With origins as far back as the 14th Century, Westminster School is one of the oldest in the country with a long tradition of scholarship - and outstanding results, both in academic and public life.

Loyal Dissent is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican, remains committed to the Catholic Church. Over a nearly fifty-year career, Charles E. Curran has distinguished himself as the most well-known and the most controversial Catholic moral theologian in the United States. On occasion, he has disagreed with official church teachings on subjects such as contraception, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, moral norms, and the role played by the hierarchical teaching office in moral matters. Throughout, however, Curran has remained a committed Catholic, a priest working for the reform of a pilgrim church. His positions, he insists, are always in accord with the best understanding of Catholic theology and always dedicated to the good of the church. In 1986, years of clashes with church authorities finally culminated in a decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology. As a result of that Vatican condemnation, he was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University of America and, since then, no Catholic university has been willing to hire him. Yet Curran continues to defend the possibility of legitimate dissent from those teachings of the Catholic faith—not core or central to it—that are outside the realm of infallibility. In word and deed, he has worked in support of more academic freedom in Catholic higher education and for a structural change in the church that would increase the role of the Catholic community—from local churches and parishes to all the baptized people of God. In this poignant and passionate memoir, Curran recounts his remarkable story from his early years as a compliant, pre-Vatican II Catholic through decades of teaching and writing and a transformation that has brought him today to be recognized as a leader of progressive Catholicism throughout the world.

In the summer of 1966, one year after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, a group of nineteen Roman Catholic priests met clandestinely in a church hall in a suburb of Pittsburgh to discuss forming an independent group of ordained clergy. Fearful that meeting publicly might be viewed as a threat to the authority of the local bishop, thus potentially risking sanctioning from him, they used numbers, not names, when circulating the minutes of the first two meetings. Once the word spread among the local clergy that such a group was meeting, and they realized there was widespread interest, they went public and invited all of Pittsburgh’s Catholic clergy, including the bishop, to their third meeting. They chose a name, the Association of Pittsburgh Priests (APP), and the group was launched. Shortly after forming, and with interest from among over two-hundred clergy, APP began advocating for major church renewal and involvement in any number of social justice issues. Regarding church renewal, they grounded themselves in the documents of Vatican II, most especially Gaudium et Spes, Church in the Modern World, and soon lobbied for optional celibacy and married priesthood, women’s ordination, lay empowerment, including the promotion of the early church notion of the priesthood and prophethood of all believers. To this day, APP remains a force for change in the church and in society, ever true to its initial intuition to fully implement the renewal of church and society called for by the bishops at Vatican II.

Originally published in 1938, this book covers various aspects of the Dissenter movement between 1763 and 1800.