Building a Fellowship of Scholars in Catholic Legal Studies

If Catholic Legal Studies should succeed in becoming a distinct and meaningful movement within American jurisprudence in the coming decades, the symposium on “The Jurisprudential Legacy of John Paul II” at St. John’s University this past weekend will be remembered as a watershed event. Not only were each of the presentations wonderful contributions toward a jurisprudence grounded in Catholic social thought and the Catholic intellectual tradition, but the spirit of fellowship generated among all the participants was tangible and powerful. In this respect, the reception, dinner, luncheon, and closing Eucharist proved to be a vitally important opportunities to build community and strengthen personal and spiritual, as well as scholarly, ties among people of faith. While we experienced the great diversity of thought among Catholic intellectuals and legal scholars in this country, we were even more likely to see points of commonality emerging and to experience a palpable sense of common purpose.

At the end of his keynote address at the Friday luncheon, John Allen (the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter) offered these closing words, which were a perfect summation of what we were about at the St. John’s symposium:

Those of you in this room have a vital role to play in bringing the best of Catholic moral and social reflection together with the highest standards of Western legal thought. As you move forward, I would like to leave you with a personal fervorino. I would urge you to wrestle with these questions in a spirit of genuine ecclesial communion, which in practical terms means, don’t just round up the usual suspects among the ideologically like-minded. The Church in the United States has been badly hobbled in attempts to respond to questions such as these, or anything else, by our deep ideological and tribal divisions. Catholic jurists and political theorists can set an example by fostering a conversation which is inclusive and respectful, but which also has teeth in insisting upon identifiably “Catholic” answers to our challenges. Looking over the speakers and topics for this conference, it’s obvious that you are already animated by that spirit. I would encourage you to be as imaginative as possible about how that model might be more widely diffused. If you can do that, you impact, like that of John Paul II, will transcend the boundaries of law and politics, and become a point of light for all of us.

As we rose to applaud these enlightening remarks, those of us who are participants on this blog (to a great or lesser degree of regularity) found ourselves looking around at each other and agreeing that John Allen’s charge — to “foster[] a conversation which is inclusive and respectful, but which also has teeth in insisting upon identifiably ‘Catholic’ answers to our challenges” — stated the mission as well of the Mirror of Justice.

Together with our Catholic “fellow-travelers” at a growing number of law schools and elsewhere in the academy, we who make up the larger Mirror of Justice community do have a unique opportunity in the coming years. We should strive to become something of a contradiction to society, which tends to group everyone on one or the other side of an ideological divide. What we heard and felt at the St. John’s symposium makes me greatly optimistic that we can have an impact on the legal and political culture and do so in unity while retaining our diversity of approach.

Greg Sisk