Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Archbishop Chaput on the topic of "No King But Caesar"

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

The Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia, delivered the keynote address at the recent Seventh Annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture at Villanova University School of Law.  The Law School's largest room could not nearly contain the people who came to hear Archbishop Chaput; his keynote address had to be simulcast to another large room.  Among the other speakers were Gerry Bradley, Peter Steinfels, Helen Alvare, Michael J. White, H. David Baer, Fr. Bryan Hehir, and yours truly.  Most of the conference papers, including Archbishop Chaput's paper "No King But Caesar," will be published in the Villanova Law Review. Below is a sneak preview of what the Archbishop had to say.  It's not for the timorous -- or rather it is, in a profoundly challenging way, intended for those of us who sometimes hesitate to do what the Second Vatican Council taught (in both Lumen Gentium No. 31 and Gaudium et Spes No.43) that it is the obligation of the laity (and others) to do:  "to impress the divine law on the earthly city."  Archbishop Chaput said this:

"The way we lead our public lives needs to embody what the Catholic faith teaches -- not what our personalized edition of Christianity feels comfortable with, but the real thing; the full package; what the Church actually holds to be true.  In other words, we need to be Catholics first and political creatures second. 

"The more we transfer our passion for Jesus Christ to some political messiah or party platform, the more bitter we feel toward his Church when she speaks against the idols we set up in our own hearts.  There’s no more damning moment in all of Scripture than John 19:15: “We have no king but Caesar.”  The only king Christians have is Jesus Christ.  The obligation to seek and serve the truth belongs to each of us personally.  The duty to love and help our neighbor belongs to each of us personally.  We can’t ignore or delegate away these personal duties to anyone else or any government agency."

 

 

 

Monday, September 3, 2012

"Non nova sed noviter"

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

On the topic of "reform" in Church teaching, I think the following is especially helpful, emphasizing, as it does, an "inviolable law":
Not without serious reason, Venerable Brothers, have We wished to recall these things in your presence. For unfortunately it has happened that certain teachers care little for conformity with the living Teaching Authority of the Church, pay little heed to her commonly received doctrine clearly proposed in various ways; and at the same time they follow their own bent too much, and regard too highly the intellectual temper of more recent writers, and the standards of other branches of learning, which they declare and hold to be the only ones which conform to sound ideas and standards of scholarship. Of course the Church is very keen for and fosters the study of human branches of learning and their progress; she honors with special favor and regard learned men who spend their lives in the cultivation of learning. However matters of religion and morals, because they completely transcend truths of the senses and the plane of the material, pertain solely to the office and authority of the Church. In Our encyclical letter, Humani generis, We described the attitude of mind, the spirit, of those whom We have referred to above; We also recalled to mind that some of the aberrations from the truth which We repudiated in that Encyclical had their direct origin in a neglect of conformity with the living Teaching Authority of the Church. Time and again St. Pius X, in writings whose importance is known to all of you, urgently stressed the need for this union with the mind and teaching of the Church. His successor in the Supreme Pontificate, Benedict XV, did the same; in his first Encyclical, after solemnly repeating Pius' condemnation of Modernism, he thus describes the attitude of mind of followers of that doctrine: "He who is influenced by its principles disdainfully spurns whatever appears old, and eagerly pursues the new: in his manner of speaking of divine things, in performance of divine worship, in Catholic usages, even in private devotions" (AAS VI [1914], 578). And if there are any present-day teachers making every effort to produce and develop new ideas, but not to repeat "that which has been handed down," and if this is their whole aim, they should reflect calmly on those words which Benedict XV, in the Encyclical just referred to, proposes for their consideration: "We wish this maxim of our elders held in reverence: Nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum (Let nothing new be introduced but only what has been handed down); it must be held as an inviolable law in matters of faith, and should also control those points which allow of change, though in these latter for the most part the rule holds: non nova sed noviter (Not new things but in a new way)."
Venerable Pope Pius XII 
Allocution Si Diligis to Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops following the canonization of Saint Pius X 
May 31, 1954

Sunday, September 2, 2012

The legal form of thought

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

It's never too early to pre-order Legal Affinities: Studies in the Legal Form of Thought, which I co-edited with H. Jefferson Powell and Jack Sammons.   My Introduction to the volume is here.  The chapters of the book are inspired by -- and celebrate -- the work, spanning forty years, of University of Michigan law professor Joseph Vining.  As Mary Ann Glendon once wrote, "Joseph Vining finds surprising treasures hidden in lawyers' ways of knowing. . . .  He challenges with equal vigor the widely held notions that law can be reduced to processes and rules, or to power relations, or to meaningless signs and marks." Jurisprudence, administrative law, animal law, constitutional law, music, theology, St. Augustine, Judge Noonan in action -- they're all to be found, along with a whole lot more, in this volume.    

