For a response to the claims contained in the Commonweal editorial ("Crying Wolf") to which Michael P. linked, go here.
To be sure, our friends are right to warn about the wages of "crying wolf". And, there is no denying -- not that there is any need to deny -- that many of those who are critics of the new law's abortion-related provisions and effects also think the law is a bad one (for reasons that Greg Sisk and others have outlined). So, as the editors note, it was never likely, despite the then-candidate Obama's endorsement of, and promises regarding, the "Freedom of Choice Act", that the Act (as such) would actually pass. In pointing this out, though, they (and we) should not think that the Administration has not, in fact, taken many steps to increase "access" to, and reduce restrictions on, abortion. It was not crying wolf to predict this before, and it is fair to lament it now.
Michael P. quotes a correspondent who writes, with respect to E.J. Dionne's recent Washington Post piece:
"A question that should be put to every participant of the MOJ blog, to which no one should not respond if MOJ intends to have any credibility at all outside Catholic circles:How does Catholic Social Theory respond to this?I can't think of any more pressing socio-theological-legal issue confronting Catholics (including American Catholics) right now or in the future..."
I am assuming that Michael's correspondent is a new reader -- welcome! -- because my sense has been that, over the last six years, we have hardly neglected the questions and problems that clerical sexual abuse and its mishandling by Bishops, lawyers, and courts. So, I'm not inclined to think that MOJ's credibility on this or any other matter should reasonably be seen as in jeaopardy. That said, the issues that Dionne writes about are, of course, important, challenging, and (regrettably) timely.
First, Dionne asks, "[h]ow in the name of God can the Roman Catholic Church put the pedophilia scandal behind it?" I would have preferred that Dionne -- a well regarded journalist and long-time observer of things Catholic -- had avoided using the term "pedophilia" which, as he knows, is both particularly inflammatory and misdescribes most (nearly all?) of the sexual-abuse and sexual-misconduct wrongs -- and to be sure, that these wrongs were not all "pedophilia" does not make them any less "wrongs". Does this matter? I think so. We should, of course, demand that the Church be truthful, but we should take care that we not demand the Church confess what to what is not true.
Dionne also writes:
The church's problem is, above all, theological and religious. Its core difficulty is that rather than drawing on its Christian resources, the church has acted almost entirely on the basis of this world's imperatives and standards.
It has worried about lawsuits. It has worried about its image. It has worried about itself as an institution and about protecting its leaders from public scandal. In so doing, it has made millions of Catholics righteously furious and aggravated every one of its problems.
I am inclined to share the view that, in many instances, those Bishops who mishandled (badly) sexual-abuse cases (and, we should remember, that most did not) did so in part because of fears about scandal, about liability, and on the advise of lawyers. At the same time, it is the reality (isn't it?) that, for the past decade, the problem has not been so much with dealing with, and preventing, new allegations of abuse, but with litigation. (The number of alleged incidents of abuse since the early 1990s is, thank God, very small.) I am not sure it is possible for Bishops -- even Bishops intent on faithful, charitable, and total adherence to the Gospel -- to put aside the reality that they are in litigation. (My former colleage Patrick Schiltz's work and experience is helpful here.) Bishops were right (weren't they?) to worry about efforts in some cases to bankrupt dioceses, to liquidiate schools, to supervise the training and selection of clergy, etc. Does this worry excuse bad or dishonest actions? Of course not. But it certainly more than excuses -- it justifies, and demands -- appropriate legal defenses. In saying this, I am not suggesting, in Dionne's words, that "defensiveness" is a Gospel value. But it is not always "defensive" to, well, defend.
Dionne writes, in closing, that:
The church needs to cast aside the lawyers, the PR specialists and its own worst instincts, which are human instincts. Benedict could go down as one of the greatest popes in history if he were willing to risk all in the name of institutional self-examination, painful but liberating public honesty, and true contrition.
Again, it does not seem helpful to me to call for the casting aside of lawyers, when one is being sued, aggresively and often, and where one has obligations not only to the Church's mission and resources, but to those who might be falsely accused. Is it a good thing for the Church's response to the problems of clerical sex abuse and episcopal mishandling (or worse!) to be handled by lawyers and PR specialists? No, of course not. But, there is no getting around the need (in my view) for these types, given all the givens.
