De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

ABOVE: Picture of Bishop Alan Williams attending the Tina Beattie lecture at Newhall and featured on the website of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre Introduction: Faithful Dialogue or Dissent? Professor Tina Beattie is a prominent Catholic personality and has been for many years. She is a regular contributor to Radio 4's Thought for the Day and is an active novelist and commentator with a special focus on women's issues. However, despite her notoriety, her theological positions often spark significant controversy within the Catholic community, particularly due to her public dissent from established Church teachings. The Catholic Church’s teaching on moral and social issues is not hastily formed opinion, but rather an organic synthesis of divine Revelation from sacred Scripture, a rich and nuanced Tradition shaped over 2,000 years, and the wisdom of the Magisterium—a living authority that has grappled with complex questions across centuries. Any approach that disregards th...

After some careful thought, there's an interesting academic post on the Tina Beattie issue on the All Along the Watchtower blog here . It makes some really excellent points with which I have a great deal of sympathy. The post comes down to this I think: I disagree with Professor Beattie’s views on abortion (and other matters), but to attack her in the way that has been done – as though no Catholic should ever dissent from the teaching of the Church on anything – and to make some of the comments I have seen on social media sites, is simply to turn her into the victim of what looks like a witch-hunt. If the aim is to get the Bishops to look at her activity, this seems not the way to achieve that objective. What Bishop wants to look as though he is trying to stifle the freedom of a woman academic to speak her mind?  I think that this comment is a little unfortunate. I certainly would not seek to limit anyone's freedom of speech. The question is about the platform from...

As a previous Pope warned us: “As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so too you will have your false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views and disown the Master who purchased their freedom. They will destroy themselves very quickly; but there will be many who copy their shameful behaviour and the Way of Truth will be brought into disrepute on their account.” (2 Peter 2: 1-2) A number of these authors reject not only the teaching of the Church on the evil of abortion – but also reject the teaching of the Church on most other aspects of the Sixth Commandment. They have instead chosen to follow theologians such as Professor Charles Curran whose license to teach as a Catholic Theologian was revoked because of his dissent from Catholic Moral teaching on 25th July 1986 by Pope Saint John Paul II. Pope John Paul authorised the-then Cardinal Ratzinger to write to him informing him of this decision and the reasons for this decision: “Th...

The Catholic Herald reports today that Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, has spoken in support of the Polish bishops’ campaign against abortion. In his homily at a Mass for the 1050th anniversary of the Baptism of Poland, Cardinal Nichols referred to the Polish bishops’ attempts to eliminate abortion, saying: “Some want to argue that abortion can be a right in conscience. This cannot be so because abortion is always the destruction of innocent life.” Thank you your Eminence!

You may have missed this story in The Catholic Herald on Monday which reports that Tina Beattie, Theologian, professor of 'Catholic Studies' at Roehampton University, and advisor to CAFOD’s Theological Reference Group, has signed a letter to the Polish Bishops’ Conference supporting “early, safe and legal” abortion. The letter follows proposals by the Polish government to make abortion illegal in the country. Tina Beattie was one of the organisers of the letter. She set up a secret Facebook group – her words – in order to brainstorm the letter’s wording and solicit signatures. The actual letter is an extraordinary piece of pseudo-intellectual sophistry which is nothing short of embarrassing from an academic perspective, wrong on every point—every few words contains a categorical error, a lie, a fallacy or a heresy. It's wrong on liberty, autonomy, conscience, legality, concepts of freedom and rights and their precedential axiomatic principle of the inalienable ...

Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest, doctor of moral theology and consulting editor of The Catholic Herald . On Twitter he is @ALucieSmith  and is appearing at the Guild Apologetics evening in Soho on the 4th May see here for details . He knows his stuff, and has given me permission to post his response to the disgraceful letter to the Polish Bishops reported by The Catholic Herald here . The recent letter to the Polish Bishops on the subject of the abortion laws in Poland, signed by Professor Tina Beattie and many others, requires comment, as it will confuse and bewilder many Catholic readers. Most of the signatories are unknown to me, but I am very sorry to see in the hundred or so names several well-known writers such as Jean Porter of Notre Dame University, and Janet Martin Soskice of Cambridge University, both reputable academics. They like the rest of us have the duty, as Catholics, to uphold Church teaching. It is a pity that they have signed a ...

Further to my comments yesterday regarding Prof. Tina Beattie's controversial and open dissent, I wanted to look deeper at the problem to illustrate that I am not just being rude about an individual, but rather, I feel, undertaking an important critique of an untenable Catholic position. The point is not to attack an individual, but to demonstrate that for such academic positions to remain unchallenged and unclarified by those who's duty it is to shepherd the faithful, constitutes the source of a great deal of our malaise in the Church. As I stated yesterday, at the most basic level it seems obvious that our unity is utterly dependent on our common profession of faith. When we compromise the integrity of that professed faith, unity ceases to be a reality. Theologians like Beattie have attempted to assimilate post-modern ideas into Catholic theology in an attempt to help the faithful feel more comfortable in the "real" world. The demonstrable reality is that ...