In the April 29th edition of The Tablet [London], there is an interesting article on condoms/AIDS, Cardinal Martini's recent statements, and Benedict XVI's authorization of a review of magisterial teaching. Click here.
In the same issue, there is this editorial:
Aids and the lesser evil
The
Vatican could no longer ignore the evidence of a serious division of
opinion in the Catholic Church about the use of condoms in the fight
against HIV-Aids. It was therefore judicious of Pope Benedict XVI to
call for a review of the medical and theological issues soon after his
election, a review now being undertaken by the Pontifical Council for
Health Care. News of the review coincided with the publication of an
interview with Cardinal Martini, widely regarded as the principal
alternative candidate for the papacy in the conclave that elected Pope
Benedict XVI a year ago, where he added his voice to those of other
senior church figures who have expressed similar views in favour of a
limited use of condoms. As he put it in an interview with an Italian
magazine, there may be occasions where the use of a condom by a married
person to protect their spouse from infection could be the lesser evil.
There
are more than 39 million people with HIV, and Aids kills some three
million a year. Every measure should be taken to reduce these totals,
especially in Africa. The Catholic Church, through aid agencies such as
Cafod and missionary organisations, is heavily involved in medical
treatment, care for the victims, and care and education of orphaned
children of victims. So the charge of callousness on this issue, so
readily levelled by Western commentators, does not stand up. Many
church leaders also oppose the use of condoms, sincerely convinced that
widespread use can be part of the problem rather than part of the
solution, on the grounds that it encourages promiscuity. Even those who
advocate condom use agree that abstinence and fidelity remain vital in
fighting the advance of Aids.
But the real problem for the Catholic Church lies elsewhere. Under the doctrine spelled out in the encyclical Humanae Vitae
in 1968, any use of condoms, for whatever reason, is immoral. There is
no leeway for arguments about a lesser evil; it is irrelevant how
effective condoms are against Aids. But it is also well known that in
the panoply of Catholic moral teaching, that on contraception is most
often disregarded by the faithful. Can the Vatican approve the use of
contraceptives in connection with Aids, even in the textbook case of a
married couple, without reopening the wider debate? Would that not be
interpreted as a retreat from Humanae Vitae? Indeed, has the time come
for such a move anyway, with Aids as the catalyst for an overdue
development of doctrine? The Pope will be well aware of all these
questions.
n
1968 the most persuasive reason advanced in favour of retaining the ban
on artificial birth control was that to lift it would signal that the
Church could change its mind, and hence undermine its teaching
authority. That is ironic, given the damage done to that authority by
the furore that followed. Today, however, far from weakening its
position, the Church would gain much public credit by admitting that
condoms should not be ruled out as a protection against HIV-Aids, even
if the practical questions concerning their advisability remain to be
addressed. And if that opens the door to wider issues, then so be it.
_______________
mp
Thursday, April 27, 2006
If you happen to have (as I do) a combination of interests in intellectual property and church history, you may want to check out this new article by IP scholar Peter Yu. From the abstract:
Today's copyright debate has generally focused on the digital dilemma created by Internet and new media technologies. Threats created by emerging communications technologies, however, are not new. Throughout history, there have been remarkable similarities between the threats created by new technologies and those posed by older ones.
During the oral argument in [the Grokster case concerning online music copying, Justice Breyer quipped:] ["F]or all I know, the monks had a fit when Gutenberg made his press.["] . . . Many legal scholars have described copyright as a response to the emergence of the printing press. However, very few have examined the press's impact on a group of contemporary middlemen - the medieval scribes. This Essay undertakes this inquiry and explores the impact of the then - new technology on the now - obsolete scribal industry. It begins by tracing the emergence of medieval scribes and the printing press and concludes with observations on the policy responses to the challenge created by the Internet and new communications technologies.
Tom
"The Party of Death" is the title of Ramesh Ponnuru's new book, which is subtitled, "The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life." As Amy Welborn writes, though, "[t]he title is provocative and a bit misleading. The 'party of death' refers to those who support unfettered abortion access, assisted suicide, embryo-destructive research, and so on - politicians, activists, scholars, judges and medical types. Included in that Venn diagram is the Democratic Party, but to tell the truth, that is really not the focus, nor the primary 'party of death' of which Ponnuru writes, although it gets its due attention, particularly in the chapters on abortion." And, one might reasonably object, the title does not take account of the facts that (a) many Democrats are pro-life; (b) many Republicans are not; and (c) Democrats and Republicans alike support capital punishment, bombing suspected terrorists, etc.
Ponnuru answers some questions along these lines here. This exchange is particularly relevant:
Lopez: What do you say to people who say that conservatives are the "party of death," since they have supported the death penalty and the Iraq war?
Ponnuru: I get that a lot from people who haven't read the book. The most articulate defenders of abortion, some types of euthanasia, infanticide, and lethal embryo research argue for those things on the theory that the human beings they kill are not persons. My book argues against that theory and goes into the chilling implications of that view.
Articulate defenders of the death penalty and the Iraq war make very different arguments. They do not, that is, say that death-row inmates and Iraqi insurgents are "human non-persons." Thus the death penalty and the war raise very different issues. This is not to say that the moral issues raised by the war and the death penalty are not serious. (I think the moral issues raised by the death penalty are sufficiently serious that I oppose it.) It is only to say that they are mostly distinct from the ones that come up in this book.
Here is another interview with Ponnuru about the book. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan objects strongly to Ponnuru's book title and claims, here. My quick surf through the blogosphere suggests that many others on the progressive / liberal side of things share Sullivan's view.
On Tuesday, thanks to Mark Tushnet's generous invitation, I presented a paper to the participants in Georgetown's Colloquium on Constitutional Law and Theory. The paper was called "Religious Freedom, Church Autonomy, and the Libertas Ecclesiae," and it is forthcoming in Villanova's Journal of Catholic Social Thought. In a nutshell, I try in the paper to use the "libertas ecclesia" ("freedom of the Church") idea as a way into current debates about church autonomy, religious freedom, and expressive association. I really enjoyed the session; both Tushnet and his students were appropriately skeptical and generously helpful. Here are the first few paragraphs:
We do not talk much in Constitutional Law courses today about an 11th century monk named Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope Gregory VII and who excommunicated the German king, Henry IV, for refusing to disclaim a royal right to select bishops. The king later re-evaluated the wisdom – or, at least, the politics – of his refusal. For three days, in late January of 1077, he stood barefoot in the snow outside a castle at Canossa, doing penance and seeking reconciliation with the pope. As it happened, this dramatic standoff failed to resolve what we now call the Investiture Crisis. (The pope lifted the excommunication, but Henry would eventually invade Rome, install an anti-pope, and force Pope Gregory into exile.) Nevertheless, the confrontation has “entered indelibly into the memory of Western civilization,” and could well have been as important to the development of western constitutionalism as the later events at Runnymede or Philadelphia.
Hildebrand not only orchestrated the first great “propaganda” campaign in history in support of his struggle with secular powers for papal control over the Roman Church. He led a “revolution” that, as the great legal scholar Harold Berman reports, worked nothing less than a “total transformation” of law, state, and society. The battle cry for this papal revolution – an idea that would serve as the catalyst for “the first major turning point in European history” and as the foundation for nearly a millennium of political theory – was libertas ecclesiae, the “freedom of the Church.” In this paper, I explore the possibility that this idea – or something like it – remains an important component of any attractive account of religious freedom under and through constitutionally limited government.
