Charles E. Curran (born March 30, 1934) is an American moral theologian and Catholic priest. He currently serves at Southern Methodist University as the Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor of Human Values. Biography Curran grew up in Rochester, New York, and was ordained there in 1958 for the Diocese of Rochester. After intensive graduate work and earning two doctorates in theology in Rome, Curran taught at the seminary in Rochester, New York. In 1965 he joined the theology faculty at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Contrary to some sources, he did not serve as a peritus or expert at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965); that distinction belonged to Charles Arthur Curran, a member of the psychology department at Loyola University Chicago. In April 1967, university trustees voted to let Curran's tenure stream appointment lapse rather than reappoint him, primarily because of his dissenting views on contraception. After a faculty-led strike that included students, the university reversed its position on Curran two weeks later and the trustees not only reappointed him, but also promoted him to associate professor with tenure. Curran later returned to prominence, in 1968 becoming part of a group of 87 theologians who authored a response to Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical affirming the traditional ban on artificial contraception. Curran continued to teach and write on the church's teaching on various moral issues, including premarital sex, masturbation, contraception, abortion, homosexual acts, divorce, euthanasia, and in vitro fertilization, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Curran was again removed from the faculty of the Catholic University of America in 1986 as a dissident against the Catholic Church's moral teaching. He maintains in his 1986 Faithful Dissent that Catholics who may dissent nevertheless accept the teaching authority of the pope, bishops and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Views Curran contended in 1971 that homosexual acts, in the context of a committed relationship, fell short of the ideal but were to be considered good for homosexual people; he stated that "I had come to accept the moral legitimacy of a union of two gay men or lesbians." In 1992, he said that "the official hierarchical Roman Catholic teaching should accept the moral value and goodness" of same-sex relationships, not excepting those that include sex. However, he has since recognized shortcomings in this argument, albeit without explicitly stating a change of position. Curran has stated that the Congregation