"To judge" is a term used in many ways, and, as a result of that lack of univocity, we need to be careful when assessing the merits or demerits of particular examples of judging (or judgment). It is fashionable in some quarters to posture as eschewing all judging or judgment, but the anti-judging posture simpliciter is unsustainable. Judgment of various kinds is obviously a necessary achievement on a regular basis for a life of tranquil order or even the avoidance of the edge of chaos.
Judges, as in courts of law, do judge, but legislators and private persons also judge. For example, I, a private person, judge that torture of the innocent is always and everywhere wrong; no legal consequences attach to my private judgment but it is nonetheless what we refer to as a judgment. A judge acting as a judge, however, judges, for example, not only that the defendant did a legally proscribed act (actus reus) but also that he did it with the requisite fault (mens rea), and, under certain specified circumstances, the consequence called punishment will by judicial action (sentencing) attach to that legal judgment. Unless our whole system of penal law were unthinkably to be transmuted into a regime of strict or absolute liability, its operation depends upon judgments of both acts and, to my present point, persons and, specifically, their fault vel non. I would just add that a system of penal law that eliminated structured and limited judgment of the fault of duly accused persons in favor, instead, of universal strict liability would present its own, profound moral problems.
The preceding, about the necessity of judgment to civilized living, is background to our present, real-life predicament. On the one hand, the line for which Pope Francis is most likely most well known is "Who am I to judge?" On the other hand, however,
the Roman Pontiff is the supreme judge for the entire Catholic world; he renders judicial decisions personally, through the ordinary tribunals of the Apostolic See, or through judges he has delegated.
CIC 1442. The person who as Pope publicly undermined his own capacity "to judge" is at the same time (as long as he remains Pope) unalienably the supreme judge for the Catholic world: "Romanus Pontifex pro toto orbe Catholico iudex est supremus."
Before proceeding, let me anticipate the objection that it is canon law and the Roman-legal way of thinking, not the tension I have identified between the role of the "supreme judge" and the particular supreme judge who ponders "Who am I to judge?" that constitutes the problem. But it is canon law, duly articulated and justly enforced, that constitutes the problem? I submit that it is not, something Raymond of Penafort (whose feast the Church celebrates today) very much appreciated. A worthy system of law, such as the canon law of the Church over the centuries, is vital to the just and effective, not to mention virtuous, functioning of a (complete) society. The opposing point of view usually says that love is be preferred to law in the Church. Indeed, but the priority of love in the Church rather calls for law than displaces law.
It is well known and easily documented that many of the active minds behind what we call "Vatican II" wished to divest the Church of the inheritance of Roman law in the canon law. These tended, by the way, to be the same minds, such as Marie-Dominique Chenu OP, who wished to eliminate Latin as the liturgical language and also sought to downplay in Catholic theology the treasure of Greco-Roman discovery of the logos. As I have commented here before, however, if the Church had not been functionally talked out of her own system of law and its just enforcement, the incidence of crime and other wrongdoing in within the Church herself in recent decades would surely have been orders of magnitude lower. The canon law has remained on the books (though of course much weakened in relevant respects between the Code of 1917 and the Code of 1983), which is why my saying "talked out of her own system of law" is somewhat hyperbolic, but the evidence is irrefutable that canonical crimes by prelates, for example, have gone by and large un-prosecuted.
But enter a gaping exception. This week includes what is to-date the most famous, indeed epochal, exception to the don't-prosecute prelates rule. The Wall Street Journal and other sources are reporting that this very week, at long last, Archbishop McCarrick is finally getting the canoncial trial Pope Francis promised would be held when he accepted Archbishop McCarrick's resignation from the College of Cardinals this past June. I have no competence, let alone any wish, to try to prejudge (sic) the result of the ongoing trial.
