Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Benedict XVI's Visit with Youth with Disabilities

By Elizabeth Schiltz

My favorite part of Pope Benedict's pilgrimage to the U.S. was his visit with the group of young people with disabilities, which I was lucky enough to watch live on Saturday afternoon.   The visual contrast between this visit and the Mass at St. Patrick's earlier that morning was quite something.  At St. Pat's, I was struck by how neat and orderly everything looked when the camera panned the whole crowd.  The order was accentuated by the fact that groups of men and women from different orders were all sitting together, so the high overhead shots showed neat, orderly, patterns of groups of people in identical habits.  Everything was beautifully choreographed, and from what I saw, there were no flaws in the execution of any part of the ceremony.

In the equally ornate room in which the Pope visited with the young people with disabilities and their parents, in contrast, the high overhead shots showed chaos -- clumps of people clustered around wheelchairs, papers (presumably programs) strewn all over the floor.  You could just sense that this was a room in which a group of parents had been fighting a losing battle in keeping their high-spirited kids in check for the (probably) hours they had to be there before the Pope's arrival. 

When Pope Benedict plunged into the group to shake hands, share kisses and blessings, there was just as much chaos and disorder, but so, so, much love and tenderness.  The kids looked mostly nonchalant, but pleased, but the parents were just radiant.  I'm sure every one of those kids was coached on proper Papal etiquette, yet I distinctly saw one young fellow with Down Syndrome belt out "Hi, Pope!" when Benedict came close.  And the Pope was beaming, too, obviously enjoying himself.  His remarks (included below) were almost incidental to the visual manifestation of the Pope and these beautiful young people showing us how "our faith helps us to break open the horizon beyond our own selves in order to see life as God does."

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Conscience at Guantanamo

By Rob Vischer

Relating to our conversation on conscience in the military, Kim Daniels of the Thomas More Law Center sends along a reminder that a physician in today's American military may face clashes of conscience that have nothing to do with abortion or birth control:

[One of our clients was a] Catholic OB/GYN serving as a lieutenant in the Navy, he originally sought our help crafting an accommodation that would allow him to continue to serve as a Navy doctor without having to write prescriptions or perform procedures that violated his conscience.  Several years later, I got a call from him again: he was now about to be transferred to Guantanamo as a general practitioner, and there expected to be called upon to supervise the use of feeding tubes on hunger-striking prisoners, something that he viewed as a violation of their human dignity and thus barred by his faith.

Fortunately for him, the transfer to Guantanamo never came through. But he's now out of the Navy practicing as a GP; I'm sure the conflicting lines of authority that he faced had much to do with that switch.

A World Without Islam?

By Michael Perry

Sightings 4/21/08

 

An Islamless World

-- Martin E. Marty

An early deadline prevents our commenting on the papal visit, the religious theme of the week. So, another topic:  Last week we sighted the hard-to-miss, politically-minded preacher Rod Parsley of Ohio, who wants the Christian United States to wage war for the "destruction" of Islam. Suppose he and his "theonomist" allies succeeded?  Ex-CIA man and Vancouver professor Graham E. Fuller gets cover treatment in the January/February Foreign Policy, for his mental game treatment of "A World without Islam?"  The sub-head reads:  "What if Islam had never existed?  To some, it's a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world?  Remove Islam from the path of history, and the world ends up exactly where it is today."

 

That word "exactly" refers to civilizations, wars, and terrorists, and commits Fuller to having to spell things out exactly.  "Is Islam, in fact, the source of the problems?  If not Islam, Then What?"  First, ethnic wars:  Religious or not, "Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, even Berbers and Pashtuns would still dominate politics in the Middle East."  Before Islam, their ancestors were fighting and, apart from Islam, they still have plenty of issues.

 

After ethnicity, "it's too arbitrary to exclude religion entirely from the equation."  Without Islam, "most of the Middle East would have remained predominantly Christian, in its various sects, as it had been at the dawn of Islam."  A few Zoroastrians and Jews were the only representatives of other religions.  Would harmony with the West have reigned if Christianity had kept a near-monopoly?  Hardly. The Crusades were a Western adventure driven by political, social, and economic needs.  Christianity was only a potent bannered symbol, "a rallying cry to bless the more secular urges of powerful Europeans." Eastern Christians would not have welcomed the Westerners, and Western Christians as readily killed the Orthodox and burned their cities as they did those of Muslims.

