Non Tasarmi, Fratello!

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!” Hillaire Belloc

Thursday, April 02, 2015

The Trouble With Jesuits, Part 31 - Mandatum Edition!


First, a definition:

The mandatum is fundamentally an acknowledgment by church authority that a Catholic professor of a theological discipline is teaching within the full communion of the Catholic Church.


 The Salesian Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, made waves last week in the Hispanic Catholic world when he refused to renew the mandatum of one of South America's most high-profile and liberal theological dissidents, Fr. Jorge Costadoat SJ.

He wrote:

 The academic path of Professor J. Costadoat includes unwise affirmations that blurred the magisterial teaching of the Church in various central points of the same, generating enough reasons to affirm that he has not sufficiently laid down in his positions the basic principle that, "the theological disciplines, in the light of faith and under the guidance of the magisterium of the Church, should be so taught that the students will correctly draw out Catholic doctrine from divine revelation" (Vatican Council II, Decree on Priestly Training [Optatam Totius], n. 16). Taking into consideration this situation, in the year 2012, following a dialogue with him, aware of the difficulties that he has, and in an act of trust, I granted him the canonical mandatum for 3 years, under the assumption that his work would be carried our and would advance with the aim to overcome the aforementioned difficulties.

With the passage of the established period, I have had to ponder the situation once again. After evaluating that his theological activity did not overcome the difficulties mentioned in the above paragraph, I have decided to not renew his canonical mandatum to teach, with the certainty that the teaching position of professor J. Costadoat, in the current state of affairs, is far -- as it had already been said -- from the theological teaching that is expected from a university that has the characteristic, and the demands, of being Catholic and Pontifical.

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