‘Faithful dissent’? Catholic school board sponsors lecture on how to oppose Church moral teachings

Dr. Graham McDonough

KITCHENER, Ontario, February 11, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Ontario Catholic school board sponsored a lecture last week focused on how Catholic schools can “value … faithful dissent” as a way of opposing Catholic teaching on “ordination, homosexuality, and contraception.”

The Waterloo Catholic District School Board sponsored Graham McDonough, PhD, to speak at St. Jerome’s University (SJU) Friday night as part of the University’s lecture series on “Catholic Experience.”

“Catholic schools often find themselves dealing with disagreements with Church teaching on topics such as ordination, homosexuality, and contraception as well as with complaints that schools are not properly teaching doctrine,” reads a description of the lecture, titled “Faithful Disagreement: an opportunity for rediscovery in Catholic education.”

"This lecture proposes that Catholic schools can do more to include and nurture internal disagreement as a powerful opportunity to embrace intellectual diversity, learn the value of faithful dissent and enable greater participation in the Church and the world.”

McDonough, an assistant professor of education and an associate fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, released a book in 2012 titled Beyond Obedience and Abandonment: Toward a Theory of Dissent in Catholic Education.  (more...)

‘Faithful dissent’? Catholic school board sponsors lecture on how to oppose Church moral teachings