Silencing the Outspoken

Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., is the foremost U.S. Catholic student of the intellectual problems surrounding church-state relations. His fellow Jesuit, Father Gustave Weigel. is a ranking expert on ecclesiology and ecumenicism, and a consultant to the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Father Godfrey Diekmann, of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, is a distinguished Benedictine liturgical scholar. Swiss-born Hans Kueng of the University of Tuebingen is one of the most exciting Catholic thinkers to emerge from Germany since World War II, and one of the select few official theologians at the Council. The books of these men have all been published with episcopal imprimaturs, testifying to their doctrinal orthodoxy.

Last month the Graduate Student Council of Catholic University in Washington submitted all these names on a list of a dozen speakers it proposed to invite for an extracurricular lecture series. Last week Monsignor Joseph McAllister, the university's vice rector, acknowledged that he had rejected Murray, Weigel, Diekmann and Kueng. Reason: all have been "outspoken on matters of concern to the Vatican Council" (which is currently in adjournment), and he did not think that the university should give them a public platform.

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