Professor, university reach
compromise
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
Moni McIntyre, ousted recently as theology professor at Duquesne
University in Pittsburgh, will remain a member of the universitys faculty
but teach in a different department.
Under terms of a compromise, McIntyre, a former nun who became an
Episcopal priest, will teach in the Graduate Center for Social and Public
Policy rather than in theology, where she was a tenured professor. Officials at
Duquesne had threatened full dismissal.
Its a compromise, but its a good enough
compromise, said McIntyre of the Jan. 31 university agreement to have her
teach in the Graduate Center.
Moves against McIntyre, a former Immaculate Heart of Mary nun,
began in early January after Duquesne President John E. Murray was notified of
McIntyres Episcopal ordination on Dec. 16. Murray said McIntyres
ordination necessarily repudiates certain teachings of the Roman Catholic
church. As a result, he said, she would no longer be able to teach
theology (NCR, Feb. 2).
It would be a contradiction, Murray said, to keep McIntyre
as a teacher of Roman Catholic theology when she had become a
publicly proclaimed official teacher of Anglican doctrine.
The actuality, McIntyre told NCR, was that she was teaching
ethics and moral theology rather than specializing in Roman Catholic theology
per se. A rabbi and a Methodist have taught in the same position, she said.
When McIntyre accepted the job in 1990, she said, the position had
not called for a Roman Catholic but rather, a person familiar with
Roman Catholic theology. I wasnt addressing papal infallibility or
the Real Presence or the ordination of women in my classes, said
McIntyre. It was feminism, ecological ethics, health care
ethics.
In 1998, on the advice of her lawyer, McIntyre informed her
department head when she left her religious order to join the Episcopal church.
She also told the dean.
McIntyre said that when the dean told her there would be
serious trouble if McIntyre subsequently announced she was to be
ordained, she understood the response to mean dont ask, dont
tell.
Shortly after her Dec. 16 ordination, McIntyre said her department
chair had asked her if rumors about it were true, and she had said yes. She saw
the university president about an hour-and-a-half later. He was upset and
wanted my resignation. And I said I wasnt giving it.
When McIntyre returned from Christmas break on Jan. 8 she found a
notice from her department head saying she should not come in to teach on Jan.
9.
McIntyre said she was accused in a Jan. 9 letter from Murray of
misrepresenting herself when she was granted tenure in 1997. McIntyre said when
she applied for tenure in September 1996 she had made no effort to contact the
Episcopal bishop. She was still a Catholic and a nun.
McIntyre said she had felt called to ordination since her
childhood. In recent years she had desisted because she wanted to remain a
member of her religious order, she said. But the call to the priesthood
was quite genuine, and I needed to pursue it, even if it meant
leaving.
The chair of the National Coalition of American Nuns, Loretto Sr.
Mary Ann Cunningham, issued a statement Jan. 29 expressing regret over the
universitys decision to remove McIntyre from her theology post. We
applaud Dr. McIntyres courage and integrity, Cunningham said,
and would suggest that her students might have been able to learn a great
deal from her about the costly struggle to be faithful to Gods plan for
their lives, about the requirements of an adult faith and about her prophetic
response to a God-given call to priestly ministry.
National Catholic Reporter, February 9,
2001
|