I like the saints. I really do. But sometimes, the accounts of the saints embolden the voice in the back of my head that tells me religion is a bunch of -- to use the technical term -- hooey. Consider John Allen's report on this month's canonization of Frei Galvao:
Benedict XVI will canonize the first Brazilian-born saint in church history during his five-day trip, on May 11: an 18th century Franciscan named Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, or “Frei Galvao,” whose claim to fame is that he developed a paper “pill” inscribed with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, which devotees ingest in hopes of a miracle. The pills are reputed to have cured everything from depression to hepatitis.
The pills are made by religious sisters at the Convent of Light in São Paolo, where Galvao died in 1832 at the age of 83. They contain the following prayer: “After the birth, the Virgin remained intact / Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.” Devotees swallow three pills over nine days while reciting the prayer.
In 2006, devotees consumed an average of 90,000 pills a month, according to Brazilian press reports. Since Galvao’s canonization was announced, that number jumped to 140,000.
The miracle which cleared the way for the canonization was reported by a Brazilian woman, who had a deformity in her uterus which doctors said would make it impossible for her to carry a baby to term. After ingesting Galvao’s pills, however, she said she was able to carry her child for seven and a half months until he was delivered by Caesarean section.
The pills are not the only sign of supernatural accomplishment attributed to Galvao. He is also said to have levitated while praying, and to have had the ability to read minds and to witness events even when he wasn’t physically present. Pregnant women sometimes borrow a frayed piece of rope believed to have been Galvao’s belt, and wear it around their mid-section in hopes of a smooth birth. Devotees even hammer off tiny chunks of the wall from Galvao’s monastery and brew them in a tea, which they drink as a sort of elixir thought to promote good health.
Auxiliary Bishop Edgar Moreira da Cunha of Newark, New Jersey, the only Brazilian-born bishop in the United States, said in an April 30 interview that until the canonization was announced, Galvao was not a well-known figure.
“Frankly, I didn’t know about this thing with the pill until recently,” he said. “It wasn’t known in Brazil. It’s a very localized thing in São Paolo.”
Devotion to Galvao has not always played to positive reviews. Some see it as superstitious and tinged with elements of folk magic. Cardinal Aloísio Leo Arlindo Lorscheider, now retired from the Aparecida diocese, said in 1998 that he considered the devotion “ridiculous,” and prohibited local nuns from making the pills. (They kept doing it anyway.)
Da Cunha said he doubted the canonization would stir much controversy. For most people, he said, the only thing that matters is that a Brazilian is being honored.
Let me get this straight. The Church accepts as proof of a miracle the fact that one woman was told that she could not carry a baby to term, and after taking this paper pill was able to carry the baby for 7 1/2 months? This is the best we can do when 90,000 pills are being taken every month?
On to my uncynical less cynical questions: Once the canonization occurs, are faithful Catholics supposed to believe that this man actually levitated, could read people's minds, and made miraculous pills out of paper? Or do saints fall under the "big tent" approach to the Church, so that it's enough to acknowledge that God manifests Himself in mysterious ways, not all of which we can vouch for with certainty? (But isn't the Church vouching with certainty by canonizing him?) In any event, just as some of today's Islamicists tempt me to embrace Voltaire, the story of Frei Galvao makes me acknowledge the appeal of David Hume.
Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we. . . .
Critics complain that these bills seek to "bias," "coerce," and "guilt-trip" women. Come on. Women aren't too weak to face the truth. If you don't want to look at the video, you don't have to. But you should look at it, and so should the guy who got you pregnant, because the decision you're about to make is as grave as it gets. . . .
To pro-lifers, ultrasound is a test of pro-choice sincerity. "The same people who scream that women must always be told 'all their options,' including abortion, balk at allowing women to see whom it is whose life they are about to take," says Mary Spaulding Balch, NRLC's state legislative director. "They are petrified that women will change their minds after seeing their babies."
