The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the Cardinal Newman Society is calling [click for PDF of their letter] for a purge of “pro-death” professors at Catholic colleges…

for perpetuating “a culture of death” by supporting abortion rights or siding against Terry Schiavo’s parents in their efforts to keep her feeding tube.

The Cardinal Newman Society also says in a fund-raising appeal that administrators at BC, Georgetown University and elsewhere should be warned their school risks being “stripped of its Catholic identity by the bishop who has authority over that college.”

Among those named in the letter are the Rev. John Paris, a bioethics professor at Boston College…Boston College did not have an immediate comment, but Paris dismissed the society as “a self-appointed vigilante committee.” He also labeled its planned appeal to the bishops as baseless, since the schools are run independently from the Catholic church. “They neither represent the church nor the academic community,” Paris said of the society’s leaders, “and yet they want to censor the academic community in the name of the church.”

The Cardinal Newman Society also named the Rev. Kevin O’Rourke, a professor at Loyola University’s bioethics institute; Tom Beauchamp, a philosophy professor at Georgetown; Maxwell Gregg Bloche, Lawrence Gostin and Peter Rubin, Georgetown law professors; Howard Freed, Lauro Halstead and John Collins Harvey, past or current medical professors at Georgetown; Daniel Maguire, a theology professor at Marquette University; Rev. Richard McBrien, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame; Curtis Naser, a philosophy professor at Fairfield University; and Kenneth Wing, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law.

– Art Caplan