Here, thanks to Amy Welborn, is Pope Benedict XVI's letter to the Catholics in China. I have not seen as much coverage as I would have expected, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places.
This is a matter in which I am very interested. (Needless to say, the Pope's tone is more pastoral and charitable than the tone I employed in my op-ed. I probably would have preferred -- though, of course, I have to admit that the actualization of my preferences would be sub-optimal, pastoral-wise -- a bit more confrontational stance with respect to the Chinese government.) I'm looking forward to hearing from my betters what, exactly, this letter means for the so-called "underground" Church in China -- and for the so-called Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. This seems telling:
Considering "Jesus' original plan", it is clear that the claim of some entities, desired by the State and extraneous to the structure of the Church, to place themselves above the Bishops and to guide the life of the ecclesial community, does not correspond to Catholic doctrine, according to which the Church is "apostolic", as the Second Vatican Council underlined. . . .
Likewise, the declared purpose of the afore-mentioned entities to implement "the principles of independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration of the Church" [36] is incompatible with Catholic doctrine, which from the time of the ancient Creeds professes the Church to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic". . .
Given this difficult situation, not a few members of the Catholic community are asking whether recognition from the civil authorities – necessary in order to function publicly – somehow compromises communion with the universal Church. I am fully aware that this problem causes painful disquiet in the hearts of Pastors and faithful. In this regard I maintain, in the first place, that the requisite and courageous safeguarding of the deposit of faith and of sacramental and hierarchical communion is not of itself opposed to dialogue with the authorities concerning those aspects of the life of the ecclesial community that fall within the civil sphere. There would not be any particular difficulties with acceptance of the recognition granted by civil authorities on condition that this does not entail the denial of unrenounceable principles of faith and of ecclesiastical communion. In not a few particular instances, however, indeed almost always, in the process of recognition the intervention of certain bodies obliges the people involved to adopt attitudes, make gestures and undertake commitments that are contrary to the dictates of their conscience as Catholics. . .
Here's a nice profile of Cecelia Klingele, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin's law school and a future law clerk to Justice Stevens. She sounds like a first-rate, and fascinating, person. Good for the Justice.
Thanks to Mark for his post about "CST and the City." What a rich subject! For starters, I cannot resist (yet) another plug for Philip Bess's book, "Til We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred." Also on my must-read list would be Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" and John McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries."
I do think -- and I mean no offense to my pals in suburbia -- that there is something "urban" about "the Catholic thing." (Read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's "Life of Thomas More.") Someone said (something like) that the heart of urban life is the "being together of strangers." That line reminds me of the old-chestnut description of the Church: "Here Comes Everybody."
For more MOJ posts on "urbanism", "new" and otherwise, click here, here, here, here, and here.
Let's run with this. Ours is an incarnational, embodied faith. Physical place, and space, has to matter to us. (This is why, ahem, ugly churches are, well, bad.) Mark?
While the Rev. Anne Redding's embrace of Islam was accepted by Seattle's Episcopal bishop,
it turns out that Redding is actually a priest under the Diocese of Rhode Island. Bishop Geralyn Wolf doesn't find the interfaith possibilities so exciting, and announced Thursday that Redding is undergoing church discipline. . . .
In the meantime, Redding will continue "teaching theology at Seattle University, a Jesuit school."
The long-awaited volume Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law has now been published and is available for purchase. Edited by MoJ-er Michael Scaperlanda and my colleague Teresa Collett, the collection includes essays from me and fellow MoJ-ers Rick Garnett, Amy Uelmen, and Robert Araujo, along with Catholic luminaries such as Francis Cardinal George, Mary Ann Glendon, Avery Cardinal Dulles, James Gordley, and Robert George.
Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino compares the argument against same-sex marriage to the intellectual property law doctrine of tarnishment:
To people like Henry Hyde, the idea that same-sex marriage demeans or assaults the institution of marriage is a tarnishment claim. It doesn't matter that he can still marry a woman. If a woman can also get married to a woman, he feels the value of his trademark has gone down. Even those who regard cross-sex and same-sex marriage as separate institutions will conjure up both when they hear the term "marriage." So now we have an answer to Edwards' query about what another person's marriage has to do with hers.
But tarnishment analysis cannot justify the objection it illuminates for at least two reasons. First, intellectual property law seeks to protect intangible goods that belong to people because they have created and built up good will for them. No such claim can be made about state-sponsored marriage, because no individual invented marriage, and no individual owns it. Second, and probably more importantly, the tarnishment analogy reveals the homophobia in Hyde's claim. Tarnishment claims arise only when the mark is being associated with something uniformly deemed unsavory. The paradigm case is a famous mark used in a sexually explicit context, like the 1996 case in which the game manufacturer Hasbro successfully barred a sexually explicit Web site from using "Candyland" as part of its domain name. To say that marriage would be tarnished by including gays is an oblique way of saying straight marriage is sacred while gay marriage is profane.
Minnesota law/philosophy prof Brian Bix has posted a new paper, Contract Rights and Remedies, and the Divergence Between Law and Morality. (HT: Solum) Here is the abstract:
There is an ongoing debate in the philosophical and jurisprudential literature regarding the nature and possibility of Contract theory. On one hand are those who argue (or assume) that there is, or should be, a single, general, universal theory of Contract Law, one applicable to all jurisdictions and all times. On the other hand are those who assert that Contract theory should be localized to particular times and places, perhaps even with different theories for different types of agreements. This article considers one facet of this debate: evaluating the relevance of the fact that the remedies available for breach of contract can vary significantly from one jurisdiction to another. This wide variation in remedies for breach of a (contractual) promise is one central difference between promises in morality and enforceable agreements in law. The article asserts that variation of remedies strongly supports the conclusion that there is (and can be) no general, universal theory of Contract Law.
As the 2007 Journal of Catholic Social Thought Conference on CST and the Law approaches, I''ve been mulling over ideas for the 2008 conference. One that occured to me is really just a phrase at this point: "CST and the City." I am wondering what CST has to tell us about the conundrums we face in deciding what sort of communities we want to live in physically. What spaces, physical settings are most conducive to community? What does CST mean by "community"? Is there a relationship between the evolving Catholic thinking about the environment and ways to think about urban planning? Is exburban sprawl a form of 'social sin''? Is Ave Maria Town really "Catholic" in its self-conception as a community and in its environmental implications? Naturally, all of the familiar threshold questions about CST as a guide, inspriration or source of authority for complex practical problems apply here as well, particularly when we move to the legal implications. Problem is, I know even less about this stuff than I do about most 0other things. Thoughts, reactions, suggestions from both my fellow blogistas and readers would be welcome as I try to figure out whether this would be worth exploring. Rick and Nicole Garnett -- I know you have some interesting ideas about all this...
Here is a link to the brochure for the Journal of Catholic Social Thought Conference on CST on the Market, the State and the Law, containing registration info as well as the agenda.
