Fr. Richard McBrien, a tenured theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in his weekly article for the National Catholic Reporter that “[n]otwithstanding Pope Benedict XVI’s personal endorsement of eucharistic adoration… it is difficult to speak favorably about the devotion today.” Fr. McBrien goes on to insinuate that Eucharistic Adoration is useless in the modern-day Catholic Church “[n]ow that most Catholics are literate and even well-educated.” Fr. McBrien reaches this conclusion: “Eucharistic adoration, perpetual or not, is a doctrinal, theological, and spiritual step backward, not forward.” In the past few decades McBrien has been often criticized for theological errors and strident criticisms of Church hierarchy. In particular, “major difficulties” in the Notre Dame professor’s textbook Catholicism elicited an official review by the National Council of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine. They noted that certain statements in the work are “inaccurate or at least misleading” and that it “overstates the significance of recent developments within the Catholic tradition, implying that the past appears to be markedly inferior to the present and obscuring the continuity of the tradition.” Just last year, The Cardinal Newman Society issued a press release drawing attention to a recent McBrien diatribe against the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Source: National Catholic Reporter