On a recent trip back to Rome from the US, I read Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s new book entitled Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way. While the book provides an interesting read, I must question some of the author’s assertions. While I realize that her work was not intended to be a scholarly examination and presentation of the confluence of law, religion (particularly the Catholic faith), and public life, I was surprised that the author’s bibliography did not contain any Church texts whatsoever. However, authors such as Joan Chittister, Harvey Cox, Mary Daly, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth Johnson, and Gary Wills made the cut. Joseph Ratzinger, Eugenio Pacelli, Angelo Roncalli, and Karol Wojtyla amongst others, did not.
One of Kennedy Townsend’s central and inspiring premises is that “Churches could be the place to encourage, nurture, and promote moral action.” However, in her estimation, they fail in this because “faith in America now divides communities.” It struck me that she has made a mistake in this assertion. I do not see faith dividing communities or anything else, but I do see political issues such as abortion, bioethical questions, euthanasia, same-sex marriage—to mention but a few—providing the grist for this divisive mill. She makes a further important claim that “We no longer hear in our churches, or in our homes, the daily reminder that to walk in God’s path is not just to pray or give charity, but also to work for justice for every creature on His earth.” (Her italics) The assertion is all the more startling when one considers the author’s personal record when she held public office—did she extend justice to all of God’s creatures? She equates the mission of the Church—her Church as she often says—with social justice. Little or nothing is said of a deep faith that takes into account God’s truth, sin, redemption, and salvation. Consequently, her prose reads more like a political treatise than it does an account of faith in public life.
On several occasions she says that the Bible is silent on issues such as contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research, but the Church preoccupies itself with these public issues. She then critiques Her Church and other denominations for not connecting religious teachings with pressing issues such as “corporate greed, environmental degradation, failing schools, or lack of health care.” These are surely important issues, but I do not remember the Gospels addressing these either; however, she does not mention that these items are also absent from the canonical texts of Sacred Scripture.
Nevertheless, she insists that she wants the Catholic Church to play its part in the world. In this contexts, she contends that the Church must be able to handle the issues of the day, which include contraception, family planning, and the role of the laity and of women in the Church and society. With regard to the role of the laity, the author does not indicate any familiarization with Pius XII’s 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus wherein he made some important points about the significant role of the laity. But, it again strikes me that the Church has addressed all these issues that she has raise and many more besides, but it seems that it has not done so in the fashion that the author prefers. Perhaps that is the real bone of her contention.
At another point she makes the interesting claim that “A number of Catholic leaders such as Father Robert Drinan suggested that the Church refrain from taking a political position on abortion on the grounds that all moral issues need not be legislative ones. But the hierarchy in Rome refused that stance.” Her statement begs the question what was the Church to do when, in fact, abortion became both a legislative and judicial matter? Was the Church, its hierarchy, its members to remain silent? Where would justice and the faith be if they did remain silent? But her response to my question is this: “I—and many other Catholics—were faced with a Church whose teachings seemed increasingly out of step with our lives. Our all-wise Church, which had seemed so embracing, so understanding of human sin and weakness, did not seem so wise anymore.” She quickly follows up this critique by stating that “Whenever I begin to despair of the Church’s recent retreat from the fight to create a just society, I remind myself of the moments when [it] lived up to its name, rose above the denominational limits, and spoke out on behalf of justice for all people.” This assertion demonstrates how unfamiliar she is with her Church, its teachings and its actions across the globe. It seems that when the Church takes a position contrary to her own, it is divisive; but, when it acts according to her views, it is wise.
She concludes her most blistering critique of the Church with her vision for a “reformed Church” that “can advance the vision of love of neighbor that the Gospels call for. As Jesus said, ‘As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’” I don’t believe the author took into consideration her own public record when she penned these lines about Jesus’s discourse on the Last Judgment from the Gospel of Saint Matthew.
When all is said and done, this author hopes and prays for a “new beginning” for her Church so that it can “preach a more balanced vision of the earthly ethics our faith requires—a bold, broad form of Christian virtue.” I believe her prayers have been and continue to be answered in a positive fashion, but her vision—perhaps for the time being—does not enable her to see and take account of this. RJA sj
St. John's University School of Law hosted a wonderful symposium on Friday on Law and Religion in the Public Square. The keynote speaker, Noah Feldman, offered a compelling analysis of the complex relationships not only between religion and morality, but also between both of those concepts and the American public square. The morning panel asked a fundamental question for American democracy: What is the place of religious conviction in our political life? Although the three speakers advocated three distinct answers, what they all share is a commitment to finding a solution to the challenge of religious diversity—a solution that protects religious freedom, that promotes equal citizenship, and that strengthens our democracy. At lunch, New York Times columnist and Fordham University Professor Peter Steinfels asked whether religious ignorance ought to be considered “a crime against the first amendment.” Whatever the answer to that legal question, his call for deeper and broader religious education is one that we should all take very seriously indeed. Finally, the afternoon panel (which included MOJ'er Rick Garnett) addressed the difficult problem of whether and how our commitment to religious freedom protects not only individuals, but also religious groups and institutions. Can the Bill of Rights sufficiently defend the religious communities that many of us feel are necessary for personal freedom to flourish? The speakers examined this question from various perspectives, including law, international relations, and American history. The proceedings will be published in a forthcoming issue of the St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Rob raises the issue of prenatal screening to remedy homosexuality, suggesting that this is not a good path to take. I want to take this a step further. If there is a gay gene (see information on gay sheep), isn't it likely that some parents will abort their unborn children if prenatal testing reveals a gay gene. This happens regularly today with Down's Syndrome children and in India and China it happens regularly when the baby is a girl. Won't some people, even some quite "progressive" people, rationalize the decision to abort by telling themselves that the world is a much too ugly and intolerant place for their beautiful gay child? If my intuition is correct, I suspect that it will be the Catholics (and hopefully evangelicals) standing in fairly lonely solidarity with the gay community, advocating the right to life for these unborn children with the "gay" gene.
