Friday, January 4, 2008
Check out this description of Nicholas Sarkozy's recent talk in Vatican City about the importance of Christianity contributing to public life in France and Europe and how such contributions are consistent with the "secular state" understood in the proper sense. (Links included to the original speech and an English translation.)
Tom
The Supreme Court granted certiorari today in Kennedy v. Louisiana, No. 07-343. The question presented:
Does the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause permit a state to punish the crime of rape of a child under 12, who survived the rape, with the death penalty, and does Louisiana's capital rape statute violate the Eighth Amendment in insufficiently narrowing the class of offenders eligible for the death penalty?
Set aside the constitutional issues, and consider only Catholic moral/social thought. The question is to Catholics who reject JPII's reasoning in Evangelium Vitae and think that the death penalty may be morally appropriate in some cases as matter of redress/retribution. Does anyone argue that Catholic thought can justify the death penalty in a case where the offender, although committing a heinous act, has not taken a life?
Tom
I think it's great that we (MOJ) won the bronze medal. We deserve it! But I have a problem with the description of MOJ:
271
votes
Where Pope Benedict XVI is the most-cited legal authority. Canon law is interpreted, and Catholic law school news is covered in detail.
The description should include something along these lines: " ... and where dissenting Catholics engage in civil, if unpersuasive, discussion with magisterium-friendly Catholics about such issues as [insert your favorite disputed question here]."
Here's the serious point: We are a vigorously pluralistic group--and that's one of our greatest strengths!!!!!
I'm sure it means very little in the big picture, but we were voted #3 in the "ivory tower" category of the ABA's top 100 blawg survey, behind only the Volokh Conspiracy and Balkinization.
Bob Cochran recently published an edited volume "Faith and Law: How Religious Traditions from Calvinism to Islam View American Law," which I look forward to reading. "In Faith and Law, legal scholars from sixteen different religious traditions contend that religious discourse has an important function in the making, practice, and adjudication of American law, not least because our laws rest upon a framework of religious values. The book includes faiths that have traditionally had an impact on American law, as well as new immigrant faiths that are likely to have a growing influence. Each contributor describes how his or her tradition views law and addresses one legal issue from that perspective. Topics include abortion, gay rights, euthanasia, immigrant rights, and blasphemy and free speech."
The Tablet
January 5, 2008
Defining Moment for the Jesuits
Michael Walsh
The meeting in Rome this month to elect a new Superior General is the most important gathering of the Society of Jesus for 25 years. It could signal new approaches to both mission and governance
On 7 August 1981 Fr Pedro Arrupe, the popular and charismatic Superior General of the Society of Jesus, suffered a stroke at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport as he returned from the Philippines. He was never again capable of governing the order. Unable to speak, he indicated that his American assistant, Vincent O'Keefe, should take over as Vicar General until a General Congregation could be called to elect a successor.
Then the Pope stepped in. In place of Fr O'Keefe, John Paul II simply appointed Fr Paolo Dezza as his own papal delegate/Vicar General. Fr Dezza, known to generations of Jesuits and other seminarians for a singularly tedious Latin tome on metaphysics, was nearly 80 and almost blind. He was therefore to be assisted by Fr Giuseppe Pittau, once rector of Sophia University in Tokyo and at the time provincial superior in Japan. What John Paul II hoped to gain by this is unclear. Jesuits around the globe protested, but obeyed. The surprisingly feisty Fr Dezza governed for a couple of years, and the Society continued much as it had before, until a Congregation was called for September 1983 to accept Fr Arrupe's resignation and elect the present Superior General, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. In 1991 the Pope rather sportingly made Fr Dezza a cardinal.
Fr Kolvenbach is Dutch, but spent much of his life in the Lebanon - his beard marks the fact that he belonged to one of the Eastern rites - and before his election had moved to Rome to take charge of the Oriental Institute. Whereas Fr Arrupe had been charismatic, Fr Kolvenbach is often described as pragmatic. Fr Michael Holman, the British provincial, told me he was a conscientious administrator, which sounds faint praise but in the circumstances is not. He has helped to rebuild confidence between the papacy and the Society, whose members continue to work in education, missions, social justice and interfaith dialogue.
But his period of office, said Fr Holman, has taken the Society "to new geographical frontiers, to Albania, for example, to Kosovo, Russia and to many other places by promoting the Jesuit Refugee Service ... he has encouraged us in whatever ministry to meet the challenge of secularism and unbelief with a witness to the Gospel made credible by our witness to the poor, to use effectively the tools of technology and the media, to adopt new forms of ministry with young people and young adults".
