Canon law professor Edward Peters had taught at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit since 2005. / Credit: Photo courtesy of CanonLaw.info
National Catholic Register, Jul 29, 2025 / 15:59 pm (CNA).
Canon law professor Edward Peters is the third faculty member at Detroit's seminary to announce that he has been fired by Archbishop Edward Weisenburger in recent days.
Peters, 68, had taught at Sacred Heart Major Seminary since 2005.
"My Sacred Heart Major Seminary teaching contract was terminated by Abp. Weisenburger this week. I have retained counsel," Peters wrote in a social media post Friday night.
"Except to offer my prayers for those affected by this news and to ask for theirs in return, I have no further comment at this time," Peters said.
A representative of the Archdiocese of Detroit declined to comment Monday, telling the National Catholic Register, CNA's sister news partner, by email on Monday that "the Archdiocese of Detroit does not comment on archdiocesan or seminary personnel matters."
Peters is an adviser to the Apostolic Signatura, which is the Holy See's highest administrative tribunal. He was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to that position in May 2010, "becoming the first layman so appointed since the reconstitution of Signatura over 100 years ago," according to an online biography.
Peters earned a doctorate in canon law from The Catholic University of America in 1991.
He published an English translation of the 1917 Code of Canon Law in 2001 and a textual history of the 1983 Code of Canon Law in 2005.
Two theologians — Ralph Martin, 82, and Eduardo Echeverria, 74 — were fired from Detroit's seminary on July 23, they told the Register last week.
Martin told the Register the firing was "a shock" and that he didn't get a full explanation for it.
"When I asked him for an explanation, he said he didn't think it would be helpful to give any specifics but mentioned something about having concerns about my theological perspectives," Martin said in a written statement, as the Register reported last week.
One thing all three now-former faculty members have in common is that they criticized Pope Francis publicly during the late pope's pontificate.
In Peters' case, he chided Pope Francis in his canon law blog, called "In Light of the Law."
In April 2016, he described what he called "writing flaws" in Pope Francis' encyclical Amoris Laetitia, keying in on Francis' interest in allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics "in certain cases" to have "the help of the sacraments," including the Eucharist.
Peters wrote that the encyclical makes what he called "a serious misuse of a conciliar teaching" of Vatican II when it conflates the periodic abstinence from sexual intercourse that a married couple may make with what he called "the angst" that "public adulterers experience when they cease engaging in illicit sexual intercourse."
In August 2018, Peters criticized Pope Francis' statements condemning the death penalty, referring to what he called "serious magisterial issues that I think Francis' novel formulation has engendered" and saying he had "grave concerns" about Pope Francis' "alteration" of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on that issue.
Weisenburger, who was installed March 18 as archbishop of Detroit after serving as bishop of Tucson, Arizona, for a little more than seven years, is an admirer of Pope Francis, as he made clear during a press conference on April 21, the day Pope Francis died. The archbishop called Francis "the perfect man at the right time" and suggested he was "a saint," as the Register reported last week.
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA's sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
