Fr Theodore Hesburgh, Enemy of the Catholic Faith, on 2017 Postage Stamp

       In 2017, the United States Postal Service will celebrate an enemy of the authentic Catholic Faith on one of its postage stamps. Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh (1917-2015), a leading proponent of the liberal agenda and the one-time President of Notre Dame University, was not a model Catholic educator. Not only was Fr. Hesburgh not a model Catholic educator, but he was actually PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE in the Catholic community for almost single-handedly being responsible for the elimination of orthodox Catholic teaching in our once Catholic Universities, and destroying their commitment to authentic Catholic education by fostering their conversion to a university status, completely independent of Catholic control. Consider that:

• Fr. Hesburgh was the leading promoter of the LAND O’LAKES document in 1967, which was the “Declaration of Independence” of Catholic Universities from Church authority at that time, and remains so to this day. As a result of Fr. Hesburgh’s influence, once proudly Catholic Universities, such as Notre Dame, Georgetown, Fordham, and Boston College have lost their essential Catholic character.

• Fr. Hesburgh was a strong advocate of the convening of a new VATICAN COUNCIL III, because, in his eyes, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) failed to deliver on his desired reform of our Roman Catholic Church. To promote his liberal modernist vision, he convened, at Notre Dame in 1977, a Symposium on Vatican III. What was most significant and revealing about his personal agenda for the Church was Fr. Hesburgh’s concept of whom the architects of Vatican III should be. His desired architects of the future Church included an extraordinary number of influential liberal modernists, such as Hans Kung of Switzerland, Edward Schillebeeckx of Belgium, Johann Metz of Germany, as well as Charles Curran and William McCready of the United States. All these scholars entertained serious difficulties with the Papacy and the Magisterium of our Roman Catholic Church.

• Fr. Hesburgh notoriously opposed any type of moral control in radio and television broadcasting. He actively supported Norman Lear, the producer of such tasteless television shows as “All in the Family” with Archie Bunker, against the reasonable moral proposals of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, which tried to introduce reasonable protections for our children and families in radio and television programming.

• Fr. Hesburgh created the climate for the theology department of Notre Dame to be controlled by such well-known dissenters from the authentic Catholic Faith as Richard McBrien, who died in 2015 at the age of seventy-eight and “was survived by his concubine of many years, with whom he lived as man-and-wife just off-campus, with the knowledge of the entire faculty of Notre Dame, several bishops of South Bend, and several bishops of Hartford."

        It was not coincidental that Archbishop Michael Miller, Secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, in 2005 chose Notre Dame University to be the venue for his warning that the Pope (Benedict XVI) expected Catholic institutions to promote the Faith, and, if failing to do so, to have their Catholic identity withdrawn.

       Considering the fact that Fr. Hesburgh was a disgrace to the Roman Catholic Faith, it’s no wonder the liberals are honoring him with the new stamp.

    

Most contents of this post are from The Orlando Truth issue 45 by Rudolph Lohse.

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