Stephen Lewis replies to the Voris Mob

Stephen Lewis replies to the Voris Mob January 18, 2019

He writes over at First Things:

Last week, a controversy erupted over a book I assigned in a five-student advanced literature seminar at the Franciscan University of Steubenville (FUS) during the Spring 2018 semester. Not wishing to further divide our university community, I trusted that my superiors at FUS would handle the matter appropriately and I refrained from public comment. But many observers have assumed that Franciscan University’s decision to remove me from my role as chair of the English Department confirms that I assigned the book out of hostility to orthodox Catholic belief. Because nothing could be further from the truth, many friends have urged me to explain why I put Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom on my syllabus in the first place. Now that some time has passed, I feel a duty to the Franciscan University community and others concerned by the uproar to provide an account….

Do go read the whole thing.  That he should even have to write this says so much about the embarrassing state of Catholic intellectual life in the US and the gutless cowardice of Franciscan, which should have defended him, but instead humiliated him to please the mob that now controls the school from a website in Detroit. Franciscan University has behaved utterly shamefully in capitulating to this mob of Know Nothings and they have publicly humiliated a good man, a good academic, and a good Catholic who they are unworthy to have gracing their faculty. I hope a real Catholic school steals him from them. They deserve it and he deserves far better than the shameful treatment the cowards in the Administration have subjected him to.  They should apologize and reinstate him as chair.

But when you are the Righteous, you cannot apologize.


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