Friday, April 22, 2005
So far, we have been pleased to post contributions to our Online Symposium papers and thoughts from the following thoughtful and distinguished authors:
Scott Fitzgibbon, on "Solidarity, Love, and Friendship"
Lisa Schiltz on "Larry Summers and John Paul II"
Dan Philpott on "An Ethic of Reconciliation"
Bob Cochran on "The Economics of Freedom"
Fr. Robert Araujo on "The Rule of Law"
Fr. John Coughlin on "Human Dignity"
Michael Scaperlanda on "John Paul the Great"
More to come!
Rick
The latest contribution to the MOJ Online Symposium on the jurisprudential legacy of Pope John Paul II comes from Boston College's Scott Fitzgibbon. Click here for "A Wojtylan Insight into Solidarity, Love, and Friendship: Shared Consciousness and the Culture of Life." Here is the introduction:
One of Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals identifies the virtue of solidarity. A document from the recent Synod for Europe refers to a “crisis of solidarity.” In the year 2000, the Holy Father stated that ‘the century now beginning ought to be the century of solidarity.”
To refer to the virtue of solidarity is to refer to the goods of close affiliations: friendships, households, marriages, and the bonds among citizens, partners, members of the staffs of hospitals, and the faculties of universities. To warn of a crisis of solidarity is to observe that there has been, in the Twentieth Century, a crisis of affiliation; a crisis of philia. It has been as though man were losing his capacity to be a political animal (as Aristotle called him); and "not only a political but also a house-holding animal" (as Aristotle also called him} and a koinonikon being: a partnership-forming creature. It has been, has it not, as though man were losing his capacity to be a culture-forming, culture-belonging animal -- a creature which forms and nourishes a life-sustaining culture, rather than a culture of death. To refer hopefully to a forthcoming century of solidarity is to invite us to a deeper understanding of the structures of close affiliation.
To invite us to a deeper understanding of affiliation is to invite us to think anew about the philosophy of the person and his communities. To think anew about just those things seemed to be the life work of Professor Karol Wojtyla prior to his election as Pope John Paul II; and some of his writings (scholarly writings; also plays and poems) develop impressive insights on those subjects. This Article discerns one major line of development suggested by his writings about the mind and identifies its implications, occasionally made explicit in Wojtylan writings, for an enriched understanding of human solidarities and how they can go wrong.
Rick
Cornell law prof Steve Shiffrin has some good questions for me following my post on authority and conscience:
The new Pope has been interpreted to say (rightly or wrongly) that the failure to follow the church's lead on a number of issues is an indication of a sinfully formed conscience. I am curious what you think. Suppose a Catholic who disagrees after prayerful consideration of the church's position on say birth control, sexual orientation, divorce, mandatory celibacy, or the ordination of women. Suppose the Catholic feels a duty as a matter of conscience to speak out on these issues. Recognizing that the Catholic might be wrong on the merits, is it your position that the Catholic has a duty not to follow his or her subjective conscience (however carefully formed)? What should the same Catholic have done in the past when he or she disagreed with the Church's position on slavery, interest on loans, evolution, the purpose of sex in marriage (thus, previously ruling out the rhythm method), or religious liberty? My goal here is not to debate you on the issue. I am just curious about your position.
This leads me to a second question.You seem to suggest that Catholic legal theory can help to lead American Catholics away from their disagreements with the Vatican. What I like about the Mirror of Justice site is that it brings together people who bring quite different Catholic perspectives to the site. Your comment seems to suggest that Catholic legal theory is committed to the view that American Catholics are wrong. Have I misread you?
My earlier post may have left a mistaken impression, no doubt due to my own lack of clarity. When I denigrated the "purportedly ominpotent conscience," I did not mean to offer in its place a completely eviscerated conscience. Indeed, my own tendency is to want to elevate conscience above all else in matters of faith.
This inclination is no doubt due in part to the individualist strain of my evangelical upbringing. Even there, though, I learned that the operation of conscience has its limits. Since I was a young boy, for example, I've always struggled to reconcile the existence of Hell with a loving God. I still haven't been able to reach a satisfactory reconciliation, but in some ways I learned to push the question to the side, neither openly defying the religious authority (in the case of my upbringing, scriptural passages) nor pretending that my conscience simply reflects authority (I don't deny that I still struggle with the issue).
Now it's relatively easy for me to push the question of Hell to the sidelines of my faith journey (though it wasn't when I was a boy and the fear of Hell overwhelmed me); much more difficult would be the marginalization (much less subjugation) of my conscience when it defied religious authority on a question that is central to my existence, e.g., the issue of sexual orientation to a gay man or lesbian.
