Lee on Catholic Legal Education

Ave Maria law prof Kevin Lee offers his typically thoughtful take on Catholic legal education, based on a talk he gave at Notre Dame this fall.  Here's his conclusion:

The nature of the relationship between nature and grace, and thereby faith and natural reason, is central to the project of Catholic thinking about law. It always has been, from St. Augustine’s metaphor of the Christian as pilgrim in a hostile land, to Gregory VII’s assertion to Gelasius I’s two sword thesis, to St. Thomas’s treatise on law, the recurring question is what is the right relation of grace and nature. This cannot be answered as a Catholic without understanding the meaning of the reign of Christ. A question, wryly asked by Jaroslav Pelican in the opening of his book, Jesus Through the Ages, is whether it is possible to imagine human history without Christ. What would be left, he asks, if it were possible to draw out all references to Christ from human history, as if with some giant magnet. What would be lost? Would the Catholic intellectual heritage still maintain what is most significant and meaningful in it? That is to say, can Catholic legal education be both intellectual and Catholic without Christ? What does the Christian claim of the Lordship of Christ mean for the Catholic legal theorist today? Is it merely a platitude or an eschatological aspiration? Or does Christ’s Lordship have an earthly political meaning that is in some way necessary to rightly understand the idea of the Rule of Law? And, for those who would argue that these questions are simply conservative and orthodox, to them the burden falls of showing how can such questions can be answered without turning to theological thinking about the nature of the relationship between Christ and modern culture. Is not the assertion that Christ is irrelevant to Catholic legal education itself a theological claim?

Rob