Less than a month after he was pulled from a speaking engagement in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Georgetown theology professor Fr. Peter Phan will speak there later this week. After being disinvited to deliver the Aquinas Lecture in St. Louis last month, Phan has accepted an invitation to speak at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park on Friday. Phan said that his decision to speak in St. Louis so soon after his planned Aquinas lecture is a coincidence. “It is not because my lecture was cancelled,” he said. His lecture, “Being Religious in A Religiously Plural World: Challenges and Opportunities of Interreligious Dialogue,” is sponsored by three Catholic groups: the Catholic Action Network for Social Justice, the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity and the Center for Theology and Social Analysis. Eighteen months ago, Phan was invited to deliver the Aquinas Lecture at the Aquinas Institute of Technology but was later uninvited after Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis spoke with Rev. Richard Peddicord, president of the Aquinas Institute, about the ongoing investigations into Phan’s work. Phan has been under investigation by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine since the release of his 2004 book, “Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue.” The book questions the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, as well as the role of Jesus Christ as the universal savior, the significance of non-Christian religions and the idea that the Church provides the only path to salvation. “I promised that I would not talk about [the book] at all,” Phan said. “I’m talking about the Christian mission . how one remains a minister of Christian ministry in an age of Christian pluralism. . It’s a totally different topic.” In 2005, Phan received a letter from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith saying that his book was “notably confused on a number of points of Catholic doctrine and also [contained] serious ambiguities.” The letter requested that he issue a clarification. When Phan failed to do so, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine issued a 15-page criticism of his book entitled “Could Easily Confuse or Mislead the Faithful.” “The reader is led to conclude that there is some kind of moral obligation for the Church to refrain from calling people to conversion to Christ and to membership in his Church,” the report says. “Such a conclusion . is in fact an alteration that blurs Church teaching.”