Monday, September 26, 2011
Pope Benedict's "Reflections on the Foundations of Law"
Richard Myers called our attention to the Pope's recent address to the Bundestag, "The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundations of Law." It strikes me that this talk warrants a lot more conversation and exploration and engagement, especially from we lawyers. Contact your local Catholic lawyers clubs, Catholic law-students associations, etc., and dig into the lecture. Here's just one bit:
. . . Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. . .
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/09/pope-benedicts-reflections-on-the-foundations-of-law.html
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and it was good to see Pope's renewed attacks on positivism
(too bad he restricted comments to Europe, there is much worse (i think) situation in the US)
"where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture, ... it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognise only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-a-vis other world cultures is left in a state of 'culturelessness'...