jshore, I go to CUA right now and I remember a theology professor being denied tenure about two years ago and he left. I took one of his courses, in fact. Is that about when your friend’s prof left Catholic University?
Sorry for the hijack
Neurotik,
No…alas the one I am thinking about goes much further back. My friend would have taken the course around 1989 ± 2 years. I am spacing on the name…It is close to the tip of my tongue. Father C---- I don’t think he was denied tenure but instead was somehow barred from teaching theology or something like that (I think he probably already had tenure) and then left the university.
Actually the described mechanics are not in the Catechism – it just states that the birth did not affect Mary’s condition of Aeiparthenos (“ever-virgin”). You’re left to figure it out, and a lot of commentators have come out with explanations.
Just in case, right after that article the Catechism clarifies that her attribute has a sense of “virginity” as a State-of-Being – absolute purity in thought, feeling, action, etc., not just the immediate physical-sexual condition. (The way one of the Brothers at my school used to put it, you can be “saving it for marriage” and abstaining from any sexual contact even with yourself, yet already be the biggest slut for things of this world)
(One thing that could apply by inference --it’s not explicitly in the Catechism either-- would be that since Mary was Immaculate (not just forgiven) of Original Sin, she would be free of the burden laid upon Eve after the Fall, of painful, laborious childbirth.)