Authority and the Law

 

As you may recall from yesterday’s readings at the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, the theme of authority was addressed in the reading from Deuteronomy and St. Mark’s Gospel. Authority is an important subject common to both Christianity and the civil law. What should Catholic legal theory’s take be on the matter?

Law that we encounter daily in civil society is a mechanism for exercising authority through the development of human norms that should be: (1) an exercise of human intelligence exercising objective reasoning that (2) takes stock of and responds to the needs of the intelligible reality that surrounds us. These two factors combine to formulate prudent normative principles that become the human law of the society for which they are promulgated to further the common good—the good of each individual and the good of everyone.

Of course, authority does not always proceed in this fashion. I suppose one reason that it does is because it possesses a sense of freedom to do what the authority wills. But this kind of freedom can be divorced from the exercise that comprehends and serves the common good. An illustration of this might be the recent HHS promulgation of regulations that will have a deleterious impact on Catholic institutions.

Here is where a thought borrowed from Lord Acton could help the authority that exercises its freedom in the promulgation of law: freedom is not what the authority wants to do; rather, freedom is what the authority must do in spite of what it wants to do. It is this latter context where human intelligence comprehending the intelligible reality has its best chance of making laws that further the common good.

 

RJA sj