IN OCTOBER 1555, during the blessedly brief but bloody reign of the devout Roman Catholic, Queen Mary I, in the #F courtyard of Balliol Hall, Oxford, England, two Anglican bishops were burned at the stake for their refusal to recant their Protestant faith. As the growing flames enveloped them, Bishop Hugh Latimer turned to the Bishop of London and former proctor of Cambridge University and uttered the famous words: "Be of good courage, Brother Ridley . . . for we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
Lo, more than four centuries after the ashes of Nicholas Ridley have grown cold, the humble candle of religious freedom burns quietly in Oxford, in Cambridge, and even here in distant Baltimore. But it is threatened, as always, by the fires of religious fanaticism -- a fanaticism all the more dangerous when it takes the form of an intolerant puritanism. Here on Loyola College's campus the Roman Catholic far right has taken up the cry of "Down with Ridley" -- in this case the college's newly installed president Harold "Hap" Ridley. President Ridley has offended this group because -- confronted with the protests of a tiny
minority of faculty and students who feel themselves morally tainted by the compassionate but frank examination of sexuality in the classroom of psychology professors Charles LoPresto and Cynthia Mendelson -- he has advocated a policy of calm reflection rather than furious condemnation. Viewing videos of couples engaged in sex, even videos used by Loyola's Pastoral Counseling Department and made for the instruction of marriage counselors -- many of them priests and nuns -- is an "evil" they say, which is condemned by the new Catholic catechism and must be abolished immediately if the college is to continue to call itself Catholic.
However meek and pure these complaining students are (all of them, I am sure, are pure, but a few are anything but meek), this sort of arrogant, self-righteous Christianity feeds on the condemnation of others and is the very antithesis of what the ministry of Jesus (or an American university, for that matter) is all about. For fundamentalists of any stripe have this in common: They shun freedom, be it academic or religious, preferring unquestioned subservience to pope, Bible or Koran. It is a masochistic tradition as old as Jephthah, the Old Testament judge who sacrificed his daughter in fulfillment of a vow. They would do well to see whether the fire of their purity is not stoked in a furnace deep in their hearts where their very selves are being torn asunder. If they do not feel at home in a university with Professors LoPresto and Mendelson, it is perhaps because they do not belong here; their place may rather be with the papal legate at Balliol Hall, torching the kindling at Bishop Ridley's feet.
Let us remember that Loyola is supposed to be Catholic by being catholic and by being a college -- not a parochial grammar school. Indeed, Loyola has the proud claim of successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that the academic atmosphere on campus is not and ought not to be "pervasively religious" but rather that of a university: an atmosphere of open intelligent inquiry. And it is on that assumption that Loyola claims the right to apply for and receive not insignificant state and federal funding, despite its religious affiliation. Rights come with responsibilities, and key among those for a university interested in maintaining academic freedom is the continual reexamination of those "truths" so often mindlessly accepted from tradition; a scrutiny which is ultimately of indispensable worth to society and church, whether initially popular or not.
Any thinking citizen who has ever had the misfortune of turning on daytime television talk shows and seen the confused and obsessive preoccupation in our culture with sexuality should welcome the fact that this profound and mysterious human dimension is being studied at Loyola in an atmosphere that is honest, scientific and, while not pervasively religious, religiously informed and inspired. (Two Jesuit priests, one of a more conservative and one of a more liberal inclination, attend each class and are available for questions of ethics or theology. The non-credit, voluntary course attempts to examine the subject free of value judgments.)
Although I spent more than 20 happy years as a Jesuit priest, I am a professor of chemistry, not psychology or theology. As one trained in the sciences, I do not see how you can investigate the boiling point of water or the psychodynamics of human sexuality without watching the respective processes. In the chemistry department, we do not ask our students to find the pH of aspirin by checking a catechism but rather by opening a bottle of acetylsalicylic acid and examining it. I am sure such fine teachers as professors LoPresto and Mendelson ask no less of )) their students. I wish them well, and only ask of them, as of our new president, to be of good courage!
Daniel M. Perrine is an associate professor of chemistry at Loyola College and a former Jesuit priest.