Friday, August 10, 2012

Update regarding Archdiocese of New York

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

I posted yesterday regarding Ed Mechmann's blog post, on the website of the Archdiocese of New York, defending Cardinal Dolan's decision to invite President Obama to be a keynote speaker at this year's Al Smith Dinner.  When Mr. Mechmann wrote to me to express some dissatisfaction with my post (which I subsequently revised), I asked him whether he had consulted or received permission before he added his post to the Archdiocese's website.  Here, with his permission, is Mr. Mechmann's reply:

"I can in fact tell you that I consulted with nobody about my blog post prior to putting it up online.  When I was asked to do the blog several years ago, the understanding was that I could post on whatever I wanted, so long as I did not contradict Church teaching, and that I did not require permission from anyone before posting it."

I am grateful for the clarification.  

The problem, then, turns out to be slightly different from the one I had first suspected.  An employee of the Archdiocese is using its official website unofficially to communicate unofficial positions on a most contentious matter that the Archdiocese has refused officially to address (or redress).  I cannot conclude that it is a good idea for the Archdiocese of New York -- or any diocese -- to pay people to publish through an official diocesan organ matter that the Ordinary does not support.  Yes, I would require permission from the competent diocesan authority, for the common good of the Church.  The disclaimers in the sidebar do not remedy -- and in some ways exacerbate -- the problem I perceive.  The amalgam of silence and quasi-official messages is confusing and disorienting.  These are confused times, and what good Catholics need from the hierarchy is clear and consistent teaching and adherence to that teaching, not quasi-official sponsorship of one more voice in the blogosphere.  

In any event, and with all due respect, I do not think that Mr. Mechmann's analysis -- according to which the Al Smith Dinner is not, in the relevant sense, "religious" -- is sustainable as a matter of Catholic ecclesiology and theology.  Sure, the Al Smith Dinner is not a sacrament or even a sacramental, but the work of Catholic Charities is the work of the Church (see the encyclical Deus Caritas Est Nos. 19-25), which surely is religious.  As I explained to Mr. Mechmann in email, the pseudo-logic of compartmentalization is a major part of what got the Church into this trouble in the first place, except that hitherto it was never the Church that said (unofficially, of course) that what the Church doesn't do in the sanctuary or sacristy is not religious, it was, instead, the state. The turning of these tables is a dark sign of the times. 

 

 

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Consistency from the Archdiocese of New York?

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

As the comments to this post by Ed Mechmann, an employee of the Archdiocese of New York, make clear, many souls aren't persuaded that inviting President Obama to the legendary Al Smith Dinner is defensible.

One has to wonder what is going on here.  Is the posting functionary's stated position the "official" response of the Archdiocese?  The sidebar on the blog disclaims all posts on the blog.  But it is utterly implausible that Mr. Mechmann's defense of the Cardinal's invitation to the President was posted on the Archdiocese's very own website without higher approval (otherwise we'd have a different problem), *especially* on a matter a contentious as this one. But how high did the approval in this case reach?  Any such approval renders the post the (at least) quasi-official position of the Archdiocese, if the very fact of its merely appearing on the Archdiocese's website -- whatever the disclaimers there -- doesn't already accomplish (nearly) that.

In any event, Catholics (and others of good will) should be insulted by this evasion/manoeurvre by the Archdiocese of New York.  The test balloon just issued by Mr. Mechmann's post shoud be shot down. If the invitation to President Obama can be defended, it should be -- and by the person(s) responsible for it.  The silence from the top and the mid-level defense occasion scandal to the faithful.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Women religious in the Church, then and now

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

Reading with sadness and almost incredulity the news of where many women religious in the United States see their future, I was reminded of this moving obituary -- of Anita Caspary Ph.D., formerly Mother Humiliata, IHM -- that shows, in remarkably short compass, something of how we got where we are today.  I take particular interest in the decline of the IHM sisters, as two of my great-aunts who wore that habit later repudiated it under Mother Humiliata's strong leadership.  Here is my great-aunt Sister Magdalen Mary, IHM, whom I was privileged to know in her old age, in a wonderful photo worthy of Brideshead Revisited and Mr. Samgrass. With all due respect to my great-aunts and other women religious of their generation, the future of women religious in the Church, in the U.S. as elsewhere, lies in this way of living, not in this one. I had the sense that Sister Magdalen Mary and Sister Mary Aloysius (whom I was also privileged to know late in her life) sensed as much in their last years, living, as they did, in diaspora, but I could be wrong about that. We never discussed it.  They were impressive women -- intelligent and self-confident, but also humble and committed to serving,in the name of Jesus Christ, those in need. The wounds from the way Cardinal McIntyre treated the IHMs remained raw even decades later.

