Monday, January 14, 2019

Why FUS Theology is Problematic

There was a recent kerfluffle about an English teacher at FUS assigning a risque book to a group of graduate students. Some people took offense because the book was apparently blasphemous.

In reference to that problem, I have no brief. If adult, well-catechized Catholics can't handle blasphemy, they should probably go live in a cave, far from the madding crowd, and spend their snowflake time in prayer, that God may strengthen them. They certainly aren't cut out for the apostolic work of evangelization.

No, my issue with FUS is rather more substantial.
It simply doesn't teach the whole Faith.

A strong charge requires strong evidence.
This is my personal experience.

During the course of my MA in theology there, I was taught that the missions of the Church were to teach and to sanctify. For two solid years, that was what I heard.

When I graduated and got job with a parish working under a wonderfully orthodox assistant priest, he pointed out that I had been mis-taught. The three-fold mission of the Church is

  1. to teach, 
  2. to GOVERN and 
  3. to sanctify

He was right, of course.

So, why was the third mission never taught, never even breathed to me, during my entire time at FUS?  This puzzled me.

After this revelation, I made a point to question other theology grads, both FUS students and non-FUS students, on precisely this point, just to see if this was, perhaps, something I had missed. To a person, every FUS-taught person answered the question EXACTLY the same way that every non-FUS grad answered: the TWO missions of the Church were to teach and to sanctify.

In every case, when I pointed out the third mission, the FUS students were struck suddenly dumb, staring at the third phrase "as a cow stares at a new gate", while one Notre Dame student reacted very badly to the third phrase, going so far as to scratch it out and say, "I don't like that one."

So, again, how is it that the graduate theology program at FUS consistently omitted the third mission? I don't know. All I know is, it did. Consistently. And this omission includes teachers like Scott Hahn and Barbara Ann Morgan. All of them failed to explicitly teach the third mission. For two solid years. To everyone.

Second story.  I had a similar experience in regards to the teaching on the sacraments. When taking the undergraduate Sacraments course, the sum total of the instruction on the sacrament of marriage from the priest who taught it was "you'll learn about that in marriage prep."

That was it. Now, as it happens, I did marriage prep at FUS. I can't call it a waste of time, because almost no time was spent doing any marriage prep. The entire experience consisted of one, diocesan required pre-Cana weekend which was ... underwhelming... in its theology.

In my personal experience, FUS isn't passing on the whole Faith. Omitting one of the three missions of the Church is an incredibly basic mistake, not unlike omitting one of the sacraments. It is absurd. FUS theology instruction may be better than most schools (I have no basis for comparison, so I can't say), but in my experience, it is substandard by any objective measure.

I have NEVER recommended FUS as a place to learn theology.

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