Maybe. But pro-lifers seem equally petrified that women won't change their minds. They rigged Mississippi's ultrasound law with a clause that would ban nearly all abortions if Roe is overturned. Now the Supreme Court has echoed that equivocation, ruling that one way to "inform" women of the evil of partial-birth abortion is to criminalize it. But the clash between ultrasound and the partial-birth ban is ultimately a choice between information and prohibition. To trust the ultrasound, you have to trust the woman.
Jack Balkin has posted a speech, delivered last week at the Yale's Second Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K2). The speech is called "Two Ideas for Access to Knowledge– The Infrastructure of Free Expression and Margins of Appreciation." Here is a bit:
Freedom of speech . . . depends on an infrastructure of free expression.
What is in that infrastructure? It includes government policies that promote the creation and delivery of information and knowledge. It concerns government policies that promote transparency and sharing of government created knowledge and data. It involves government and private sector investments in information provision and technology, including telephones, telegraphs, libraries, and Internet access. It includes policies like subsidies for postal delivery, education, and even the building of schools.
Read the whole thing. And, consider this: What if we substituted "religious freedom" for "free expression"? Does religious freedom require an infrastructure? If so, "[w]hat is in that infrastructure"? A fascinating question, I think.
Prof. Bainbridge comments here on a recent New York Times story about "pay to stay" jail upgrades being offered in California. Here's a bit from the story:
Anyone convicted of a crime knows a debt to society often must be paid in jail. But a slice of Californians willing to supplement that debt with cash (no personal checks, please) are finding that the time can be almost bearable.
For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few. . . .
“It seems to be to be a little unfair,” said Mike Jackson, the training manager of the National Sheriff’s Association. “Two people come in, have the same offense, and the guy who has money gets to pay to stay and the other doesn’t. The system is supposed to be equitable.”
But cities argue that the paying inmates generate cash, often hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — enabling them to better afford their other taxpayer-financed operations — and are generally easy to deal with. . . .
What should we think about these "upgrades"? Certainly, one could hardly blame one convicted of a "relatively minor" crime for wanting to take advantage of this option. And, these upgrades might well provide a useful source of revenue. I wonder, though: Why stop at $82.00 per day? I would think that corrections agencies could fill their "upgrade" cells while charging substantially more. What if it turned out that many of those convicted of "relatively minor" offenses were willing to pay, say, $1000 per day -- or $10,000 per day -- not to avoid the loss of physical freedom associated with punishment, but to avoid the non-trivial risks of being harmed by other inmates? What would this willingness tell us about the extent to which we are failing in (what I take to be) our obligation to protect those we incarcerate?
I assume we don't want to say that these risks are "part of" the punishment that is justly imposed upon those convicted of crimes. So, if someone buys their way out of those risks, it is not -- is it? -- that they are buying their way out of duly imposed "punishment." But, once we acknowledge that there are non-essential, unpleasant incidents of punishment that we *are* willing to allow people to pay to avoid, then how do we justify imposing those incidents on those who cannot (or simply do not) pay to avoid them?
From time to time, a number of MOJ contributors, including this author, have commented on challenges that institutions of higher education, which identify themselves as Catholic, have faced, are facing, and will likely face in the future.
It was recently brought to my attention by Mr. Dominico Bettinelli that the
Boston
University
student daily, The Daily Free Press, published an article on May 1 about its neighbor on
Commonwealth Avenue
,
Boston
College. [HERE] While the article, entitled “Gay Professors Say BC Lags in Accepting Their Lifestyles,” concentrates on a particular element of the faculty at BC, I realized the essay’s content raises challenges to institutional Catholic identity and soul that other groups of faculty could also present. Who might be in these other groups? They could include a group of law professors who support “abortion rights” and “reproductive autonomy”; or, a group of life sciences professors who promote embryonic stem cell research; or, a group of business school professors who advocate an unregulated business economy; or, a group of education professors who assert that parents have no right to monitor and control the content of the education their children receive in public schools.