Christians have rightly expressed skepticism toward prenatal screening, particularly since it is often used to provide information to justify abortions. But what if the screening is used to remedy disorders, and what if the "disorder" in question is homosexuality? Leading evangelical Albert Mohler suggested that such screening would be a good thing. Now (former) Ave Maria University provost Fr. Joseph Fessio says:
“Same-sex activity is considered disordered. If there are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of children in the womb, and a way of treating them that respected the dignity of the child and mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of science.”
This is not a good road to head down.
Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, recently asserted that “Public reason is not possible in a culture that is dominated by the ‘dictatorship of relativism,' for a very simple reason: Relativism is a dogma and therefore it a priori rejects rational argumentation, even toward itself. . . . Relativism [denies] a capability of reason to argue truth . . . [and so] prevents the use of public reason.” Villanova law prof Robert Miller shows here and here why this assertion is wrong. Read his whole analysis, but here's a taste:
Crepaldi, like many Catholic thinkers, tends to lump together under the rubric of “relativism” several quite different moral doctrines, all of which differ from Catholic teaching and have become prominent in the twentieth century, but none of which (other than perhaps the emotivism of the logical positivists) involves a wholesale rejection of rational argumentation on normative issues.
German authorities have taken a girl into state custody after her parents removed her from public school. It's seen as either another example of Germany's war against homeschoolers or as a prudent step taken for the child's own well-being, or both. Here is a collection of news stories on the controversy.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
MOJ's very own Rick Garnett was at Villanova yesterday to give the annual Gianella Memorial Lecture, and his title was "Do Churches Matter? Towards an Institutional Understanding of the Religion Clauses." The roster of earlier Gianella lecturers includes MOJers Steve Bainbridge and Michael Perry, as well as our friends Steve Smith, Joe Vining, and Cathy Kaveny. Not surprisingly, Rick kept the standard very high, raising a really interesting and important question with his charactertistic subtlety. As his title suggests, Rick is among those who suspect that the Court has taken an unjustifiably individualistic approach to what rights "religion" may and should have under our Constitution. I hope Rick will post the paper soon. For now, I'll just float one question I pursued with Rick yesterday. Granted that "establishment" provides a textual hook for a more institution- or group-friendly approach to our first freedom, what about originalist grounds for such a kindred approach? The world assumed by the framers and ratifiers was ontologically dense with group persons that were understood to precede "the state." True, some, such as Madison, took a remarkably individual-centered turn when they came to justifying a legal protection of religious freedom, but such justification is consistent with an affirmation that freedom for individuals may not be sufficient freedom for meeting religious demands. As the pictures of the monks being evicted from the monasteries in the mountains of France early in the last century (i.e., not all that long ago) testify, something central is lost when the cenobium is dissolved. As Russ Hittinger has argued, the cardinal sin of the modern state is its assertion of a monopoly on group personhood. The framers of our Constitution did not suppose with Hobbes, Rousseau et al. that group persons exist by right only as a concession of the state.
I've posted a new paper titled Solidarity, Subsidiarity, and the Consumerist Impetus of American Law. This is my contribution to a forthcoming book put together by my colleague Teresa Collett and MoJ-er Michael Scaperlanda titled Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law. In the paper, I try to connect solidarity and subsidiarity in a way that offers a response to the recent push to empower consumers and marginalize the moral agency of providers.
Perhaps I'm posting this now because I really need reader feedback; perhaps I'm posting this now because I really need to push Mark's dropping of the "F-bomb" off the main page before my dear grandmother figures out how to make use of the internet connection at her nursing home. In any event, here is an excerpt:
Catholic social teaching speaks truth to the power of the liberal state by bearing witness to solidarity’s vision of the human person, realized within subsidiarity’s framework for the ordering of society. In the context of a free market economy, the practice of solidarity requires that service providers honor the dignity of the consumer, which is not coextensive with the autonomy of the consumer. Solidarity, then, can be realized only to the extent that service providers are empowered to meet needs in ways that diverge from, or even defy, the overarching norms of the collective—that is, solidarity is not possible absent a legal system that accepts the premise of subsidiarity.