 

 

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Final thoughts on FCC v. Fox, at least for this round of litigation

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

I've blogged here before concerning the FCC's and the courts' ongoing effort to settle the legal significance of the FCC's statutory mandate to prevent indecency in the broadcast media.  The Supreme Court's recent decision in this wash-rinse-repeat litigation that is characteristic of administrative law in the US today prompts these thoughts and reactions.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Cardinal Newman: To believe in a Church is to believe in the Pope

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

"I say the Pope is the heir of the Ecumenical Hierarchy of the fourth century, as being, what I may call, heir by default. No one else claims or exercises its rights or its duties. Is it possible to consider the Patriarch of Moscow or of Constantinople, heir to the historical pretensions of St. Ambrose or St. Martin? Does any Anglican Bishop for the last 300 years recall to our minds the image of St. Basil? Well, then, has all that ecclesiastical power, which makes such a show in the Christian Empire, simply vanished, or, if not, where is it to be found? 
I wish Protestants would throw themselves into our minds upon this point; I am not holding an argument with them; I am only wishing them to understand where we stand and how we look at things. There is this great difference of belief between us and them: they do not believe that Christ set up a visible society, or rather kingdom, for the propagation and maintenance of His religion, for a necessary home and a refuge for His people; but we do. 
We know the kingdom is still on earth: where is it? If all that can be found of it is what can be discerned at Constantinople or Canterbury, I say, it has disappeared; and either there was a radical corruption of Christianity from the first, or Christianity came to an end, in proportion as the type of the Nicene Church faded out of the world: for all that we know of Christianity, in ancient history, as a concrete fact, is the Church of Athanasius and his fellow Bishops: it is nothing else historically but that bundle of phenomena, that combination of claims, prerogatives, and corresponding acts, some of which I have recounted above. There is no help for it then; we cannot take as much as we please, and no more, of an institution which has a monadic existence. We must either give up the belief in the Church as a divine institution altogether, or we must recognize it at this day in that communion of which the Pope is the head. With him alone and round about him are found the claims, the prerogatives, and duties which we identify with the kingdom set up by Christ. We must take things as they are; to believe in a Church, is to believe in the Pope. 
And thus this belief in the Pope and his attributes, which seems so monstrous to Protestants, is bound up with our being Catholics at all; as our Catholicism is bound up with our Christianity. There is nothing then of wanton opposition to the powers that be, no dinning of novelties in their startled ears in what is often unjustly called Ultramontane doctrine; there is no pernicious servility to the Pope in our admission of his pretensions."
           Bl. John Henry Newman 
           Letter to the Duke of Norfolk 
           1875

Friday, July 6, 2012

"Only liberty"?

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

It's true that Pope Paul VI said the following in an allocution at the close of the Second Vatican Council:  "What does the Church ask of you [the state] today? … She asks of you only liberty, the liberty to believe and to preach her faith, the freedom to love her God and serve Him, the freedom to live and to bring to men her message of life."  It is also true the Council itself, in the Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis humanae, had just officially declared that it "left untouched" (relinquit integram) "traditional Catholic" doctrine on the duties of the state with respect to the Catholic Church (DH No. 1).  It is further true that in 1966, Father Joseph Ratzinger wrote that that sentence -- the one in which Dignitatis affirmed that the Council "left untouched" the traditional doctrine -- constituted a "minor flaw" (sic) that should be ignored!  Ratzinger later said that he no longer regarded that sentence in the same way.  The fact is, the Council did declare that it left untouched the traditional teaching on what the state owes the Church, and traditional teaching is not satisfied by "only liberty" for the Church.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Archbishop Chaput at Villanova Law

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

As previously announced, The Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., the Archbishop of Philadelphia, will deliver the keynote address at the Seventh Annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture.  The Conference will be held at Villanova University School of Law on Friday, September 14, 2012.  The topics and themes of this year's papers and discussion will be loosely bounded by Archbishop Chaput's book Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (2008, 2009).

Also speaking at the conference will be these distinguished scholars and public intellectuals:

-Helen Alvare, Associate Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

-Helmut David Baer, Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy and Department Chair, Texas Lutheran University

-Gerard Bradley, Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School

-Rev. Bryan Hehir, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Secretary for Health Care and Social Services, Archdiocese of Boston

-Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham University Center on Religion and Culture, University Professor at Fordham, and religion columnist for The New York Times

-Michael J. White, Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

 

Please mark your calendars and plan to join us at Villanova in September.  The exact conference schedule will be available in due course.

Previous Articles More Articles

Recent Posts

Categories

Monthly Archive