To his credit, Dionne recognizes that what he calls for would not be "easy", and that enemies of the church will use this scandal to discredit the institution no matter what the Vatican does. Many in the hierarchy thought they were doing the right thing, however wrong their decisions were. And the church is not alone in facing problems of this sort." It is certainly not alone; indeed, the government, other religious institutions, and non-profit organizations of many stripes face even more serious problems of this sort. But, those whom Dionne calls "enemies of the church" tend not to be interested in these problems. Obviously, that the Church is being singled out does not make her wrongs any less wrong. But, it seems to me that the realities that Dionne acknowledges in this passage complicate seriously his call for the Pope to "risk all".
Michael P. is quite right to call our attention to the pervasive problem of the distorting effect that political loyalty can have on one's acceptance and appreciation of the facts. (That this problem is a real one makes it all the more unfortunate, of course, that political leaders and partisans so often misrepresent those facts to their partisan advantage.) In my experience, almost all engaged and intelligent people are aware of this problem, and yet are tempted (understandably) to imagine that it only besets those with whom they disagree. And so it goes . . .
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist and health policy researcher at
the University of Michigan, writes:
"Studies have shown that people tend to seek out information that is
consistent with their views; think of liberal fans of MSNBC and
conservative devotees of Fox News. Liberals and conservatives also tend
to process the information that they receive with a bias toward their
pre-existing opinions, accepting claims that are consistent with their
point of view and rejecting those that are not. As a result, information
that contradicts their prior attitudes or beliefs is often disregarded,
especially if those beliefs are strongly held.
Unfortunately, these tendencies frequently undermine well-intentioned
efforts to counter myths and misperceptions. Jason Reifler, a political
scientist at Georgia State, and I conducted a series of experiments in
which participants read mock news articles
with misleading statements by a politician. Some were randomly
assigned a version of the article that also contained information
correcting the misleading statement.
Our results indicate that this sort of journalistic fact-checking
often fails to reduce misperceptions among ideological or partisan
voters. In some cases, we found that corrections can even make
misperceptions worse. For example, in one experiment we found that the
proportion of conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush’s
tax cuts actually increased federal revenue grew from 36 percent to 67
percent when they were provided with evidence against this claim. People
seem to argue so vehemently against the corrective information that
they end up strengthening the misperception in their own minds.
The debate over health care reform, which was marred by false and
misleading claims about the plan’s contents, provides a case study in
how difficult it is to correct widely held misperceptions."
The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment provide that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” U.S. Const. amend. I. These clauses require a “ministerial exception” to employment statutes if the statute’s application would interfere with a religious institution’s employment decisions concerning its ministers. . . . Because the ministerial exception is constitutionally compelled, it applies as a matter of law across statutes, both state and federal, that would interfere with the church-minister relationship. . . .
This piece, by Elizabeth Lev, raised for me some very important points, to keep in mind as we follow the latest reporting on sexual abuse by clergy, and mishandling of these cases by the Church:
. . . After the National Assembly diminished the authority of Louis XVI in 1789, anti-monarchical literature dwindled, but fierce accusations against Catholic clergy for misdeeds past and present increased. Isolated cases of clerical immorality were magnified to make depravity appear endemic to the entire priesthood (ironically, in an age where sexual libertinism was running rampant). The French propagandists labored night and day, dredging the past for old scandals whether decades or even centuries distant.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Burke, a Protestant, asked the French, "From the general style of late publications of all sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of monsters, a horrible composition of superstition, ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice and tyranny. But is this true?"
What would Edmund Burke make of the headlines of the past few weeks, as stories of a clerical sex abuser in Germany a quarter century ago, made front page headlines and top TV stories in US news? What would he think of the insistent attempts to tie this sex abuser to the Roman pontiff himself through the most tenuous of links?
