Which are you: a capitalist? or a Catholic? Alasdair MacIntyre wants to know!
Check this out, at dotCommonweal.
:-)
Friday, May 1, 2009
Catholicism v. Capitalism
Conference on Catholic Legal Thought
The 4th Annual Conference on Catholic Legal Thought will be hosted at Catholic University’s Law School (Washington D.C.) from June 9 – 11, 2009.
As you may know, in June, 2006, at Fordham Law School, twenty-three Catholic law professors from all over the country met for three days to explore ways to foster the development of the emerging body of Catholic legal thought. At this initial meeting, it was decided that the group would meet annually to support the development of Catholic legal theory, and provide an enriching opportunity for law faculty to gather and discuss this theory and their work in the field. The annual meeting, it was decided, would be hosted by a different law school each year. This year, the Conference will be in Washington D.C., hosted at The Catholic University of America.
As with the prior conferences, this meeting is for those law professors who are just beginning to integrate Catholic social thought into their scholarship and teaching, as well as those law professors who are more experienced. As has become traditional, the first afternoon will be an introduction to basic principles of Catholic social teachings. The second and third days will consist of more in-depth, interactive presentations and discussions. Our time together will also encompass daily Mass and spiritual exercises, as well as the opportunity for participants to share meals and much informal fellowship.
For this 2009 Conference, we selected as our theme “The Legal Implications of the Work of Pope Benedict XVI” with the idea that our conversation would be organized around three central themes in his writings: Love, Hope, and Law (with the additional hope that these would correspond neatly with the first encyclicals of his papacy – the two already written and the highly anticipated one yet to come.) Unlike many typical conferences, we hope that this will not be a collection of presentations an audience, but rather that it will truly be a discussion led by our presenters with all conference participants. To that end, a list of reading materials will be circulated to all registrants in advance of the conference.
If you would like further information about the Conference and registration materials, please contact Prof. Lucia Silecchia (silecchia [at] law.edu).
Should Deal Hudson be denied communion?
Last week I noted Deal Hudson's apparent application of just war theory to torture. My post was picked up by the folks at Vox Nova, who observed:
If this is true, and Hudson did indeed make this argument, then it has grave implications. He has fallen into the consequentialist trap, when the Church has unambiguously declared torture to be an intrinsically evil act, regardless of intent or circumstance. The analogy with just war teaching is off. The reason one cannot say upfront that all war is intrinsically evil is that some wars may be justified by circumstances. It so happens that these circumstances are more narrowly circumscribed that many Catholic war defenders are willing to admit, but the door is still open, even if slightly. It’s the same with the death penalty, but here the opening is so narrow that no case in the modern world would realistically make it through. But the door is firmly closed against torture. As an intrinsically evil act, you do not need to move onto the next phase of the moral calculus and ask about consequences. It is for this reason that a particular directly-procured abortion could not be justified by any appeal to circumstances, such as the woman’s health, material circumstances etc.
I wonder if Hudson is aware how serious this is. If he is thinking along these lines, then he is standing resolutely against the magisterium on a non-negotiable matter. Ironically, Hudson has been out in front demanding sanctions against those who publicly support abortion from receiving the Eucharist. And yet, if you interpret the appropriate canon in this manner– as I have argued before– than Hudson’s own manifest support for an intrinsically evil policy on this scale would also be grounds for banning him from communion. Not that I support that, mind you, but let’s please be consistent.
This prompted Deal to write a response. Here's an excerpt:
2297 [of the Catechism] does not explicitly rule out torture in the case of gathering information to protect the common good; a confession is not that, it is an admittance of personal guilt about a specific act or set of acts.
2298 seems like a more sweeping comment, where it says that they deny "legitimate rights" of the human person and we should work "for their abolition. I don’t read this as declaring a non-negotiable ban on torture, but I can see why there would reasonable disagreement on the issue. My hunch is that the language in 2298 about working to abolish torture is same as the Church saying we should work to abolish war itself.
. . . I was assuming any act of torture would take place with the context of war, in the face of clear and present danger to the common good. I realize people are skeptical about such reasoning in the wake of Iraq, but the Church recognizes that war is sometimes necessary, along with all suffering and death that accompanies it.
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