Who Can You Trust in a Roman Collar? A Series on the Good, the Bad, and the Disappointing! Fr. Charlie Curran

Fr. Charlie Curran, April 1967, Catholic University, protesting Humanae Vitae...

It's hard for a Catholic to know whom he can trust among our bishops and priests these days (including Pope Francis), although the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is getting clearer by the minute. I started to do a post on one of my heroes, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, but along the way got caught up in memories of my state of confusion in the late 1960s when I was a college student.
Those memories reminded me that this kind of confusion in the Church is nothing new.


I lived through the post Humanae Vitae chaos as a young adult both single and married. In 1967 I was a Junior at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. Dissenting "theologian" Charlie Curran was spouting off down the street at Catholic University. My roommate and I, who often studied at the Shrine cafeteria, walked over to check out the big demonstration in April to see what all the commotion was about. The local Ordinary, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, tried to deny tenure to Curran as a faculty member.  A major boycott of classes ensued with many of the faculty (dare I say most?) leading the charge. What a ruckus! It was the age of student protests and rejection of authority. The crowds were enormous.

Dissenting religious is nothing new. Note the nun and the priests or brother in the photo.

Curran was an expert manipulator of the press and public, as so many liberals are, and the massive university boycott against O'Boyle's decision was a journalist's dream. They covered his every fulmination. The Vatican apparently couldn't take the heat and stifled O'Boye's attempt to rein in the heretical priest. Ironically, Pope Paul VI raised O'Boyle to cardinal later that summer. Was that in reparation one wonders? Just shut up and we'll make you a cardinal!

A liberal promoting contraception (and other sexual immorality), Curran organized clerical dissent to the encyclical and made destroying Catholic doctrine on marriage and sexuality his life work. At 85 he continues, but now he has a powerful ally. Like another dissenter in a roman collar (James Martin), Curran uses the words of Pope Francis to bolster his on-going dissent from Catholic moral teachings. In fact, the "development" of his sexual ethics supports just about every sexual perversion the human heart can imagine under the rationalization of "following your conscience."

Several years ago, Curran spoke to New Ways Ministry (NWM) which was condemned by the Vatican in 1999, and by the U.S. Catholic bishops. Nevertheless, NWM continues on its heretical and hedonistic way giving the middle finger salute to Church authority which they consider a violation of American freedom. NWM represents the Americanist heresy on steroids.

NWM was on the Curran bandwagon from its very beginning in 1977 and gave him their Bridge Building Award in 1992. With dissent to heterosexual moral teachings well on the way during the 1960s, it was time for the ascendence of homosexual perversion and NWM's founders, Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent were the ones to do it. That they would enthrone Charlie as a hero was no surprise. A modern Martin Luther, he fit their profile in courage as a rebel against Christ and his Church. And there were new barriers to knock down and new heroes to champion in the LGBTQ community. Cementing their relationship, Curran wrote the forward to Gramick and Nugent's 1992 book, Building Bridges. (Hmm...where have we heard that title before? Was James Martin shilling for the NWM award and deliberately connecting himself to Gramick, Nugent, and Curran?)

After scandalizing students at CU for years,
Charlie went to SMU to scandalize
and mislea a new pool of students.

Charlie Curran didn't get his own kingdom like Lucifer (at least not yet), only notoriety and considerably more than 15 minutes of fame. But every dissenter in the Church embraced him. In her 1991 book, Ungodly Rage: the Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, Donna Steichen recorded many dissent events that featured Curran and his allies scandalizing the gullible folks in the pew.

The fact is that Charlie Curran led a "coup" in 1967 that helped create the horrible situation we have in Catholic education today.

One of the few academics who stood up to him and refused to support the boycott, Msgr. Eugene Kevane, Dean of the School of Education, was dismissed from his post about six months after the coup. It seemed the entire Catholic University staff had lost their minds.

Kevane, who died in 1996, was vindicated in 1987 when Curran was finally suspended and banned from teaching at Catholic schools. Nonplussed, Curran continued his career on a protestant campus, Southern Methodist University (SMU). No need to protest there of course as the Methodists had already lost the faith and embraced the sexual immorality of the modernists.


Curran's dissent came during the post World War II push for population control and many of the high and mighty in the world used him to promote their agenda. The history is sordid, but fascinating with names like Rockefeller, Ford, Hugh Moore (founder of the Dixie Cup corporation, leader in establishment of Planned Parenthood International, proponent of voluntary sterilization), and many others including Fr. Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame. Obviously, Judas was only the first apostle to betray Christ.

In all this was Curran a partner or a pawn? Whatever his role, it continues even as he stands on the threshold of eternity.

May God have mercy on Charlie when he exits stage left which can't be very far off. In your charity pray for a deathbed conversion. It doesn't seem too likely at this point as he is clearly a man of monumental pride, but God's grace is amazing even for people who've devoted their lives to evil.

Next...one of the good guys...Cardinal Gerhard Müller.