 

That was long ago. More recently, in the age of oil, would Christian economic interests in the Middle East have welcomed Western dominators?  He cites chapter and verse before he answers "No!"  "Then there is Palestine."  Would Christians, after millennia of anti-Semitic impulses, have suddenly welcomed Zionists? "And the new Jewish state would still have dislodged the same 750,000 Arab natives of Palestine from their lands even if they had been Christian—and indeed some of them were."  No peace there.

 

As for intra-Christian rivalry, Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity have always had trouble, often lethally expressed.  Orthodox Christians mistrust and fear the West as did their ancestors.  These Orthodox would dominate a Middle East had it remained Christian. Roll calls: "We would still see Palestinians resist Jews, Chechens resist Russians, Iranians resist the British and Americans, Kashmiris resist Indians, Tamils resist the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and Uighurs and Tibetans resist the Chinese."  Summary:  "It is not an entirely peaceful and comforting picture."

 

Nor would the "New Atheists" who want a non-religious world have anything to offer.  The twentieth century horrors "came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolin, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot."  In truth, the conflicts of such a world would parallel those of a world with Islam.  Rather than seek to "destroy" Islam and the Muslims, one infers, it might be better for all peoples of faith to look more in the mirror and less out the window, to promote peace.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School

Islam and the Secular State

By Michael Perry

A new book by my colleague Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State (Harvard 2008), has been attracting a great deal of attention.  (Not at all surprisingly.)  A post today at The Immanent Frame:  Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere is certainly worth your attention.

Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics

posted by Robert Hefner

Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im’s Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a. Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, An-Na`im has for more than twenty years been a tireless proponent of a deeply religious but liberal-modernist reformation of Islamic politics and ethics. Published just five years after his flight from the Sudan in April 1985 (after the Numeiri regime executed his Sufi teacher, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha), An-Na`im’s Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law established him as one of our era’s most articulate exponents of the Islamic grounds for constitutionalism and human rights.

In a trademark gesture of democratic openness, in late 2003 An-Na`im circulated a draft of his new book to scholars and activists in Turkey, Egypt, the Sudan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria. From January 2004 to September 2006, he worked with local Islamic associations in all of these countries to organize workshops and focus groups to discuss and refine the book’s arguments. The English manuscript was also translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Bengali, French, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu; it was also made available on the Internet. Among the global Muslim intelligentsia, the draft quickly became a cultural event in its own right. The book version of the manuscript will both broaden the discussion and deepen the controversy.

Two things distinguish this new work from An-Na`im’s early writings. The first is his explicit endorsement of a secular state as the best form of government for Muslims and for the flourishing of Islam. In Toward an Islamic Reformation, An-Na`im had dedicated his energies to addressing believers’ understandings of Islam and Shari`a, and had less to say about the appropriate form of the state. As he put it, he hoped “to reconcile Muslim commitment to Islamic law with the achievement of the benefits of secularism within a religious framework.” In this new book, he sets his sights squarely on providing Islamic rationales for secular government.

The second quality that distinguishes this book from his earlier scholarship is its systematic effort to ground arguments in support of freedom, constitutionalism, and secularity on two bodies of research: historical studies of the development of Muslim politics and Shari`a from the early Islamic period to the rise of the Ottoman Empire; and case studies of Shari`a politics in modern India, Turkey, and Indonesia. An-Na`im plumbs the depths of these empirical materials to provide corroborating evidence in support of his larger argument.

The argument has three pillars ...

[To read the rest, click here.]

David Skeel on Evangelicals and Climate Change . . .

By Michael Perry

. . . here.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

April 19, 1995

By Michael Scaperlanda

Time does heal some wounds as memories become more distance.  Much of the buzz in the Oklahoma City area today is about the NBA's vote yesterday to approve the Seattle Supersonic's relocation to OKC.  13 years ago in OKC all the focus was on the 171 (including three unborn children)  people who lost their lives, the 800 or so injured, and those who were orphaned in the Murrah Building bombing.  Please remember them and their families in your prayers.

