Catholic Legal Studies

Last Friday's first annual Scarpa Conference in Catholic Legal Studies, at Villanova, set a standard that will be hard to surpass in future years.  Not a few attendees told me it was the best conference they ever attended. I risk immodesty only to signal that, once again, when we try hard to bring our Catholic tradition to bear on our contemporary questions about law, politics, the public square, the Church in America, and so forth, our efforts are blessed.  There was a freshness to the work and conversation last Friday that would, I like to think, please our Holy Father, as would the joy that permeated the Mass of Our Lady of Sorrows that His Eminence Cardinal Dulles celebrated at the conclusion of the conference. 

Cardinal Dulles's keynote address provided us with a vintage-Dulles history of the Church's recognition of a proper distance between the God's things and Caesar's, highlighing the ways in which Pope Benedict has reinforced that distance.  In response, Bill Wagner (CUA) wondered whether the reservoirs of the creative minorities will be equal to their task of giving the state the moral compass that, on Benedict's account, it inherently lacks.  Amy Uelmen's paper offered a searching account of how Benedict's call to social charity consists with the true message of Dominus Iesus about the unicity of salvation through Christ.  My colleague Michael Moreland, in response, noted that not once does Deus Caritas Est characterize charity as a virtue.  Rick Garnett's paper explored Benedict's recent work to bring to the next stage our understanding of what the true liberty of the Church, libertas ecclesiae, means and demands.  It's not just about individuals and their consciences, but also and primordially about ecclesial society's freedom to govern and constitute itself.  In response, my colleague Robert Miller developed both philosohical and theological arguments to show how religion is an inherently social act.  My own paper attempted to trace the disintegration of the Leonine synthesis on the state, according to which the state enjoyed a certain sacredness inasmuch as it is a particpation of the divine rule.  I suggest that John Paul II and, to an even greater event, Benedict XVI give us an instrumentalist state that does not receive a natural law on the basis of which to make positive law.  Mark Sargent, my colleague and the Dean of Villanova Law, replied with a probing inquiry into what, if Benedict is right, holds civil society together and keeps it from enacting immoral laws.  The day was an extended meditation on what the Augustinian elements in Pope Benedict's teachings invite us to hope for and do, and what they would deny us reason to hope for and legitimate freedom to do.

These one- or two sentence descriptions work an injustice to some truly excellent papers.  But if they catch your eye, you can look forward to reading the papers in the Villanova Law Review this spring.