What I do wish to underscore is that the man who very successfully adopted the anti-judging stance for all the world to see and celebrate is the man who nonetheless will be, will-nilly, the "supreme judge" in McCarrick's case. It does not matter to the exercise of that supreme jurisdiction that McCarrick seems to have found personal favor with Cardinal Bergoglio and then Pope Francis. Francis cannot recuse himself from being the supreme judge in McCarrick's case because, just as the Pope is the supreme legislator in the Church (which of course does not mean that his power is absolute), so, too, is he the supreme judge, irrespective of any bias of which he cannot rid himself. This perhaps startling claim is the consequence of the theological doctrine summarized as follows in Canon 331, a canon Pope Francis himself has not been shy about formally invoking (e.g., with respect to his own role in ratifying the results of the 2015 Synod (cf. Can. 343)):
The bishop of the Roman Church, in whom continues the office given by the Lord uniquely to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, is the head of the college of bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the pastor of the universal Church on earth. By virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise. (emphasis added)
We should pray for Theodore McCarrick and for his supreme earthly judge. It is to be hoped that McCarrick will receive a just trial and, if he is justly found guilty under canon law, a just penalty. These will depend upon judgments of his acts but also of his culpability. And thereafter there remains also the possibility of mercy.
Now enter the "Pope of Mercy." People who are likely to be reading these words will know that this Pope has made his mark on the media and the world, including many Catholic faithful, by styling himself as more merciful than others, including his predecessors. The most recent example of Francis's unique mercy came with his revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to declare that the Church now considers capital punishment to be always and everywhere "inadmissible," a topic I recently discussed here. Pope Francis seems to have judged (sic) all previous popes to be deficiently merciful on the question of capital punishment (and, for that matter, related penological policies and practices).
The rub, however, is as follows. Even the "Who am I to judge?" and uniquely merciful Francis cannot help acknowledge the necessity of judgment. Consider this from Francis's less-than-merry "Christmas Greetings" to the Roman Curia during Advent (sic) 2018: "To those who abuse minors I would say this: convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice." Justice, both human and divine, presupposes and depends upon judgment.
So far, to the best of my knowledge, not one man among the hierarchy has responded to the Pope's ominous Christmas imperatives to hand themselves over to the police. In fact, the very recent news is that Pope Francis did not know that he had just a few months ago given (and continues to give) cover in the Vatican (as an "Assessor" in high Vatican finances) to one of his protege bishops from Argentina who is publicly accused of sexual abuse of his seminarians. It sometimes seems that Pope Francis has very bad prudential judgment about whom to bring close to himself in exercising his ministry, thereby unintentionally multiplying the consequences of the "Who am I to judge?" policy.
We all await the divine judgment: Pope Francis got that right. And we should await that judgment with the "fear and trembling" that the Catholic tradition always until recently taught and preached. But Pope Francis also got right that he himself has a ministerial role that concerns judgment that, subject to ultimate and assured eschatological rectification, must be made in the here and now, sometimes by civil authorities but sometimes by ecclesiastical authorities. We must not forget, come what may in the McCarrick trial and otherwise, that Pope Francis is the supreme judge "pro toto orbe Catholico." Even the "God of Surprises,"a favorite of Pope Francis's, seems at this point unlikely to make the McCarrick problem go away. We therefore await the judgment of this Pope as the supreme judge for the Catholic world, including Archbishop McCarrick, keeping in mind that the Code of Canon Law (1983) concludes by reminding those called to judge under its force that "the salvation of souls . . . must always be the supreme law in the Church." CIC 1752.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
The growing number of those who claim that Pope Francis is making a mess of things can hardly be accused of disrespecting the Roman Pontiff. After all, it was Francis himself who in July 2013 famously said, "I want a mess." I count myself among those who prudently suspect most of this Pope's "off the cuff" remarks of being more planned than spontaneous, much like the reliable presence of professional photographers when from time to time Cardinal Bergoglio took public transportation in Buenos Aires. Far from disrespecting the Pope, those who positively credit Francis with making a mess are guilty of sycophancy of an odd sort; messes are usually to be avoided, but this Pope's promoters are programatically pleased to attach themselves to his mess making.
