Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was in Philadelphia today to give the St. Thomas More Society's annual Gest Forum lecture. The lecture was high Neuhaus style, with consequent effect: Many came away wishing they were capable of offering such courageous witness to the Catholic faith. On the train ride home I was pondering how the laicized state has failed to uphold its part of the modern bargain. The Church blessed the state's emerging as an independent instrument, rather than a sacral achievement under the watch of the Church, on the promise that the state would protect and reflect a true anthropology of the person, including the person's intrinsically social nature. The toothpaste has left the tube, and now the very idea of the state's giving effect to an understanding of what is truly good for humans is drummed out of court. Neuhaus's response to the problem, as offered today to a rapt audience of lawyers: People of good faith must press on in every possible and attrative way to hold government responsible to the natural law.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Breaking the bargain
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
"That would make the angels weep"
The title is a gem stolen from a sentence studding Jo McGowan, "To Welcome a Child: Gay Couples & Adoption," Commonweal, May 5, 2006. What/who, you may ask, would inflict as much upon the angels? Answer: "The recent decision by Catholic Charities of Boston -- under unwarranted pressure from both the bishops of Massachusetts and from the Vatican -- to refuse to allow gay couples to adopt children." The aforementioned decision, the persevering reader learns, "is a disgrace to all that the church stands for." Wow. Eventually, the peroration : "Love is rare enough in this world of violence and meanness. Can we truly consider rejecting it because it comes from people of the same sex?" That's grand, but please back up a bit for the richest line in the piece: "Gay couples, having staked everything on love in a world that is often hostile toward them, let alone tolerant, are better suited than most to the challenges of caring for children who need unconditional acceptance."
I'm sorry, but, first, where is the evidence that gay couples' love makes them "better [though,breaktakingly, not best] suited than most" for caring for unwanted children? Second, and related, please God that each of us could say that he or she has "staked everything on love." But are members of gay couples categorically those individuals? My reading is less clear. Third, the Catholic and natural issue isn't really, is it, that the aforementioned/hypothesized love for a child is "from people of the same sex," but rather whether, for this purpose, the child is loved as a member of a family? Two or seven people giving love, however blessed that phenomenon, do not a family make. It's a signal achievement of our modern culture to deny that groups, such as families, amount to more than an aggregate of the members. Finally, the local ordinaries' and the Holy See's exercising authority concerning the works of "Catholic Charities" cannot be the problem. For the reasons suggested above, their doing so was not "unwarranted" (though I confess uncertainty as to the traditional meaning of "unwarranted").
I wouldn't have bothered, except that Commonweal should have done better.
Monday, May 8, 2006
Gay marriage and religious liberty
Forgive me if someone's already blogged about this here. Maggie Gallagher has a fine piece, in this week's Weekly Standard, on where we're headed and where some already are. In the following paragraph, which I excerpt, Gallagher is describing a conference in which scholars pro and con gay marriage had been asked to speak to the attendant issues of religious liberty.
Reading through these and the other scholars' papers, I noticed an odd feature. Generally speaking the scholars most opposed to gay marriage were somewhat less likely than others to foresee large conflicts ahead -- perhaps because they tended to find it "inconceivable," as Doug Kmiec of Pepperdine law school put it, that "a successful analogy will be drawn in the public mind between irrational, and morally repugnant, racial discrimination and the rational, and at least morally debatable, differentiation of traditional and same-sex marriage." That's a key consideration. For if orientation is like race, then people who oppose gay marriage will be treated under law like bigots who opposed interracial marriage. Sure, we don't arrest people for being racists, but the law does intervene in powerful ways to punish and discourage racial discrimination, not only by government but also by private entities. Doug Laycock, a religious liberty expert at the University of Texas law school, similarly told me we are a "long way" from equating orientation with race in the law.
By contrast, the scholars who favor gay marriage found it relatively easy to foresee looming legal pressures on faith-based organizations opposed to gay marriage, perhaps because many of these scholars live in social and intellectual circles where the shift Kmiec regards as inconceivable has already happened. They have less trouble imagining that people and groups who oppose gay marriage will soon be treated by society and the law the way we treat racists because that's pretty close to the world in which they live now.
