Details will soon be available on the Villanova website about:
The Eighth-Annual
John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture:
Exploring and
Celebrating the Legacy of John T. Noonan, Jr.
Friday, November 15,
20013
Villanova University
School of Law
The Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr., has served on the United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 1986, following a
distinguished career in practice and teaching. In a scholarly career spanning more than half a century, Noonan
has written major works, some of them now classics, on a stunningly broad range
of topics including usury, bribery, contraception, religious freedom,
federalism, professional ethics, marriage and annulment, abortion, and
jurisprudence. The conference will
explore aspects of many of the topics Noonan has studied and illuminated, emphasizing
the thread that unites all of Noonan’s work: the development of doctrine.
Keynote Speaker
The Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr.
United States Circuit Judge
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Speakers
William Cardinal Levada
Prefect Emeritus, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Holy See
Patrick McKinley Brennan
John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies and Professor
of Law
Villanova University School of Law
Richard Painter
S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law
University of Minnesota Law School
Kenneth Pennington
Kelly-Quinn Professor of Ecclesiastical and Legal History
Columbus School of Law and School of Canon Law
The Catholic University of America
Reverend Michael Sweeney, O.P
President
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (Berkeley)
Joseph Vining
Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law Emeritus
University of Michigan School of Law
George Neumayr nails much of what's wrong in what is unfolding in this pontificate.
This Pope's private and erroneous opinions (e.g., that conscience is autonomous), shared with the whole world in the chosen format of magazines and newspapers, cannot but do great damage to souls. This could easily be cause for despair, but since we have it on our Lord's own authority that the Church, His own mystical body continued in the world, will survive until the eschaton, we should cheerfully and respectfully correct the Pope when he deviates from the Faith and pray fervently and hopefully for his greater fidelity.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Predictably, my agreement here on MOJ with Germain Grisez's trenchant criticism of Pope Francis's already-hallowed interview has generated some spirited, often misguided, and sometimes even angry correspondence. That goes with the territory, although the anger really isn't becoming or intelligent.
What should not go unnoticed, though, is this. Many of my correspondents are quick to find fault with me (and others) for criticizing a journalistic INTERVIEW given by the Pope. These same correspondents and their ilk, however, are frequent self-styled "dissenters" from magisterial teachings taught authoritatively in official Church documents. The interview is "sacred," but the actually sacred and officials teachings of the magisterium remain always ripe for "dissent." The sophistry and inconsistency are patent.
This is a good opportunity to share something I heard John Haldane (the first Catholic Professor of Philosophy in the University of St. Andrew's since the Reformation) say the other night in a fine and moving talk about being a Catholic intellectual today. According to Haldane, the time is overdue to stop dividing the Church along lines borrowed from politics. We shouldn't talk about "liberal Catholics," "conservative Catholics," or the like. This is a view I've long held. As Haldane stressed, what matters are othodoxy and orthopraxy. And these come by living the whole Tradition, not by any other means. Politicizing the internal life of the Church only blocks the all-importance of being united in Christ in all essential matters.
Those who seek to live the whole Tradition will be eager to be docile in the face of authoritative teaching and governing by Pope Francis, and they will devoutly hope to be sanctified by his example and ministry in order to become more docile and obedient in matters of orthodoxy. They will be prepared to be "surprised" by his evangelical example and to be vivified by it. They will, however, be intelligent if they deny that an "interview" is beyond criticism, and they will resist the suggestion that criticizing the interview represents a refusal to be "challenged" by the new Pope. For the reasons given by Grisez, we Christians cannot responsibly build our lives around ambiguities of the sort Pope Francis irresponsibly throws around in the medium of a journalistic interview. There are clearly inspiring and sound points in the interview, but they do not elevate the piece as a whole to a text from which one could, if one were so inclined, "dissent." One can intelligently disagree with an interivew, no matter which mortal gives it.
Pope Francis can do better, I hope.