Disrespect and sycophancy aren't the only available postures, however. A middle way would be respectfully to call upon Pope Francis to speak clearly and authoritatively on the matters of faith and morals that pertain to the exercise of the Petrine munus and otherwise to speak with the modesty befitting a monarch. Previous Popes almost always knew how both things were to be done. And the evidence (as collected by Henry Sire, for example) is that this Pope, author of that undefined novelty "synodality," does indeed see himself as a monarch, but some commentators have reasonably asked whether he isn't one masquerading, less and less successfully, as a populist in the Peronist model. I remain of the traditional Catholic view that the Roman Pontiff is in fact constituted, by virtue of his office, as a monarch in his potestas, the current "mess" notwithstanding.
Which brings me to my present point, concerning Pope Francis's prepared statement and off-the-cuff remarks to the "International Commission against the Death Penalty" on December 17th. The mess of confusion in what the Pope wrote and said does not allow us to pretend any longer that this Pope is not saying -- as clearly as he is likely to say it -- that he himself is in fact teaching a development of Catholic doctrine concerning the civil authority's right to execute persons. But exactly what doctrine Francis has in mind, however, remains to be specified, and in specifiying it we should of course apply a hermeneutic of charity.
Pope Francis himself helps by making unmistakably clear that sometimes the civil authority will have not only the right but also the duty to execute persons for the valid purpose of defending persons for whom the state is responsible. This reaffirmation of the Church's teaching on self-defense is to be welcomed, even if it could have been accomplished in far more precise terms and concepts than the available texts and transcripts indicate. But what Pope Francis seems now to have ruled out as always "inadmissible" is the state's executing a person for the purpose of applying a just (and therefore proportionate) penalty or punishment to a person duly convicted of a crime.
What Pope Francis seems to be teaching is that, even when applied for the generally valid purpose of deterrence and to a duly convicted person to whom a proportionate penalty is due, the death penalty is always and everywhere immoral because it violates human dignity. How executing in valid (and therefore proportionate) defense of persons is not a violation of human dignity, whereas executing a duly convicted wrongdoer as a punishment always and everywhere is a violation of human dignity, is an apparent contradiction that is not explained away. Human dignity per se cannot be a good and sufficient reason not to kill a person if, as the Pope rather clearly states, self-defense, even including by killing a person, is sometimes both a right and a duty.
Setting this profound difficulty aside for the moment, I would like to conclude here with a different but deeply related line of inquiry, one that concerns Pope Francis's invitation, on December 17th in the remarks I have just been discussing, regarding how to judge (sic) those who in the past taught that the death penalty was in some cases morally acceptable:
In past centuries, when the instruments available to us today for the protection of society were lacking and the present level of development of human rights had not yet been reached, recourse to the death penalty was sometimes presented as a logical and just consequence. Even in the Pontifical State this inhuman form of punishment has been resorted to, ignoring the primacy of mercy over justice.
This is why the new wording of the Catechism implies also assuming our responsibility for the past and recognizing that the acceptance of this form of punishment was the consequence of a contemporary mentality, more legalistic than Christian, which sacralized the value of laws lacking in humanity and mercy. The Church could not remain in a neutral position in the face of today’s demands to reaffirm personal dignity.
What are we to say about those persons, including the Popes, who accepted -- in the sense of authoritatively teaching the in-principle moral uprightness of -- the death penalty as, in Pope Francis's words, "the consequence of a contemporary mentality" (italics added)? The then-contemporary morality was in fact, we are told by Pope Francis, immoral. But how are we to think about the possible culpability of the Popes and everyone else (from the Fathers of the Church through and including Pope Benedict XVI) in teaching the in-principle morality of the death penalty as punishment? It will not do to exonerate them, if indeed they need exonerating for holding and teaching allegedly objectively incorrect moral views, to say that their holding and teaching them was a "consequence" of the (defective) culture in which they lived. It is the very possibility of human free choice, obviously, that makes moral assessment possible, and it would add the proverbial insult to injury to claim that our forebears weren't choosers but, in the relevant respect, "consequences." What, after all, allowed Pope Francis the putative insight that the death penalty long approved by his Predecessors is, was, always has been, and always and everywhere will be in fact morally evil?