Friday, May 5, 2006
Weigel on Fr. Jenkins's tergiversating
| A Golden Dome opportunity missed: | ||
A pall will hang over commencement at the University of Notre Dame this year --- the pall of a great opportunity missed. Temporarily, one must hope. Notre Dame's new president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, got off to a brilliant start this past fall, with an inaugural address that located Notre Dame solidly within the ancient tradition of Catholic higher learning. Father Jenkins then led a pilgrimage to Rome, an act that embodied a key plank in the reformist platform announced in his inaugural address: to "think with the Church" means both to think and to think "with the Church." Then, in April, things changed, dramatically and for the worse. After a campus-wide debate, Father Jenkins announced that "the creative contextualization of a play like 'The Vagina Monologues' can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition." Therefore, Father Jenkins decreed, the V-Monologues could continue to be produced on campus.
It was difficult, bordering on impossible, not to read Father Jenkins' decision as a surrender to the most corrosive forces eating away at the vitals of Catholic higher education. That view is shared by numerous Notre Dame faculty, among whom Holy Cross Father Wilson Miscamble stands tall, literally, intellectually and spiritually. In a public letter to his brother Holy Cross priest, Father Miscamble told Father Jenkins that "your decision is being portrayed as involving your 'backing down,'" in part because of an untoward deference to "the convictions of certain senior Arts and Letters faculty that any restriction on this play would damage our academic 'reputation' --- and especially among those 'preferred peer schools' whose regard we crave." "Indeed," Father Miscamble continued, "it is hard to understand [your decision] in any other terms." Then Father Miscamble got down to cases: "In your recent...statement you reveal a level of naivete about the process of a Catholic university engaging the broad culture that is striking and deeply harmful to our purpose as a Catholic university. We live at a time, as Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter pointed out some years ago, when the elite culture is programmed to trivialize religion. Further more, much of popular culture is deeply antithetical to religious conviction and practice. It offers a worldview completely at odds with any Catholic vision. It is a worldview from which none of us can be sequestered and, indeed, many of our students arrive here far more influenced by the reigning culture than by faith convictions. "Amidst this larger context you are to permit the continued production and promotion of a play which, as our colleague Paolo Carozza rightly puts it, 'seems to reduce the meaning and value of women's lives to their sexual experiences and organs, reinforcing a perspective on the human person that is itself fundamentally a form of violence.' Dialogue with this point of view is ridiculous. It should be contested and resisted at Notre Dame but never promoted. Notre Dame must hold to a higher view of the dignity of women and men. Might I ask that if this play does not meet your criteria of an 'expression that is overt and insistent in its contempt for the values and sensibilities of the University,' then what would?" Father Miscamble ends by asking his brother priest to "go back to your best self and to your original instincts and position on this matter. Don't embarrass those of us who want to work with you to build a great Catholic university. Lead us."
The V-Monologues are stupid, and one of the things a great Catholic university ought to teach its students is to avoid the stupid. It can't do that by the "creative contextualization" of stupidity. George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C | ||
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Authority, etc.
I've only just begun to study the fascinating postings on authority, etc., but one question occurs to me right away. Don't the Church's own careful distinctions as to the kind of adherence she asks of the faithful matter to analysis? An alternative taxonomy, helpful in itself, has been developed in the conversation here, but I'm not clear on how it tracks or declines to track what the Church herself has taught on these precise questions. The Church's distinctions may prove to be inadequate to our purposes here, but in a tradition that knows how to "define and declare," pronouncements of other kinds should be treated as what they claim to be. Perhaps there are straw men in operation here and there? For example, the Church claims the authority to teach unerringly what is contained in the deposit of faith. But does she claim to teach with equal certainty what is not explicit in the deposit of faith but is known (only) thanks to the natural law?
