Beattie is an expert on ethical and feminist issues and a regular contributor to liberal British Catholic weekly The Tablet.
On 6 November, she was supposed to start teaching a course as a visiting fellow. But then she was given a cold shower.
Beattie received a letter from the president of the University of San Diego, Mary Lyons, informing her that her fellowship was being withdrawn because of her public dissent from the Church’s moral teaching.
The occurrence did not just cause an uproar in the U.K. but was reported on by the Catholic liberal weekly National Catholic Reporter and news agency Adista spread the news in Italy too.
Beattie stated that the revocation of her fellowship was “symptomatic of something very new and very worrying.”
“It's not about me; it's about some change in the culture of the Catholic Church that we should be very, very concerned about.”
In her letter, the University of San Diego’s president said the theologian’s vision was not in line with Catholic Church teaching and that the university’s primary mission is to give the opportunity to build on their Catholic intellectual tradition in all its various forms. This includes a clear and coherent presentation of the Church’s moral teachings, which she as a Catholic theologian has publicly dissented from.
The course Beattie was due to teach was based on the history of art. Visions of paradise: women, sin and redemption in Christian art, as an approach to the artistic representation of the female body between the late Middle Ages and Renaissance art.
This is not the first time the theologian has had an invitation withdrawn. It happened last September when she was supposed to give a talk in Clifton Cathedral, England, as part of a series of conferences celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.
A month prior to this, the theologian had signed an open letter in favour of same-sex marriage, which was published in The Times newspaper.
In 2008, the University of San Diego cancelled its invitation to feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether who was due to to teach Catholic theology there the following academic year.
The University of San Diego is a Catholic institution established in 1952 by the Archdiocese of San Diego and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a missionary congregation of women religious.