One set of answers to the complex questions about how to judge in the case of legitimate development of doctrine is provided by Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. (1926-2017). Here is the crux of it: "St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were defenders of the lawfulness of human slavery and of the rightness of religious persecution. Are we in a position to judge them as teachers of unjust doctrine? It is evident, I believe, that if each generation is free to measure its predecessors morally, using the criteria now accepted, no one will escape condemnation. We must be judged by the moral criteria we know. Judgment of the status of past moral doctrine presents a different question." (Noonan, A Church that Can and Cannot Change, 200-01).
Noonan thus suggests that persons should be judged by the moral criteria they knew, perhaps even the then-familiar "mentality," whereas doctrines must be judged, as Noonan elaborates in passages I have not quoted above, according to their conformity to the person of Christ. But is it an exhaustive dilemma between persons-as-implementers-of-then-contemporary moral-criteria and doctrines-as-subjects-of-evaluation-according-to-transcendent-criteria? I think not. Those who press for valid development of doctrine are themselves engaging in morally praiseworthy, one might even say prophetic, witness. But prophecy is risky business. False prophets exponentially outnumber true prophets.
What then of those who press for invalid "development" of doctrine? The Catholic understanding is that valid development of doctrine occurs when what was implicit in the depositum Fidei is authoritatively made explicit. In the face of a purported development that amounts in fact to no more than a comparatively attractive personal opinion, the judgment that cannot be blinked is that the purported doctrine, however attractive and no matter the sincerity of its proponent, is in fact false qua development of doctrine.
The other judgment, however, concerns the culpability of the falsifier. Here I think of something else Noonan wrote in the same vein, the valid development of doctrine: "The Modernists took the idea of development and ran away with it. Doctrine became the projection of human needs, changing in response to those needs. Control of doctrine by the objective content of revelation disappeared. . . . The Modernist position that human needs will shape doctrine carries the cost of eliminating any objective content; it is, as Pius X put it, 'the synthesis of all the heresies.'" (Noonan, "Development in Moral Doctrine," 54 Theological Studies 662, 671-72 (1993) (citations, including to Pascendi (1907), omitted). Noonan's touchstone, divine revelation in Scripture, of course establishes the moral rectitude of capital punishment in some circumstances. See Edward Feser's work here
Even in December we can join Pope Francis in his prayer intention for this past October: "St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle." The Modernists took the idea of development and ran away with it.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
As most readers already know, the forces of "the state" in the form of police officers, even Texas Rangers, spent some twelve hours yesterday rooting around inside the Houston Chancery in what the same Chancery does not want to hear called a "raid." The non-raid, prosecutorial action for records related to clergy sex was, as most readers also already know, of the home-base of the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal DiNardo.
This latest prosecutorial investigation of the Church for things having to do with clergy sex abuse is just one among a large and doubtless soon-to-grow number of similar legal actions across the country: at least fourteen states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Department of Justice in what could well become a nationwide investigation and prosecution. That Pope Francis, acting through the Congregation for Bishops, recently directed the USCCB not to vote on its planned reforms "to hold bishops more accountable," as the agenda items were often described by the press, could conceivably end up having emphatically-unintended legal consequence in the possible federal case against the Church. The Vatican's stated reason for disallowing the USCCB's planned vote was the meeting Pope Francis had already called for in in Rome in February to address "clergy sex abuse" and related issues on a universal scale.
As to that "meeting," I am deeply sympathetic to the need for universal Church governance on these issues, and I hope Pope Francis, who after all is the man in charge, will finally provide the rules and enforcement that are necessary to begin to get the wrongs righted and the ship turned closer to the right direction. I'm not immediately hopeful, however.