In 1790, Burke answered his own question with these words: "It is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated when profit is looked for in their punishment." . . .
is a sketch of two deeply humane Catholic believers who made an enormous impression on the atheist Scruton: a Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, an aristocratic Englishman and popular old-school priest, and Basia, a poor Polish philosophy student who had suffered. What you miss in the excerpt is the opening, in which Scruton writes poetically about being drawn to old and nearly abandoned French country churches as a young man. He opens by relating a sense of being a vandal in visiting churches as an unbeliever, as many tourists are:
Of course, they don't steal the works of art, nor do they carry away the bones of the local martyr. Theri thieving is of the spiritual kind. They take the fruit of pious giving, and empty it of religious sense. This theft of other people's holiness creates more damage than physical violence. For it compels a community to see itself from outside, as an object of anthropological curiosity. Those holy icons that returned the believer's gaze from a more heavenly region are suddenly demoted to the level of human inventions. Those once silent, God-filled spaces now sound with sacrilegious chatter, and what had been a place or recuperation, the interface between a community and its God, is translated to the realm of aesthetic values, so as to become unique, irreplaceable, and functionless. The tool that guaranteed a community's lastingness, becomes a useless symbol of the everlasting.
Scruton then relates his role in an actual minor theft from a country church (of crystal cruets), and how it haunted him for years afterward. The real theft, though, was sacramental -- his failed marriage to a Catholic woman, which broke him spiritually. He writes of his lesson as a spiritual thief: "Stay away from holiness, was the lesson. Stay away until you are sure it possesses you."
That's more or less where the essay picks up at the link above. The profiles Scruton writes of those two very different Catholic believers illustrate what it is like to live one's life devoted to the Good, and the Good in the person of Jesus Christ. . . .
5th Annual Notre Dame Right to Life Conference Friday, April 9th-Saturday, April 10th, 2010 The keynote speaker will be Francis Cardinal George. Other speakers include George Weigel (Ethics and Public Policy Center), Joan Lewis (EWTN), Father Thomas Berg (Westchester Institute) and Dr. Maureen Condic (Westchester Institute). Registration is FREE. To register and see schedule, please visit www.nd.edu/~prolife/conference. For questions, contact Gabrielle Speach at [email protected].
. . . The iniquitous distribution of American medicine is a scandal, but even the incomplete moves of the current plan create a system that no future bureaucracy will be able to resist using for social engineering. It puts an enormous section of the American economy and a huge slice of decisions about life and death in the hands of a government-employed elite. And, given the condition of elite opinion today, that will always mean increased government-sponsored abortion and euthanasia. We have seen it at the United Nations, and we have seen it in the European Union, and we will see it in the United States as well: You cannot create a system that allows bureaucrats to undertake major social changes and imagine that they will not use it. You cannot put their hands on the wheel and expect that they won’t start turning. . . .
Thursday evening I had the honor to give the 2010 Prophetic Voices Lecture at Boston College. The annual lecture is sponsored by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, under the direction of Alan Wolfe. Professor Wolfe was an exceptionally gracious host, and it was a wonderful opportunity to get together with old friends and make new ones. Sitting in the audience next to Professor Mary Ann Glendon was theology professor Frederick Lawrence who, many years ago, tutored me on the epistemology and cognitional theory of Bernard J. F. Lonergan when I attended summer workshops devoted to Lonergan's thought at B.C. (I was, at the time, an undergraduate student at Swarthmore.) Also in the audience was philosophy of science professor Patrick Byrne, to whom I would often go for help when Professor Lawrence's explanations went over my head. Jorge Garcia of the Department of Philosophy was there, as was Peter Skerry of the Department of Political Science. These are two scholars from whose writings I've learned a great deal over the years. Like my host, the audience was very gracious, sitting through my nearly Castro-length speech (almost an hour-and-a-half) without complaint. Before the speech, I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time at the Boisi Center and meet its impressive young staff. The Associate Director, Erik Owen, who completed his Ph.D. under Jean Bethke Elshtain at the University of Chicago, exudes not only competence, but also intellectual and moral seriousness. Professor Wolfe is lucky to have landed such a talent---and he knows it. My Prophetic Voices Lecture was the ninth in a series that goes back nearly to the founding of the Boisi Center. The first was given in 2002 by Fr. Bryan Hehir. Among others who have given the annual lecture are Rabbi David Saperstein, Sister Helen Prejean, Jim Wallis, Rev. Peter Gomes, and Kathleen Townsend Kennedy. For obvious reasons, one of the participants in the lovely dinner held after my lecture referred to me (jokingly---I think) as "the affirmative action prophetic voice." However, that may be, I am grateful to Professor Wolfe and the B.C. community for the honor of speaking in the series, and for their graciousness (and patience).
