By Anthony Esolen
Crisis Magazine
August 15, 2025
As readers here must know, the Archbishop of Detroit, Edward Weisenburger, has fired three longtime professors of philosophy and theology at the archdiocese's seminary, Sacred Heart. The firing took the professors by surprise. He has given no reason for it, except to say that he disagrees with their theology. I do not know what that means, nor does the archbishop seem to intend to tell us what it means.
Let us come to cases. If I say to William of Ockham, "I disagree with your theology," and William, justly and as a loyal son of the Church, desires to know exactly where this disagreement lies, I must reply. I might say that to subordinate God's knowledge to His will must result in a conception of God that is like what Muslims believe about Allah, unfettered from reason and, therefore, not approachable by reason. Punishment for sin would then also be arbitrary and extrinsic, not inherent to the sin itself. Then William might point out some error in my drawing conclusions from his premises, or he might say that he does not actually hold the premises I attribute to him; or he might rethink matters and change his mind.
Likewise, if I say to Cardinal Reinhard Marx, "I disagree with your moral philosophy," and the cardinal agrees to have a conversation rather than pulling rank, he might say, "Tell me what the problem is."
I might then say, "Your willingness to normalize and even to celebrate unnatural sexual relations, denying that they are unnatural no matter how they may feel to those who engage in them, leaves the Church with no logical reason to oppose a man's taking two wives, if such an arrangement pleases them, and with no credible witness against fornication. You cannot tell John and Mary to wait for marriage while Will and Rich cannot possibly have any such intention, since their sodomy consummates nothing, has no biological meaning, and, because it is not natural, must be learned as a habit long before they decide they will continue in it for life. You have also detached sexual morality from nature, drained the masculine and feminine of meaning, reduced sexual being to tools of hedonism, and given the go-ahead for pseudo-monogamous couples to adopt children and thus deliberately to deprive those children of either a mother or a father. All kinds of harm and confusion are already implied by your failure to enter more deeply into a truth available to reason and developed by the Church: that man is for woman and woman is for man."
I do not know what the cardinal would say in reply, but I hope he would see that a real reply is needed.
Such a reply cannot be, "The doctrines are developing," no more than William of Ockham could say so legitimately. That is not to answer the objection but to evade it. When a living thing develops, it becomes more powerful than before, not less; its latent faculties come to the fore; its observed relations to other creatures are more numerous, more intricate, more dynamic. If the doctrine in question is that sexual relations are licit only within marriage and marriage is what it is by nature, then a true development of that doctrine might show its powerful relations to doctrines on the nature of the human body, or what it means to be an incarnate creature, or why the account of the creation of mankind in Scripture makes explicit what for the other creatures is left implicit, that "male and female [God] created them," or even Jesus' saying that you cannot enter the kingdom of God unless you enter it as a little child.
We know that a thing is decaying or dying when it loses such interrelations, or when its scope of application is narrowed. The fraternal club that once attracted many young men and was at the heart of town life is in decay; we know it when it becomes for us just one odd choice among others, of passing an evening or two every couple of months, without building anything. People ignore it not because they hold it in contempt but because there is no real life in it anymore.
The philosophy department at New Directions University is in decay because the courses have all been subordinated to political aims; they have lost their connections to linguistics, mathematics, art, cosmology, history, literature, and the patient study of man. It is no longer a leader but an appendage. And it is well on its way to becoming an appendix, to be ignored or gotten rid of.
The difference between a living society and a mere collective or a group is like the difference between an organism and inanimate matter; and here, those among us who plead for the "social" as more valuable than true doctrine are strangely antisocial and individualist. Jack is walking in the fields. He is a person not a mere beast. He can enter into relations of thought with all that he sees. His body is not a collection of parts but a whole, with more interrelationships in the cells of his brain alone than there are stars in the galaxy. But as Jack grows enfeebled, the relations and interrelations fall away, until, one moment after he has died, there will be a bone here, a liver there, a patch of skin, a vein, and so forth through all of what used to be the parts of a real body and are now just isolated and inanimate things.
To say, then, that the Church's social teaching is separate from her teachings regarding sex is to get each one of them wrong—and to fail to recognize the sociality of the truths themselves; it is to treat each one of them as a mere island, an object in a collection of objects, a lung and an artery in a corpse. That is not development. It is not even decay. It is death.
And this, I am guessing (and the archbishop has left us no choice but to guess), is behind the sacking of the three professors at Sacred Heart. They said, in effect, that Pope Francis' apparent retreat on the Church's teachings regarding sex and marriage was not development but decay.
Since a pope's infallibility is narrow in scope and is cast in negative rather than positive terms—I mean that it is not guaranteed that he will be wise or that he will preach the truth or that his preaching will develop that truth; all that is guaranteed is that he will not, ex cathedra, preach falsehood in faith and morals—his words are open to criticism. The manner of such criticism should be careful, filial, and respectful, such as was not accorded to Pope John Paul II when many a liberal Catholic dismissed him as a half-wit Pole who could not possibly grasp the advanced intellectualism of the Western world. But the sinfulness of the manner or of the intent of the critic is one thing; the criticism itself is another.
The critics of John Paul II were wrong not because they were arrogant, disobedient, supercilious, and smug. Some were, some weren't. Nor were they wrong because they disagreed with something that he wrote that did not rise to a level requiring the faithful to submit their intellect and will. They were wrong because their premises were false or their reasoning from valid premises was faulty. They were wrong because they were wrong.