In
the Catholic Church of Pope Francis, it is dangerous to be too
conservative. Professor Josef Seifert, a distinguished Catholic
philosopher from Austria, discovered this recently, when he was
dismissed from his position at the University of Granada in Spain by the
local archbishop.
Seifert’s sin was to have raised questions about “Amoris Laetitia,”
the controversial papal exhortation on marriage, whose ambiguous
statements on divorce and remarriage the philosopher described as a
potential “theological atom bomb” for Catholic moral teaching. Such
stark criticism of a sitting pope “damages the communion of the church,” Granada’s archbishop wrote, while retiring the professor from his academic post.
