed from the university’s Web site — set off alarms among critics of Ruether’s views, who published articles on Web sites calling her a “radical non-Christian” and charging, among other things, that she calls God “Gaia.” (For the record, she said that she calls God “God,” and did so in a conversation with this reporter.)

In an interview, Ruether said that she was strongly recruited by the university for the position. She said that she has more invitations than she can handle, but that she agreed to the visiting chair after faculty members attended a lecture she gave, and spoke about how much they wanted her to teach. Terms were negotiated and the announcement was made, she said. Subsequently, she said, Provost Julie Sullivan called her and explained that the theology department “had not consulted with the donor and the donor had a different vision” of the chair, so the offer to Ruether was being rescinded. (The donor is anonymous, according to a university Web site.)

“This is obviously a case where the faculty were not able to ask the person they wanted to ask because of ideological bias,” Ruether said. She added that her academic freedom would not be affected because she would continue to write what she believes, but she said that the academic freedom of San Diego faculty members had been hurt by having her appointment blocked. She said that “it’s their academic freedom being denied,” when the faculty have appointments vetoed just for being controversial.

Lance Nelson, chair of the theology department and the person who recruited Ruether, declined to talk about the situation and said that only the provost could talk about the matter. The provost did not respond to e-mail messages. Pamela Gray Payton, a spokeswoman for the university, confirmed via e-mail that upon “review of the specific purpose of the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology, the University of San Diego is no longer considering the appointment of Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether as the 2009-2010 chair holder.” Payton added that Ruether was “never officially appointed” to the position.

LifeSiteNews.com, which had previously urged Catholics to call the university to oppose Ruether, is praising the university’s latest action and urging readers to write the university to express support.
— Scott Jaschik

*****************************************************************************

Obviously the University of San Diego has the right to hire whom ever their donor wants hired, or in this case doesn't want hired, but if they bow down to the money they should at least admit this is a question of money talks. Let's not confuse this with an attempt to maintain Catholic orthodoxy on their own, or as an act of backing down in the face of an email campaign from LifeSiteNews.com. This is just another case of honoring the wishes of a rich donor. Just another case in a long line of cases of academic integrity literally sold. This isn't particularly the province of religious colleges, secular institutions do it all the time as well.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is absolutely correct when she states this doesn't effect her academic freedom, it effects the Academic freedom of the University of San Diego. Apparently they have so little freedom that the head of their theology department is unable to comment on his own but must refer to higher authority. You know, the really bought and paid for higher authority. The one's who understand they owe their employment to their buyers, and especially to their almost always anonymous buyers. Anonymity gives one so much more freedom to interfere than actually having one's name attached to the donation.

Maybe the University of San Diego could start restoring it's integrity by refusing to accept anonymous donations. Then at least we'd know who is buying their orthodoxy. Come to think of it it might be nice if LifeSiteNews gave us a list of their major donors. The information might be quite enlightening. What if instead of having a bunch of really committed true believers we found out that in actuality they had a lot of paid hacks. That knowledge might be of interest to all the people who partake in their email campaigns. I'm not saying sites like LifeSite are definitely composed of a bunch of folks writing things they could actually care less about strictly for the almighty dollar. What I am saying is we don't know that's not the case.

We do know that Rosemary Radford Ruether writes it like she sees it, and she has been kicked and castigated for doing so. Not her writing or ideas, just her. It's pretty obvious if you go to the articles about this on LifeSite that the authors of these articles have read nothing more than the titles of her books. Hence the reference to her calling God Gaia. Had they actually read the book, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, they might have come to actual understand what she is referring to in the title. But, hey what's a little disinformation in God's war against progressive secularism, feminism, and prochoicers--- especially against a woman theologian who is all of those but still has the audacity to call herself Catholic and teach as a Catholic theologian.

As the retrenchment continues in the Church, the term Catholic theologian will come to be synonymous with upscale Catholic Catechism teacher. There's no point in engaging in speculative theology from the Catholic side of things when the Vatican is insisting it already has all the truth and it's just a matter of people being too secularly selfish and pigheaded to bow down to the obvious. Benedict more or less made this point repeatedly during World Youth Days. His Church has no room for theologians like Rosemary Radford Ruether who images the very worst of progressive Catholic theology. It's the very worst because it presents the biggest threat to the clerical system and it's self sustaining theology, and horror of horrors, her theology is largely based in liberation theology.

The irony of all this is that these theologies which the Vatican finds so heretical, could never have been written by any one other than a Catholic. One almost has to live and breath the prevailing theological climate of the fifty's and sixty's to have ever been moved to write the kind of theology that R3 and other progressive theologians have written. These theologians wrote what they did because they perceived themselves to be on the outside with no hope of ever changing the status quo unless the theology on which the status quo is maintained is seriously challenged.

The parallels between the early 16th century reformer's clashes with the Vatican and our current times, are uncanny. Like then we are in a battle over excessive top down authority regarding creeping infallibility and the empirical trappings of the Papacy. We are battling over Latin and vernacular languages, just like our predecessors did over translating the bible from Latin to the vernacular. We are battling about the propensity of the clergy to be inclined to pedophilia or immature misogynistic homosexuality. The 16th century heterosexual clergy wanted celibacy dropped, but the misogynist gay subculture in the Vatican fought them tooth and nail, and won the battle at the Council of Trent, maintaining the power of their celibate closet. A lot of equally immature heterosexual misogynists benefitted from the victory. It's no wonder the Catholic theology of sexuality is misogynist, exploitative of the fertility of women, and based almost exclusively on the penis. Lest I forget, there were also ongoing battles between the Vatican and secular governments about just how far the Vatican would be allowed to use it's influence with laity and clergy in an attempt to control governments. Hence we have Anglicanism, which is now experiencing their first shot at schizm over these very same issues.

The end result of all those battles was the splintering of Catholicism. It looks to me like we're in another period of splintering. The Vatican, as was demonstrated at WYD, will return to the past taking it's 'true believers' with it. It will continue to proclaim the supremacy of atonement theology, and at WYD they did an incredible production of the Stations of the Cross and completely left out the Resurrection. This is a very skewed theology of the mission of Jesus, but it's the one that props up all the trappings of the clerical culture. That it's a theology directly co opted from the pagan notions of Christ like Divine saviours is overlooked, as is the fact the term 'Christ' is from the Greek for said pagan Divine saviors. That Rosemary Radford Ruether would use the pagan term Gaia in conjunction with God cannot be overlooked. Gaia is after all, a feminine pagan term for God. That makes all the difference. Christ (male) yes, Gaia (female) no.

Only a really true believer in atonement theology is going to continue in the practice of Catholicism. I feel sorry for those youth who cast aside those of us who grew up in it because we have some serious knowledge to impart about the guilt inherent in atonement theology, and it's debilitating descriptions of the nature of humanity. The only people who benefit from imposing a faith which emphasizes subordination and personal inadequacy are those people who are heavily invested in subordinating others for greed and or ego. Such as people with enough money to become anonymous donors of theological chairs and the Catholicism which directly benefits from the money and it's attendant message.