![]() ![]() I and another Jesuit seminarian had serious objections against taking that loyalty oath. Until late 1967 (after my ordination) it was mandated that every professor in a seminary and every priest take the oath against modernism. When I was preparing to be ordained in 1967, I was expected to sign the infamous "Oath Against Modernism" initiated by Pius X in 1910. I have only once been confronted with a loyalty oath in the church. ![]() The courts also shot down many of the loyalty oaths because of the vagueness or undue breadth of the language written into the oaths. The courts ruled that if the state suspected a citizen of breaking the law, the burden of proof lay with the state to prove that, not with the citizen to have to proclaim his or her loyalty by an oath. Most of them got knocked down by The Supreme Court or other federal courts in the 1960's. In the end, the loyalty oaths of the 1950's probably did more harm than good. I remember still, with a shudder, the awful McCarthy period and the House Un-American Activities Committee and the harm they did to innocent people and the way they sowed as much suspicion and fear of outsiders as any real patriotism. I am not, generally, much of a fan of loyalty oaths of any kind. ![]() My concern is less the debate between Bishop Cordilione and the Board of the Catholic Association for Gay and Lesbian ministry but rather the disturbing and growing recourse to ecclesiastical loyalty oaths. I am doing something of a spin-off on Michael O' Loughlin's blog about tough questions in Oakland. ![]()
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