Monday, September 17, 2012
Tolkien on Law
MOJ-reader and fellow South Bender Jonathan Watson has posted on SSRN a paper that should be of interest, "Tolkien on Law". Check it out!
Worthen's "Power of Political Communion" gets Murray (and Biden) wrong
Molly Worthen's NYT piece, "The Power of Political Communion," is attracting (as it should) some notice and comment, and I think it makes a number of powerful and important points. But, it goes wrong in a few places, too.
First, the piece takes as true an unfair and inaccurate characterization of the social-welfare, spending, and taxation policies that are actually likely to be pursued and enacted by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a Republican President. ("[T]he Republican mission to slash the social safety net and deregulate Wall Street will worsen structural inequalities in a way that is radical and even anti-Christian.")
Next (and, for present purposes, more important), I think Ms. Worthen gets both Joe Biden and John Courtney Murray wrong:
Plenty of Catholic politicians still make their home in the Democratic Party, but most have learned not to rock the Roe boat or speak too loudly in the name of their religion: Mr. Biden has said that he is opposed to abortion but supports the Supreme Court decision as the product of consensus.
Mr. Biden is not a “cafeteria Catholic” who chooses his beliefs according to convenience. He stands in the tradition of the Rev. John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian who asserted that the foundation of modern pluralist society is not perfect agreement but continuing “public argument” based on shared values. The laws that frame this evolving conversation cannot always align with religious teachings. “It is not the function of civil law to prescribe everything that is morally right and to forbid everything that is morally wrong,” he wrote in a 1965 memo advising the church to support the decriminalization of artificial contraception.
The link that's provided regarding Joe Biden's asserted view that Roe is the "product of consensus" actually characterizes Biden's position as "Roe v. Wade is as close to a consensus as we can get." This is a very different position. Roe was certainly not the "product of consensus", but a radical and overreaching judicial imposition of the policy views of a few on the legislatures of nearly every state. What's more, the Roe position does not actually represent (and the Democratic platform certainly does not represent) what would be the "consensus" view in the United States.
Second, I believe it is wrong to move from Murray's intervention in the contraception debate of the 1960s to a conclusion that he would have supported the Roe regime. It was quite important, if I understand his writing correctly, to his view on the contraception question that it did not involve a question of public morality or basic justice (as the abortion debate -- he would certainly have thought -- does).
Our own Susan Stabile has written at length on this question, and I think Ms. Worthen's piece would have been better if it had taken Susan's paper into consideration.
Solve the fiscal crisis by taxing the church?
Paul Caron calls attention to a WaPo article suggesting that some are considering the Roman Catholic Church -- you know, the one with all the fancy art and deep "coffers" (See Garnett & Carr, "Drop Coffers," in The Green Bag) -- as a source of funds in fiscal-cliff times. Putting aside the Post writer's silly reference to the Church as "one of the last untouched sources of wealth" (um, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, anyone? Where does the writer think York Minster came from?), the piece raises some interesting questions. Note that the article is not only about proposals to impose taxes on the Church's property, but also about proposals to end various subsidies (like school funding). It strikes me that these different moves (i.e., imposing taxes and removing subsidies) raise different questions, but put that aside.
At First Things, Leroy Huizinga has some thoughts about the story. He writes:
. . . Why shouldn’t churches be taxed, in general? One reason has to do with preserving a healthy separation of Church and State. If Churches can be taxed, then the government can get into the business of running them (or crushing them) through tax policy, like it does most everything else. Another reason is that private institutions like churches contribute to the common good both as charitable institutions directly serving people through its various programs and also as space as a community mediating between individual and the State. A third reason is more practical: Churches generally do a better job administering social programs than government does (which, one suspects, grates government functionaries). A fourth reason applicable to Europe in particular: The reason most people bother visiting Europe and spending significant tourist dollars there is the legacy of beauty produced by Europe’s Christian heritage. . . .
Of course, one knows why government wishes to control religion, going back at least to Hobbes. Religious institutions have often been the only entities effective in challenging State power, reminding rulers that there is a higher law than their whims and will, that they too stand under the judgment of God and nature. . . .
Sunday, September 16, 2012
A thought about the "disenchantment of the world"
Yesterday, at a very interesting roundtable conference at Valparaiso University on Brad Gregory's new book, The Unintended Reformation, on participant recounted -- in the context of a conversation about Weber's "disenchantment" claim -- an exchange in which it was asked, "do you think you live -- that is, do you experience yourself as living -- 'in Creation' or in 'the Universe'?" A big question, that.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Chicago Lecture: "Religious Freedom in America Today"
The Lumen Christi Institute and the Catholic Lawyers Guild are sponsoring a lecture by some guy named "Richard Garnett" on "Religious Freedom in America Today," at Skadden Arps in Chicago, on Sept. 26. More info is available here. (I gather there's CLE available!) All those who are not re-arranging your sock-drawers on that day . . . see you there!
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
"For Greater Glory" released on DVD today
Get yours here. Viva Cristo Rey!
And, while you're at it, (re-)read Graham Greene's Power and the Glory.
The abortion debate: lower rates or more-just laws?
In this post, at America ("Schneck hits a nerve on abortion"), Vincent Miller writes, commenting on Prof. Steve Schneck's arguments at a recent Democrats for Life event:
Schneck casts much needed light on how abortion functions as a political
issue. Over the years, I’ve spoken with many committed and knowledgeable
Prolife activists, who can recount and critique the various strategy and policy
positions the movement has made. They know the issues and the political
tradeoffs. (It’s encouraging to see similar reflection in some of the comments
on the CatholicVote site referenced above.) But for so much of our politics,
it’s simply a moral posture. “Prolife” Republicans have been in power
repeatedly since 1980 and have spent virtually no political capital on policies
that address abortion in significant numbers. It’s a posture that need have no
relationship to outcomes.