Friday, March 24, 2006
"Darwin in Dover, PA," and metaphysics in high school
The April First Things includes a trenchant, short piece (still available only in paper), by my colleague Robert Miller, on what "Intelligent Design" is and is not. Check it out. In addition to explaining why "Intelligent Design" is not science (and therefore should not be advanced in "science" courses), it recommends as follows: "I think public high schools ought to offer, at the senior level, a course in philosophy, including metaphysics. The texts should include Aristotle and Aquinas on arguments for the existence of God but also criticisms of such arguments by Hume and Kant, as well as some contemporary philosophy of religion. This would negate the impression, perhaps created in science classes, that science explains everything there is to explain about the universe."
Friday, March 17, 2006
More Maritain
Thanks to Rick and Michael for noticing the review of Barre's Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven. This rich book deserves and rewards careful attention. As does the beautiful book by Rick's colleague Ralph McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life (Notre Dame, 2003). One wonders how the various notions of "dissent" ventilated here in recent months would be judged by the charitable Maritain who cherished Merton and Alinsky.
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Titles?
Vatican City - Pope Benedict has dropped one of his nine official titles, giving up "Patriarch of the West" in a discreet step apparently intended to help promote closer ties with the Orthodox churches of the East.
Benedict will retain titles such as Vicar of Jesus Christ and Servant of the Servants of God, but the patriarch title will not appear in the Vatican's annual directory due out later this month, Roman Catholic Church officials said on Wednesday.
The Pope has stressed his desire to improve ties with the Orthodox churches, which split from Rome in 1054, and a Vatican aide said scrapping the patriarch title was meant to help that.
"In the past, the patriarchate of the West was contrasted with that of the East," Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, former head of the Vatican office for eastern rite churches, told the Italian news agency ANSA.
"I think the Pope wanted to remove this sort of contrast and his act is intended as a spur to ecumenical progress."
Some Vatican observers were not so sure this would help.
The daily Corriere della Sera said the Orthodox churches "could see this papal innovation as an indirect affirmation of himself as a 'universal patriarch'".
Vatican relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of these churches, have been strained because the Moscow hierarchy suspects the Catholic Church of trying to win new members there following the fall of communism in 1991.
Orthodox leaders could see the move as a Vatican bid to ignore geography and rise above the ancient structure of Christianity as centred in the five main patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.
Rome is the centre of the Roman Catholic Church while Istanbul, the former Constantinople, is home of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, symbolic head of the Orthodox churches. The others play much lesser roles in Christian affairs.
Benedict will visit Bartholomew in Istanbul in November.
The Pope's remaining eight titles are Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Province, Sovereign of Vatican City and Servant of the Servants of God.
Against torture
Michigan law professor Joseph Vining, a Catholic, has written against the degraded lawyering in the torture memo. Unfortunately for present purposes, his characteristically insightful, elegant, and elevating essay is part of the volume After Authority, which I edited and is now under consideration for publication. Other contributors to the volume, while I'm at it, include (among others) Avery Cardinal Dulles, Russell Hittinger, Steve Smith, Michael J. White, Tom Kohler, Glenn Tinder, and J. Budziszewski. We can hope that the outside readers will hurry.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Regarding the "New Impediment"
The article by Monsignor Candreva in the magazine America dated February 27 of this year concludes with this hope: "I hope that the above reflections can help assure my brothers in the priesthood who may feel that the instruction [sic] makes them 'second-rate' that any of us who honestly made our ordination promises, who have faithfully accepted the burden of celibacy, and who have, no matter how we may have failed the Lord and his people, risen up through the grace of the sacrament of reconciliation to continue to carry our cross, can look forward with founded hope to being embraced by the Lord at the end of our journey." America identifies Monsignor as a canon lawyer and retired priest of the Dicocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y.
America attaches the following sub-title to Candreva's essay: "The Vatican's document regulating admission to seminaries and ordination revives an almost extinct legal device." No doubt, Monsignor is right, in a way, that "Prohibiting men with certain characteristics from being ordained to the priesthood is nothing new in church [sic] discipline." But does Monsignor see this as no more than a matter of (1) regulating (2)admission to (3) seminary or ordination as (4) a question of discipline or legal device? There is a theology that is being applied, if clumsily, in the Instruction.
"Purposive interpretation," as we say in the law, would be of value here. Failing that, a return to the "almost extinct legal device," the "impediment," might be necessary. Or are there no "impediments" to the sacraments?
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