After 25 years in office, and at the age of nearly 80, Fr Kolvenbach wants to retire and return to the Middle East. Alone among Superiors of Religious orders, the Jesuit General is elected for life, so the forthcoming General Congregation, the 35th in the Society's 468-year history, will first have to accept his resignation before choosing a successor. When I asked Fr Holman about possible Vatican influence on the voting, he diplomatically restricted himself to saying that the Prefect for the Congregation for Consecrated Life would preside at the opening Mass on 7 January and that the Pope, whom delegates are to meet in February, will be the first to be informed of the name of the new General.
There is, however, rather more to it than that. After the problems of the early 1980s, the Jesuit powers-that-be hope that the person selected will be acceptable to the Pope. It is said that a long list of some 60 names of likely candidates has already been submitted to the Vatican, just in case there are problems. And there is another issue where Pope Benedict has had an input. The Society's various provinces send in postulata, or topics they would like to be debated at the Congregation. Several provinces made the suggestion that in future the General should retire, perhaps at 80. Discussion on this, which would be a major change to the Society's Constitution, has been vetoed by the Holy See. Benedict XVI, a Rome-based Jesuit suggested to me, was alarmed by the thought that if the "black pope" was obliged to retire at 80, people might start to expect the same of the "white" one.
[To read the rest, click here.]
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Rock Chalk Jayhawk! Kansas 24 - Va. Tech 21!
In response to Rick's post this afternoon, let me say this:
We must distinguish between two questions: (1) Does capital punishment violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments? (2) Should we want to Supreme Court to rule that capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments?
Rick and I agree that *if* the answer to the first question is no, then the answer to the second question should be no too.
However, if the answer to the first question is yes, it does not follow that the answer to the second question should be yes too. Why not? Well, I answer that question (among others) in my new book: Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court: A (Partial) Theory of Judicial Review (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
As it happens, I think that the answer to the first question is yes--and that the answer to the second question is ... no.
Thanks to Michael P. for posting the Times article on states' reluctance to "lead change on executions." To the extent the article is (additional) evidence that state legislatures have grown so used to federal-court supervision of state and local policies relating to crime, punishment, public morals, etc., that they are now too infantilized, or cowardly, to actually revisit their policies and take account of changing views and circumstances . . . well, that's bad. (If states are reluctant to "lead change" because, at the end of the day, the people to whom state legislatures are accountable don't really want "change", that's a different matter, it seems to me.)
Now, to be clear, and in response to Michael: The reason why I want the death penalty to be abolished legislatively, and not by federal courts, is because I am confident that the Constitution does not require the abolition of the death penalty, and so any federal-court decision abolishing the death penalty would be, in my view, an anti-democratic overreach. If I thought -- as, I gather, Michael does? -- that the death penalty is unconstitutional, my preference for legislatively driven abolition over abolition-by-judicial-decision would be, like Michael's, much less strong.
Rick often says that although he opposes capital punishment, he wants the legislatures, guided by true morality--not the courts, guided by their understanding of constitutionality--to abolish it. Well, I thought of Rick's position this morning when I read this piece in the NYTimes.
NYT, 1.3.08
States Hesitate to Lead Change on Executions
By ADAM LIPTAK
When a state panel recommended last April that Tennessee abandon the three chemicals used in executions across the nation in favor of the single drug usually used in animal euthanasia, the state’s corrections commissioner said no.
Though the move would have simplified executions and eliminated the possibility of excruciating pain, the commissioner, George Little, said Tennessee should not be “out at the forefront” of a decision with “political ramifications,” according to recently disclosed evidence in a death row inmate’s lawsuit.
Mr. Little’s decision helps illuminate one of the questions lurking behind the year’s most eagerly anticipated death penalty case: Why have states so doggedly and uniformly clung to an execution method with the potential to inflict intense pain when a simpler one is readily available?
When the Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in Baze v. Rees, the Kentucky case that has led to a de facto national moratorium on executions, it will mostly be concerned with the question of what standard courts must use to assess the constitutionality of execution methods under the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.
But beyond that is the more practical question of why all 36 states that use lethal injections to execute condemned inmates are wedded to a cumbersome combination of three chemicals.
The answer, experts say, seems to be that no state wants to make the first move. Having proceeded in lock step to adopt the current method, which was chosen in part because it differed from the one used on animals and masked the involuntary movements associated with death, state governments would prefer that someone else, possibly the courts, change the formula first.
“The departments of correction are dug in,” said Deborah W. Denno, an authority on methods of execution at the Fordham University Law School. “There’s safety in numbers. But if one state breaks from that, the safety in numbers starts to crumble.”
“If you change,” Professor Denno continued, “you’re admitting there was something wrong with the prior method. All those people you were executing, you could have been doing it in a better, more humane way.”
[To read the rest, click here.]
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