Schneck forces us to think about outcomes. . . .
Schneck’s argument is dangerous to those who want to use abortion as a moral
shibboleth. If abortion is a real policy issue about women and children, the
calculus becomes much more difficult. Moving from checking the right box (in
time for one’s candidacy) to arguing about outcomes can only be a win for the
Prolife movement.
Two quick points: First, and with all due respect, Prof. Schneck's argument that "their proposals for Medicaid will have a grave impact on the abortion rate" rests on some highly questionable assumptions about the "proposals", about their effect on Medicaid, and about the connection between Medicaid cuts and abortion rates. Others have fleshed this out (and not only in what Miller calls the "right wing Catholic blogosphere"), and so I won't get into the weeds on this matter here.
The more important point, as I see it, is this: Yes, "outcomes" (i.e., fewer abortions) matter, but this is also a matter of basic justice. It is deeply wrong and gravely unjust that our laws exclude from protection against lethal private violence a particular group of vulnerable and voiceless human beings. This injustice is not lessened, it seems to me, by policies that have the no-doubt-welcome effect of reducing the human cost of those unjust laws. To say, as Prof. Schneck did, that abortion is a "powerful abortifacient" is, I think, to obscure the (to me) very important point that it is our unjust abortion regime, which not only tolerates but constitutionally protects certain decisions made by actual real-life decisionmakers (not abstractions like "poverty") to cause the deaths of innocent persons.
Miller writes, "[m]oving from checking the right box (in time for one’s candidacy) to arguing about outcomes can only be a win for the Prolife movement," and I suppose, if the choice is actually between merely "checking the right box" and improving outcomes, that's right. But, that isn't, in fact, the choice. The claims are repeated often, but they don't get any less false with repetition, that pro-life politicians (who, at present, tend to be in the Republican Party) haven't actually delivered any improvements in the legal regime and that these improvements are merely symbolic, and do nothing to help with outcomes. Again, both of these claims are false. If one really cares about outcomes, one cannot shelve the hard work of fixing the regime.
UPDATE: Michael Fragoso expands and improves on my points, at Public Discourse, here.
Rerum novarum and the Chicago Teachers Union strike
Regular readers of "Mirror of Justice" probably know that I am (to put it mildly) unimpressed by the argument one (too often) hears, in the context of policy and other debates about education reform, pensions and retirement benefits, collective bargaining and "closed shops", to the effect that "Catholic Social Thought supports unions -- see, e.g., Rerum novarum -- and, therefore, Catholics should be supporting the views and programs being advanced by the [fill-in-the-blank public-employee] union." This and similar arguments oversimplify significantly the Church's teachings on the rights of association and the dignity of both labor and laborers.
The recently announced and (at present) ongoing strike by the Chicago Teachers Union illustrate, for me, all too well that and why these arguments misfire. Chicago's public schools -- and the performance of too many of those schools' administrators and teachers -- are a disgrace, and they are causing -- at great public expense -- grave and lasting harm to thousands and thousands of vulnerable, often low-income people. The Chicago Teachers Union, like so many others, resists meaningful educational reform -- including school choice, which Catholic Social Teaching clearly supports -- at (almost) every turn. And yet, they are unsatisfied with pay that exceeds that of their colleagues in nearly every other big city and with a strikingly generous healthcare-benefits and retirement-benefits package, and they resist efforts to somehow hold them accountable for their performance.
Public education, properly understood, is the education of the public, and policies relating to public education -- which takes place in parochial, charter, and government-run schools alike -- should have as their aim the well being and flourishing of those children being educated, not of the adults doing (or not doing, as the case may be) the educating.
. . .Dozens of churches and civic organizations offered activities to children Monday, hoping to give parents' options by keeping their kids off the streets. So, too, did about a quarter of the city schools, although they only had skeletal staffs and limited resources. . . .
We've been told, recently, that Rep. Ryan's economic proposals "fail [a] moral test" set out by Catholic teaching. I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but put that aside. This does.
September 11
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Conference: "Telling the Story of Today's Christian Martyrs"
Notre Dame's Institute for Church Life is hosting what looks to be a wonderful conference in early November: "Seed of the Church: Telling the Story of Today's Christian Martyrs":
The conference intends to raise consciousness inside and outside the Church
regarding the widespread persecution of Christians around the world and to
explore how the Church has responded and might respond vigorously and
faithfully in the future.
It is striking how little attention the secular world pays to this injustice,
despite the fact that the persecution of Christians is one of the largest
classes of human rights violations in the world today. The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community estimates that some 100 million Christians are victims of severe persecution. Yet governments, human rights organizations, the global media, and the western university pay little heed. For example, of three hundred reports that Human Rights Watch has produced since 2008, only one focuses on a case of Christian persecution. Similarly, despite the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act by the U.S. Congress in 1998,
neither U.S. foreign policy nor civil society has ever made the persecution of
Christians a high priority.
A central objective of this conference is to rectify this lack of acknowledgment
of this persecution by the secular media and Western academia, and to
communicate to the world the extent and character of the persecution. Yet the purpose of the conference goes beyond raising awareness. It is also to explore
how the Church can respond to the persecution of Christian believers
prayerfully and liturgically, out of the depths of the Church’s spiritual
theology. In the most profound sense, what does it mean to be in solidarity with brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer violence for their faith?
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