In the new First Things, George Cardinal Pell has an essay titled, "The Inconvenient Conscience," in which he writes that conscience:
is neither the apprehending of an alien law nor the devising of our own laws. Rather, conscience is the free acceptance of the objective moral law as the basis of all our choices. The formation of a Christian conscience is thus a dignifying and liberating experience; it does not mean a resentful submission to God's law but a free choosing of that law as our life's ideal.
And if a Catholic does not choose God's law as it is embodied in Church teaching, according to Cardinal Pell, "that should not be the end of the matter but the beginning of a process of conversion, education, and quite possibly repentance."
My reference to conscience as not being omnipotent signals the extent to which I agree with Cardinal Pell's understanding: if, as a Catholic, I dispute the Church's teaching on a given issue, I have much cause for reflection, prayer and conversation with other believers. But I'm not comfortable with the suggestion that the properly formed conscience is defined by its acceptance of Church teaching, as Cardinal Pell implies. Sometimes, the end result of sincere reflection, prayer, and conversation is continued disagreement. My inclination is to create as much space as possible for such conversations to continue within the Church without precluding the possibility that dissenters may actually turn out to function as agents of change. (The space should not be so endless as to create a vacuum; there's no point in having a conversation about whether Jesus is the son of God, to take an easy example.)
As for Professor Shiffrin's question about MoJ's stance toward American Catholics, I think it's important that we help elucidate connections between the Gospel and our real-world environment, particularly connections that run along our legal and political cultures, challenging each other to reflect more deeply on what it means to follow Christ in the modern world. More often than not, this effort will be directed toward encouraging Catholics to recognize the wisdom of Church teaching on a range of issues that are given short shrift in the current climate (notably war, materialism, and poverty, not just sexuality). At other times, though, Catholic legal theorists may challenge the Church to recognize overlooked or potentially misconstrued implications of the Gospel. (That was the point of my earlier post on John Courtney Murray.)
Again, I'm new to Catholicism, and thus have little life experience in the context of a religious community that takes hierarchical authority seriously. (In my experience, when conscience runs up against religious authority, we start a new church.) I'm anxious to get the views of other folks.
Rob
I am in need of some help from my fellow bloggers and readers on thinking through the issue raised by Michael P. on the Church, Condoms, and Aids.
I would break down the question in two ways - first, is the condom use taking place within marriage or outside of marriage, and second, is the question one of morality or prudential judgment.
Situation 1. If one spouse is infected with HIV/AIDS, couldn't a condom be used for the purpose of protecting against the transmission of the disease (HIV/AIDS) as long as the married couple is not using the condom for the purpose of treating the possibility of the creation of new life as a disease?
Situation 2. When the sexual act occurs outside of marriage (especially where there is no intimacy such as in a case where a women exchanges the use of her body for money), the unitive aspect of the coupling is absent. In these situations, the degradation of self - the giving of a body as an object for the pleasure of another - has already taken place. Does it add anything to the degradation to use a condom for protection against a) the disease of HIV/AIDS or b) the procreative aspects of sexual union, since the unitive and procreative are inherently conjoined? (As an aside, I should make clear that I am not making a subjective moral judgment about desperate women in desperate situations but stating an objective fact about the degradation of self, a fact that I am sure many of these women understand all too well).
If my analysis is correct, then condom use would be morally permissible in Situation 1 because it is not meant to inhibit the pro-creative possibilities of the union but only the anti-creative nature of the disease. And, in Situation 2, the use of a condom is no less morally impermissible than sex act itself because engaging in sex outside the marital union destroys the procreative as well as the unitive purposes of sex.
Addressing situation 2, it seems to me that the Church is right to teach abstinence - that the sexual union ought to take place within marriage. Since this is the Truth revealed in our Tradition, what else can it teach? But, given the real world reality of non-marital sex with grave consequences, could the Church, consistent with its theology, support (or at least not condemn) condom use in these situations. Here, given my analysis above, the answer is yes.
If my analysis is correct so far (and I stand ready to be corrected), then the question becomes a prudential question. And, here it becomes less about sex and more about how do you help someone engaged in destructive behavior. The question is akin to how to deal with drug addicts and the dangers (including the danger of transmitting HIV/AIDS) of using unclean needles. Is it prudent to supply (or promote -or at least condone- the supplying) of clean needles to drug addicts? Isn't that the real issue here?
I look forward to hearing from others.
Michael S.