Consider that when Archbishop McCarrick belatedly "resigned" from the College of Cardinals at the end of July, the Vatican's one promise was that McCarrick would be subject to a canonical trial for his alleged crimes. But, as the Washington Post reported last week (Nov. 23), there is zero evidence that that trial, the mere public beginning of which could begin to repair some broken trust, will ever occur. It may well occur, but who knows? There is an easy, available, if imperfect, point of comparison in recent Church history. When Pope Benedict's butler committed his crime ("aggravated theft"), the butler got a speedy, public canonical trial that the Vatican was eager for the world to witness and take note of. At the very least, we can say that McCarrick is not getting anything resembling a speedy trial, and there are of course plenty of possible reasons, some of them sinister, for the slow, if any, progress in bringing McCarrick to canonical justice.
Meanwhile, McCarrick is an old man (88), and there is ample reason to suppose that the Vatican has little interest in having all the facts possibly at issue in his trial spread upon the record. It's worth noting in this connection that those who wag their finger and point to Archbishop Vigano's violation of the pontifical secret rarely then draw the obvious practical conclusion that Archbishop Vigano should be put on canonical trial. As with McCarrick, can you even imagine what would come out in that court room for the world then to have to face? Pope Francis will "not say one word" about Vigano's actions and un-refuted allegations, but he also will not cause his legal system at Rome to bring the law-breaking Archbishop to trial. Why should not Vigano, like McCarrick, be tried for his alleged crime(s)? (Of course, there is arguably good reason to conclude that Vigano should not be tried because in his case the positive law of the Church was displaced by the demands of higher law, but that's another question and it is emphatically not the position the Vatican has taken in not prosecuting Vigano).
All of which, along with so much more to the same effect in the recent news, brings me to my present point: "in the interest of public utility, crimes ought not remain unpunished" ("publicae utilitas intersit, ne crimina remaneant impunita"). This doctrine, first stated by Pope Innocent III in 1203, was an essential part of the Church's way of authorizing secular governments to create penal systems and punish criminals. This new doctrine, as Richard Fraher has written, "helped to justify the [then] nontraditional punitive measures which communal governments enacted to ensure stability and curb violence in the new city-states." Fraher continues: "the motivation behind the development of the new criminal procedures . . . was the perceived need for efficient enforcement of the canon law, for the purpose of deterring deviant behavior." And, lest anyone wonder, the historical record makes perfectly clear that deviant, criminal behavior by members of the clergy was crucial in the Church's decisions, as in 1203, sometimes to defer to the secular government in enforcing the criminal law.
Innocent III's accommodation of 1203 is just one example of the Church's out-sourcing some of the dirty work the Church, like the state, wanted, with good reason, to see done and done reasonably well, granted by all concerned that secular justice would fall short of the understood higher demands of higher law. From Pennsylvania and New York and Texas and probably soon to California, the states are doing work the Church has long relied on them to do.
To be sure, however, what the states are doing today is done against a radically different Church-state "balance" than any Innocent III could have imagined in his worst nightmares. But, as I have long insisted, at the heart of the problem has been the Church's refusal to follow and enforce her own law. It wasn't groovy for "the Church of accompaniment" even to acknowledge the Church's legal power over her members, let alone to threaten penal remedies and sometimes enforce them. But it was the "accompaniment" model that was at work when "Uncle Ted" was spiriting young men off to his long-notorious shore house.
"The Church of accompaniment" failed us, all of us: the victims, first of all and foremost, but also all the rest of us who were owed a Church that was governed the way Christ intended his shepherds to safeguard the faithful. So, while I am distressed by pictures of the police raiding one chancery after another, I am relieved and grateful to see the state starting to do for men, women, and children what the ministers of the Church have so miserably failed to do.
