Campus Notes

A letter published today in Catholic World Report by Fr. Peter Ryan and Dr. Germain Grisez contradict’s the National Catholic Reporter‘s article from Monday asserting that their June Theological Studies article on marriage was “unedited and without undergoing normal peer review.” However, at least one fact NCR appears to have reported correctly is that the Vatican pressured the Jesuit journal to publish the Ryan-Grisez article in response to a 2004 piece arguing for “a change in church teachings on divorce and remarriage.”

National Catholic Reporter reported that the Vatican “mandated that Theological Studies publish–unedited–an essay coauthored by Ryan and theologian Germain Grisez” in response to the controversial 2004 article challenging Church teachings on marriage.

Today, Fr. Ryan and Dr. Grisez issued a clarification of the facts.  The authors’ statement, posted at Catholic World Report, asserts that their article was indeed edited and did go through a peer review process.

From the letter at CWR:

 In August 2010, having received our final draft, the editor wrote: “I am pleased to report that my editorial consultants have recommended that we publish your manuscript, but in a substantially reduced form.” That letter included comments from two referees along with the editor’s proposed “trimmed version,” from which were excised our arguments showing that much of Himes and Coriden’s case is unsound and that Piet Fransen’s interpretation of Trent on marriage, on which they rely, is based on false factual claims.

Had Theological Studies published, without a mandate from higher authority, the unexpurgated final version of our reply to Himes and Coriden, its doing so would have contributed to its credibility as a forum for fair and thorough treatment of vital theological controversies. As for the quality of our scholarship, we ask only that readers of the two articles set aside the fact that higher authority had to mandate publication of the unexpurgated version of our article and judge for themselves.

Fr. Ryan and Dr. Grisez’s entire letter is available here.

NCR reported that the aim of the Vatican is to “weed out dissenting voices and force the journal to stick more closely to official church teachings.”  The Ryan-Grisez statement does nothing to allay NCR’s fear.