Each MOJ author can test for themselves whether they are using too many or too few (see Rob's post for MOJ's overall score) big words by going to this website and entering the URL for their personal MOJ category. This could be a good distraction when grading time comes around in a couple of weeks (although I must fess up - I have already checked my Fog Index score).
Is it possible that the conversation at Mirror of Justice requires less education to be understood than the average Reader's Digest article? That's what this measure suggests. This can't be right; if it is, that's really bad disgraceful opprobrious.
Rob
UPDATE: As I suspected, the figure cited by Professor Bainbridge seems a bit off. When I ran our blog through the site, we come out operating at a twelfth-grade (rather than seventh-grade) level (just above Volokh, by the way). A key trait of the Catholic legal theory project, I suppose, is to make it widely accessible, but I was getting a bit uncomfortable that our discussions require no more nuance than this sort of thing.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
International Herald Tribune
OME,
April 21 - Pope Benedict XVI is known to be conservative on social
issues, and no one expects his Roman Catholic Church to soften its
opposition to birth control. Still, a rising number of Catholics, in
the Vatican and outside, are urging the new pope to revisit what was
probably his predecessor's most divisive position - his opposition to
condom use in the fight against AIDS.
As Pope John Paul II fell ill and his influence waned, a number of high church officials and theologians began tentatively - but publicly - to suggest that the church should accept condoms in certain circumstances to stem the spread of AIDS, as a pro-life medical intervention.
"I believe condoms need to be debated, and I believe theologically their use can be justified, to prevent the transmission of a death-dealing virus," said Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg, South Africa, an impoverished diocese of miners and poor women who sell their bodies to feed their children, where H.I.V. rates in prenatal clinics approach 50 percent.
"I see these young women and their babies, and the desperation and the suffering, and I think, 'What would Jesus want?' " he said in an interview. "There's no way he could condemn someone like this."
The new pope has said nothing about the issue. But, the bishop said, "At the very least, I think it would be healthy for the church to discuss this openly, to be humble and to be seen struggling in the face of this very serious disease."
[To read the whole piece, click here.]
A new CNN poll finds that three-quarters of American Catholics are more likely to follow their own consciences on difficult moral questions than the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI. From my perspective, this underscores the importance of the Catholic legal theory project, which is geared not so much to buttress the institutional authority of the Church, but to engage the prevailing legal and political cultures with the foundational premises of Christianity. Along with the broader impetus of Catholic social thought, Catholic legal theory is perfectly situated to shape the conscience -- even the purportedly omnipotent conscience.
Rob
Here's an interesting review of Steven Smith's new book, Law's Quandary.
Rob
George Weigel in today's Wall Street Journal:
"St. Benedict was born in 480, in a small Umbrian village. In 529, as a monastic town was being built for Benedict and his monks on the brow of Monte Cassino, Plato's Academy closed in Athens. The timing nicely illustrated a conviction of the late John Paul II: "In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences." As a great embodiment of classical culture shut its doors, the "academy of Christianity," as the new pope once called it, was being established.
And a good thing, too. The Roman empire was in rapid decline, beset by wars, economic dislocation, and social disorder. The civilizational achievement represented by Plato's Academy could have been lost; classical culture might have gone the way of the Mayans. That it didn't had a lot to do with Benedict. His monks not only preserved crucial elements of the civilization of Athens and Rome during the Dark Ages; they transformed that civilization by infusing a biblical understanding of the human -- person, community, origins and destiny -- into the classical culture they preserved for future generations in their scriptoria and libraries.
The result of that fusion of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome was what we know as "Europe," or, more broadly, "the West." It was a colossal, indeed world-historical achievement. And the achievement was entirely consistent with what Pope Benedict XVI remembered in a recent interview as "a Benedictine motto: Succisa virescit -- pruned, it grows again." Thanks to St. Benedict and Western monasticism, the demise of classical civilization was the occasion for a new beginning -- and, eventually, a nobler civilizational accomplishment.
***
He once called himself a "donkey," a "draft animal" who had been called to a work not of his choosing. Yet when Joseph Ratzinger stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter's to begin a work he never sought, I couldn't help think of the conclusion of Alasdair MacIntyre's penetrating study of the moral confusions of the West, "After Virtue." In a time when willfulness and relativism had led to a frigid and joyless cultural climate, MacIntyre wrote, the world was not waiting for Godot, "but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict." The world now has a new Benedict. We can be sure that he will challenge us all to the noble human adventure that has no better name than sanctity."
For the full essay, click here.
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