Understanding the PBA decision

By Rick Garnett

A student of mine at Notre Dame Law School has posted an interesting paper, here, on the Supreme Court's decision upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.  Here's a bit:

Gonzales v. Carhart represents a seismic shift in our nation's abortion jurisprudence. Upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, despite the lack of a health exception, it signals the end of what can be termed the physician veto. This veto can be globally defined as the placing of dispositive weight in our nation's abortion jurisprudence on the autonomy and judgment of physicians who favor abortion rights, at the expense of undergoing the more difficult and deeper process of engaging issues of women's liberty and equality vis-à-vis the nature of the unborn fetus and of abortion itself. From Roe until the more recent Carhart decision, this dispositive weight - the veto - has shielded the right to abortion in a manner that approaches the absolute through the erection of an impenetrable wall of deference to physician autonomy and judgment in this area of their practice.

This Note chronicles the life and death of the physician veto as it has been used to shield the right to abortion ever since Roe. This Note is not meant to be a critique or support of Carhart in terms of the substantive abortion issue at question. Neither is it intended to be an in-depth analysis of the intricacies of the Court's holdings in its abortion cases, as this has been exhaustively achieved elsewhere. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the precedential value of how Carhart will affect future abortion jurisprudence. In doing so, it exposes for future academic and legal discussion the plain fact that Carhart invites society to engage the abortion debate in a new way. Our jurisprudence is now invited to consider the abortion right - with its attendant philosophical and medical questions concerning women's liberty, equality and health, and the fetus' life and nature - without abbreviating the discussion through unqualified deference to the judgment of a physician who supports abortion rights.

The Pope's U.N. Address

By Rick Garnett

Here is the Pope's U.N. address.  It covers a lot of terrain.  Here's just a bit, about the Declaration, and human dignity:

This reference to human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the responsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document was the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and science. Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

Academic Freedom and Catholic Educational Institutions

By Susan Stabile

With respect to the Pope's address to Catholic educators referenced by Steve, Rick and Patrick (here, here and here), I struggle with the question of what academic freedom means in the context of Catholic institutions of higher education and I welcome the views of others.

It seems to me that Catholic institutions should not be unwilling to bring in speakers who espouse positions not in accord with the Catholic church.  I don't think censorship serves truth and believe a Catholic institution ought to be willing to foster discussion and debate about all issues.  That may argue in favor of providing for rebuttal when a speaker will be advancing a position antithetical to the Church, but I don't think it betrays a university's mission and identity to allow such speech to occur.

On the other hand, I think a Catholic law school, for example, would be perfectly justified in not hiring - and probably should not hire - a scholar whose primary research agenda is to promote a position antithetical to the Catholic Church.  If the thrust of my scholarship were to promote the position (to use the example in a post Rick made last week) that there is no moral difference between abortion and a pap smear, I don't think St. Thomas should be funding my research and giving me a platform from which to promote those views.  The institution's unwillingness to do so should not be viewed as an inappropriate limit on academic freedom.

I'd be interested in hearing whether others disagree with either of those conclusions.

Academic Freedom and the Pope's Address to Catholic Educators

By Steve Shiffrin

As Patrick has noted, the Pope’s message to Catholic educators contains this passage: “In regard to faculty members at Catholic . . . universities, I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.” I read this passage as qualifying the doctrine of academic freedom, rather than manifesting a claim that a prohibition on contradicting Catholic teachings is consistent with academic freedom. This is said to be necessary to protect truth on Catholic campuses.

 The standard view of academic freedom, however, is that such freedom serves truth and that censorship does not. I am reminded of a passage in Charles Taylor’s learned and brilliant book, A Secular Age 466 (2007) where he observes that the vision of a church “tightly held together with strong hierarchical authority, which will nonetheless be filled with practitioners of heartfelt devotion” is filled with tension. “There are, of course, people whose devotional life is enhanced by the sense that they live under this kind of authority, but for the masses who do not respond this way the choices are either to knuckle under, or leave, or live a semi-clandestine life. The irreversible aspect of Vatican II is that it brought this contradiction to the surface.” 

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