"The Church has its own inherent right [nativum et proprium Ecclesiae ius] to constrain with penal sanctions Christ's faithful who commit offences." CIC can. 1311. The U.S. bishops have acknowledged their awareness that "the McCarrick case" deeply troubles the American faithful, as it should. When will the Church exercise the duty correlative to her right "to constrain with penal sanctions" in the case of McCarrick, appropriate sanctions not approached by his current life of comparatively comfortable exile in an obscure Kansas Friary? Why exactly has McCarrick not been reduced to the lay state? Only Rome can accomplish the available justice in the McCarrick case. Will it? McCarrick has still not so much as offered a public apology, only a denial.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Forgiveness is the demand of the Gospel that can be the hardest to meet, at least when forgiveness is undertaken with the seriousness of purpose the Gospel and most of the Christian tradition understand it to require. But what constitutes the act we call "forgiveness?" I attempt to answer this question in a paper I have just posted, Forgiveness No Matter What: Justice and Love among Equals, the abstract of which appears below.
My argument for forgiveness "no matter what" does not imply, let alone entail, that those who forgive as they should should also reconcile with those they forgive. Current events make it timely to be clear on where forgiveness ends and the distinct question of reconciliation can begin. With Pope Francis and a growing chorus of Catholic bishops asking now for forgiveness for the acts and omissions of so very many bishops and priests having to do with the sexual abuse of children, vile and sometimes criminal acts and cover-ups, it bears emphasis that, on my account of forgiveness, forgiveness, although it is to be given no matter what, does not entail reconciliation. A victim who has managed truly to forgive his or her offender may nonetheless have good and sufficient reason to avoid anything like reconciliation with the offender, no matter how contrite or eager for reconciliation the offender may be. Even victims who can bring themselves to forgive bishops who concealed sexual crimes may surely have the best reasons for insisting that the offending bishops be removed, by the Pope, from office and duly punished. Forgiveness is a moral act of love among equals, and as such it is agnostic concerning the strictly prudential judgments that should determine how to interact, if at all, with forgiven offenders.
FORGIVENESS NO MATTER WHAT: JUSTICE AND LOVE AMONG EQUALS
Abstract: This paper argues that, given an understanding of human persons as having good reasons to act for the natural happiness of which they are capable, forgiveness is properly defined as the extension of the due love of self of a person who has been offended to his or her offender, upon realizing that he or she has been offended.
Every account of forgiveness presupposes some moral anthropology, and the teleological account of the human person made explicit here, with the help of the work of Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre, postulates a human function that in turn provides the person who would qualify himself as a rational agent good reasons for choice and action. Those reasons include, when the rational agent has suffered an injustice in the form of an offense, choosing, on the one hand, to hate the injustice per se but, on the other, to love first himself and, by an extension of that love between persons who are by nature equals, his offender. The basic idea, pursued in conversation with a wide range of contemporary accounts of forgiveness, is that the obligation to forgive one’s offenders is unconditional exactly because it follows from the indefeasible good reasons a human person has to love himself or herself, even in the face of offense and any consequent misdirected desire to hate his offender.
Forgiveness “no matter what” does not entail reconciliation with one’s offender; the self-loving forgiver may have good and sufficient reasons that in fact bar reconciliation with his offender, even the repentant and contrite offender. But an offended person never lacks good and sufficient reason to love himself with (here in Aquinas’s terms) amor amicitiae and amor concupiscentiae, nor, upon reaching the correct judgment that he and his offender are moral equals, his offender with those same two forms of love. Forgiveness involves willing the goods for one’s offender that escaped him when he chose to perpetrate the offense.
The analysis stresses the importance to forgiveness of what Harry Frankfurt called “second-order desires” because of the central place of forgiveness in preventing lives from going wrong because of misdirected desires, e.g., the desire to hate one’s enemy. The analysis grapples with the implications of the inequality of persons’ capacities to form second-order desires and, further, to reach the judgment that we are essentially one another’s equals. I also consider the place of grace, the divine gift by which the human person with a natural end is given also a supernatural end, in a complete economy of forgiveness. Finally, the paper suggests why modern nation states lack the important capacity to show offenders anything approximating the loving forgiveness by which those who have suffered injustice are bound back together with those who have done the injustice.