A friend sent me something important that the distinguished moral theologian Germain Grisez, thoroughly a man of the Second Vatican Council, has written about Pope Francis's much-discussed interview and the thinking and attitude that it reveals. I'll preface Grisez's devastating criticism with the considered observation that the "dialogue" between the Church and the world so much pressed by some Catholics today, including Pope Francis himself, is a literally hopeless novelty. The term dialogue appears some 28 times in the documents of the Council, but, to my knowledge, the term had never appeared -- not once -- in earlier Church documents. There was transcendent reason to prefer the Church Militant to "dialogue." What happens in such "dialogue" is not that the world is converted, but that the world finds some of its *own* reasons for agreeing with *some* of what the Church teaches. But that sort of worldly-sculpted agreement elides the one necessary moment for which the Church must be working with respect to every available soul, viz., conversion. I would suggest that when the New York Times applauds its favorite, humble Pope, it's not because the Times or some poor soul has been converted. It's because the Times sees an image of its not-humble self in what the Pope has said. Grisez's critique should put a welcome end to certain myths about the value of the Pope's interview. The relationship between the Church and the world cannot be like that among "friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine" (Cf. John 16).
Here is what Grisez wrote:
Dear Dr. Moynihan,
Insofar as I understand what Pope Francis had to say, I can agree with him, but he said some things that I do not understand, and that have already been made bad use of by the secular media. Take the following passage:
"The dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent. The Church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow."
The teachings of the Church certainly are not all equivalent. There is a hierarchy.
But what is the point of saying that the Church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a "disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently"? Making this assertion suggests, unfortunately, a caricature of the teachings of recent pontificates. I assume Pope Francis would reject that reading. But where, then, is the state of affairs that needs to be overcome?
Proclamation in a missionary style does focus on essentials. But the new evangelization cannot proceed as if the Gospel has not been already preached, and either understood or not, but in either case, rejected. Still, I agree that what is central needs to be presented more clearly and forcefully than has generally been the case. Unless people believe that Christ has risen and will come again and gather into his kingdom all who are ready to enter, and unless they hope to be among those ready to enter, there is no use trying to instruct them about what they need to do in order to be ready to enter.
But what is meant by “moral edifice of the Church”? Many people mistakenly think that the moral truth the Church teaches is a code she has constructed and could change. If that were so, it could collapse like a house of cards. Perhaps Pope Francis means that the moral teachings, though they are truths that pertain to revelation, will collapse for the individual who lacks hope in the kingdom to come. But who knows what he means? The phrase is impressive. It reverberates in one’s depths. But if it was suggested by a spirit, it was not the Holy Spirit, for it is bound to confuse and mislead. [emphasis added]
I’m afraid that Pope Francis has failed to consider carefully enough the likely consequences of letting loose with his thoughts in a world that will applaud being provided with such help in subverting the truth it is his job to guard as inviolable and proclaim with fidelity. For a long time he has been thinking these things. Now he can say them to the whole world — and he is self-indulgent enough to take advantage of the opportunity with as little care as he might unburden himself with friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine.
Germain Grisez
Monday, September 16, 2013
Thanks to Rick for calling our attention to Mike Baxter's characteristically trenchant essay "Murray's Mistake". Baxter's thesis reminded me of how Boston College's Fred Lawrence made a parallel and overlapping point in criticism of Murray: "Murray never acknowledged that Locke did not basically disagree with Hobbes's 'artificial law of nature.' He did not recover virtue instead of power as the publicly relevant chief concern of political theory. Intsead he moderated Hobbes's bottom line of self-preservation into comfortable self-preservation." The result, as Lawrence goes on to explain, is that "[t]he common good and values not able to be 'costed out' get eliminated from the sphere of political discourse and public opinion. This de facto privatization of Christian values may just be left obscured, albeit unintentionally, by Murray's famous distinction between public order as the domain of legitimately exercised political power and the common good as the domain of public consensus and of social concern beyond the limits of public order."
I'm not clear on why Lawrence thinks that what Murray obscured he obscured "unintentionally." Be that as it may, Baxter is surely right that Catholics today are not capable of doing what Murray supposed that they would do. The solution to the current problem requires that the Church do what Murray refused her constitutional room to do. I'll commend again in this connection Chris Ferrara's magisterial book Liberty, The God That Failed. In my view and in Ferrara's, the *problem* is the separation of the state from the Church. The Church-less state that is remitted, on a good day, to mere natural law cannot think adequately, and, on the bad day that is our era, the state gives up thinking altogether and righteously does whatever the majority happens to covet.
