Thoughts about the Catholic Legal Theory Project on the Feast of the Sacred Heart

When I went to mass this morning, and heard the readings to celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart, I was taken by the beauty of the selection from the letter to Ephesians 3:8-12.14-19.  Here’s a snippet: “…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” 

 

The Gospel (John 19:31-37) then drove home just how fleshy is the whole endeavor: “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out.”

 

What I like about the questions of our thoughtful practicing-lawyer friend is that they seem to be a call for a deeper sense of the connectedness of the whole project.  I wonder if the idea of a “root” and a “ground” – specifically in love – might be an interesting starting point in answering the question of what is the point of spending time working out a theoretical framework, but in a way that does not become disconnected from the lived experience, and in particular, the lived struggles and sufferings of humanity (including lawyers) around us – so as to ultimately surpass knowledge, and in some way touch the fullness of the experience of God. 

 

I also thought it was interesting that so many of our practicing-lawyer-friend’s questions rang true for me, but I would have framed them not as a tension between practice and theory, but as a more feminine critique of the inaccessibility of theoretical abstractions; or in some contexts, as came up in our discussion of the documents, as a North-American critique of European tendencies to high (for me inaccessible) levels of abstraction. 

 

I am a big believer in the importance of taking time to spin out a theoretical ground and framework for our scholarship.  For me the highlight of the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought last week was the help that I received in working out what could be a fairly abstract argument about the relationship between law and morality as a grounding for my summer work in progress on duty to rescue.  We wrestled quite a bit with the question of whether the underlying story we tell about rescue makes a difference, regardless of the legal outcome.  But I do think that our practicing lawyer friend is right, that in the work of theory, we do need to keep in mind the “questions and needs of real people” – and perhaps having this as a focal point (or to put it another way, being “rooted and grounded in love”) might be the ultimate key to comprehension in any meaningful sense.

 

Finally, over the past week I have spent some time thinking about the journey of the CCLT since the initial 2006 brainstorm.  At that initial gathering we faced a fork in the road: whether to focus more intensively and purposefully on projects to form the next generation of legal scholars in the Catholic intellectual tradition; or more on building an intentional community of mutual encouragement and support among those who are working in the field, with the secondary goal of initial and continued formation in the tradition.  While the first remains a vitally important project and piece of unfinished work, we chose to take the second path. 

 

As Susan and Rob already mentioned, the group includes a very diverse span of perspectives and approaches to the tradition.  My Fordham colleague and others who were there for the first time were impressed to find in an academic environment such an encouraging, accepting atmosphere where one finds what I think is a rather extraordinary capacity to listen to and welcome each other across and within differences.  As our culture, the blog world, and the church itself face the risks of increasing polarization, perhaps one of the real beauties of the CCLT project is the priority that it gives to building these kind of relationships, the space it fosters to be “grounded and rooted in love,” and in this way, to nourish an exchange which is all the richer because of the real differences in our theoretical, practical and experiential perspectives, perhaps even giving us a taste of the “breadth and length and height and depth” of God’s love.