Monday, August 27, 2018
The current crisis in the Church, the one crystalized by Archbishop Vigano's epochal "Testimony" (which remains to be verified in the time-tested procedures and processes of the Church), has led lots of well-intentioned, good, prayerful, and hurt people to denounce failures of "leadership" in the Church. And it is no doubt true, I think, that we have witnessed and are witnessing hour by hour a failure of leadership on the part of our Catholic bishops.
But "leadership" is not a Catholic, nor even a theological, concept, and no manner or amount of better "leadership" will lead (sic) to solutions to the deep problems that are afflicting the Mystical Body of Christ. The Church has always taught that the successors to the Apostles who are the bishops are entrusted by their consecration with three distinct but inter-related functions: to teach, to govern, and to sanctify. Cf. CIC No. 375. Today and for more than a few decades, many of the bishops as individuals, the bishops as groups (such as national episcopal conferences), and the bishops as the college of bishops (cf. CIC 337) have failed the People of God in ways that, as the growing light reveals, are both abject and systemic. What we we are witnessing but also suffering is not merely a failure of governance; it is also cause and consequence of failures of teaching and sanctifying.
All I can think at this excruciating moment is that, along with the prayer and penance that are overdue and that are more needful than ever before, the solution must be sought in the exercise of the three true gifts of the office of bishop, not in more "leadership"or, its cousin, bureaucracy. This is a time for prophecy, yes, but more immediately for fervent exercise of the office of bishop in all three of its aspects -- teaching, governing, and sanctifying, and all three starting with the Bishop of Rome, as Pope Francis has preferred to be called from the time of his election to the Chair of Peter. The only true future for the pilgrim Church lies in orthodox teaching, just and effective governance, and the grace of the sacraments and prayer.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Current events in our nation's capital make this Independence Day an especially opportune occasion to observe that Blanshardism is not finished. By Blandshardism I mean, of course, the activities of those who believe what wrote in his best-selling book, American Freedom and Catholic Power nearly seventy years ago: "the Catholic problem is still with us." Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and McGeorge Bundy were among the books most famous fans. Following their master's lead, contemporary Blanshardians echo his call for a "resistance movement" to Catholics' "antidemocratic social policies." A catalogue of Blanshardian grievances against Catholics and their Church is at hand in an article (here) I wrote several years ago. The article closes with Blandshard's agreeing with Hilaire Belloc that holding and adhering to the Catholic view of things about how this world is to be arranged and governed ensures "monstrous conflict" with those who prefer a state that is the agent of "the new morality" (a term I borrow from Edward Rubin).
Of special salience in light of the aforementioned current events is the Blanshardian dogma that "overpopulation" encouraged by Catholic doctrine regarding human sexuality presents "the most basic and formidable threat to the future happiness of the human race." It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the force driving this anti-human program. Blandshard himself didn't shrink from aping the "three generations of imbeciles are enough" O.W. Holmes of Buck v. Bell in defending it: "Fortunately, neither the people nor the courts of the United States agree that there is anything necessarily wrong in depriving an insane or feebleminded person of the capacity to reproduce by a simple and relatively painless operation which does not even deprive him of the satisfaction of sex." Here one does well to recall that Holmes's opinion in Buck, from which the Catholic Pierce Butler alone dissented, was joined by Stone, Brandeis, Taft, Sutherland, Van Devanter, Stone, and, of course, McReynolds.
I am of the mainstream view that Buck v. Bell was wrong, but I am also of the view that Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a so-called "substantive due process" decision from which even Holmes did not dissent, and a decision contemporary neo-conservatives have a hard time justifying in terms of their judicial philosophy of choice, was and remains right. Be that as it may, our Supreme Court's power and authority to set aside acts of the legislature on the ground that they are substantively deficient are not going away, and for that sufficient reason it makes good sense for the Senators to inquire into the substantive views of judicial nominees. When the Senators do make those inquiries and make them openly, We the People can assess whether their own criteria for evaluating those views are Blanshardian, as they often are and will be, and then decide for ourselves if we will keep voting Blandsharians into high office. Blanshardians usually beget Blanshardians.