The Church has positions and moral teachings on all these issues that are frequently the subject matter of public debate these days. Drawing on The Daily Free Press article about homosexual faculty and the acceptance (or not) of their lifestyles, it is quite possible that any of the faculty members who work at Catholic institutions could promote their “need” to “overcom[e] the school’s deeply rooted religious tradition” as they champion their claims regarding lifestyle or any other matter with which they identify. As one proceeds through this article, the perspectives of 30-year, 17-year, 10-year, and 1-year veterans become revealing about the attitudes of some faculty toward the Catholic mission and identity. What becomes clear after review of this litany is that the institution has labored to maintain its identity—and its soul—in spite of the increasing challenges to them.
While faculty who identify with particular crusades that conflict with the Church’s teachings on vital issues will likely continue laboring and lobbying for their causes, it would be imperative for Catholic institutions of higher education to consider convening a seminar on Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae that could address a coordinated approach to implementing John Paul’s sound and wise principles. After all, it is not only the identity of these institutions that are at stake, it is also their mission to demonstrate to the skeptical world that faith and reason are not only compatible but inextricably linked. Otherwise, the ongoing fragmentation of learning and research that beleaguers the academy of the present age will continue and burgeon. And the souls of those institutions that call themselves Catholic will be in greater peril. RJA sj
Today's local paper carried the story of a boyfriend who hired someone to punch his six-months pregnant girlfriend in the stomach. The girlfriend is fine now (physically), but the punch caused a miscarriage, and both men have been charged with second-degree murder. The police chief commented that he had never heard of so young a homicide victim, and that the case was "heartbreaking." The county attorney said:
"I have never seen anything that sickens me quite like this . . . . What else is left in crime to disgust you? You assault a pregnant woman, the mother of your child, and you hire somebody to kill the child. This is Idi Amin stuff."
The boyfriend, who had already fathered a child with another woman, stated that he did not want another child. So if a father does not want to have a child and hires someone to end the pregnancy, he is guilty of the most disgusting crime imaginable. But if the mother does not want to have the child and hires someone to end the pregnancy, even over the father's objection, well, that's a different story. (We might even pay for it.)
The Boston Globereports on the post-Lawrence expansion of the battle to overturn prohibitions on adult incest. Many of the arguments portrayed seem to presume that the only rationale for the prohibition is the fear of genetic abnormality. A more promising ground, in my view, is the integrity of the family structure and the danger of family members assuming incompatibile roles. In this regard, incest prohibitions are protective of individual autonomy because they maintain the family's role as a platform for a member's future autonomy. And if there's one thing we hold sacred in our legal system, it's individual autonomy. That's why, despite Lawrence's unfortunately broad language, I don't see the case as a direct threat to our incest laws. (The Ohio Supreme Court recently agreed.)
WASHINGTON, May 2 — The
Justice Department has begun an internal investigation into whether a
former senior adviser to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales improperly tried to fill vacancies for career prosecutors at the agency with Republicans loyal to the Bush administration, department officials said Wednesday.
The inquiry focuses on whether Monica Goodling, formerly a top aide
to Mr. Gonzales, sought to determine the political affiliations of job
applicants before they were hired as prosecutors — potentially a
violation of civil service laws and a break with a tradition of
nonpartisanship in the career ranks at the Justice Department.
The inquiry by the department’s inspector general and the Office of
Professional Responsibility was announced on a day in which the House
and Senate Judiciary Committees advanced their broader investigations
of issues related to last year’s dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
The FIRST THINGS blog ("On the Square") has a great story today by Ryan Anderson -- on Amnesty International's plans to spin and sell its just-adopted policy in favor of the complete decriminalization of abortion: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=719
I want to add a couple of words to the conversation between Rick and Eduardo about a Catholic judge's moral obligation to grant habeas relief in death penalty cases when they could do so with a technically correct legal ruling. If we're talking about a range of technically correct legal rulings, I guess it would depend whether any particular ruling is more correct than another one. If that's the case, I still don't see the basis for imposing a moral obligation on the judge to adopt the "less correct" ruling. If the grant of habeas relief follows from the "most correct" legal ruling, then every judge should be under a moral obligation to adopt that position, shouldn't they?
Catholic social thought has something to say on this subject. In a recent paper, I argue that, by upholding the law even when it conflicts with her rightly formed conscience, the Catholic judge furthers the principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, reciprocity, and the common good.
