Daviel Maguire: Dissing the Pope as Usual

Dan Maguire is doing his usual thing, bitching about the Pope and the teaching of the Catholic Church with which he disagrees. Happily, the New York Times, which sought out a comment from him, also printed several letters from loyal Catholics lauding the Pope.

In an e-mail to Theology Department faculty and graduate students, Maguire goes further:

Yesterday morning, I was invited by The New York Times to submit a letter on the pope’s departure. When I spoke to the editor about my letter, she asked about Matt. 16:19. People are interested in theology when they see its effects unfolding in public life. I told her, as Hans Kung puts it that “the famous saying about Peter as the rock on which Jesus will build his church” that “strikingly has no parallels in the other Gospels, is not a saying of the earthly Jesus but a post-Easter construction…” probably coming from the Palestinian community and inserted into Matthew’s Gospel.

Maguire, of course, is doing what liberal theologians typically do when faced with scripture they find inconvenient: they dismiss it as bogus.

The fact that there are no parallel passages in the other gospels proves nothing, since many of the things Jesus said appear in only one gospel. Of course, Maguire doesn’t believe that what Jesus said has any authority anyway, since he is, at most, barely a theist and certainly not a Christian.

Maguire has every right to whatever religious views he wishes to hold, but he shouldn’t pretend that those views trump the views of people who are really Christians, and he certainly should not pretend that his views and those of like-minded theologians trump those of the bishops.