As Nina Shea reports, here, the PRC and its "Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association" are moving strongly against Catholic Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin, who "has not been publicly seen since July 7, the day he was ordained auxiliary bishop of Shanghai and the day when he dissented from state religious policy. Catholic sources report that the 44-year-old Bishop Ma is now being detained under a form of house arrest, cynically described as a 'retreat' by state religious authorities." God bless him.
Monday, July 23, 2012
More religious-freedom difficulties in China
John Joseph Garnett
Pope Leo XIII -- whose writings and thought are, of course, very important to those of us interested in church-state relations and "Catholic legal theory" -- died on July 20, 1903. On that same day, in 2012, my second son, John Joseph Garnett was born!
St. John Fisher and St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!
And, though he's not (yet!) recognized as a saint, we are big fans -- and will be hoping for the intercession -- of Bishop "Dagger" John Joseph Hughes. (More about him here.)
Thursday, July 19, 2012
"An Evangelical-Catholic Stand on Liberty"
John Garvey and Philip Ryken have a good piece at WSJ.com, discussing the participation of both Wheaton College and Catholic University in the effort to undo the misguided (and, I think, illegal) HHS mandate. A bit:
Many Americans disagree with our shared belief in the immorality of abortion.
That is their right. But there should be no dispute about a second point we hold
in common: Religious schools like Wheaton College and Catholic University should have the freedom—guaranteed by the United States Constitution—to carry out our mission in a way that is consistent with our religious principles. . .
A government that fails to heed the cries of its religious institutions
undermines the supports of civil virtue and puts in jeopardy our constitutional
order.
That last point is particularly important. All freedoms are vulnerable when religious freedom is eroded. As I argue here and here.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
"Schools that Work": The Cristo Rey schools
A nice piece, by Samuel Casey Carter, on the Cristo Rey schools. A bit:
Cristo Rey has done at least three things most urban schools fail to do: It operates on a financially sustainable business model; it educates to a high standard students whom the public-school system has left behind; and it encourages its students to develop real-world skills that will help them succeed in college and then on the job after they graduate.
Remembering the Blessed Teresian Martyrs of Compiègne
On July 17, 1794, the 16 Blessed Teresian Martyrs of Compiegne were guillotined by the Committee of Public Safety for various crimes against the French Revolution and its "Civil Constitution of the Clergy."
UPDATE: Thanks to a correspondent, here's a link to a powerful bit from the Finale of Poulenc's opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites.
More on the "I Do" Divide: A short response to Eric Bugyis
Eric Bugyis has a post, here, that, in my view, reflects a misunderstanding of what I wrote, and intended, in my recent post, "Marriage, Class, Opportunities, and Outcomes." He writes:
[I]f one reads past the headline, the picture becomes significantly more complex, and Garnett’s takeaway: “It’s not just that marriage might be ‘confined’ to the fortunate classes; it’s also, it seems, that mobility into those classes (or not) is connected to the decisions that people make — and that people’s parents make — about marriage and childrearing,” becomes less tenable (to the extent that it is not meant to be trivial).
I did, of course, "read the past the headline" and appreciate that the "picture" is "complex", and I am confident that my short reaction is both tenable and nontrivial. Bugyis seems to have assumed quickly that I was offering a "values-oriented" interpretation of the stories described in the piece, perhaps in an exercise of "sanctimonious" or "self-congratulatory affirmation." While I admit to thinking that "values" are implicated in the choices people make about marriage and child-rearing, I think his assumption here is unfair and uncharitable, and, in any event, unfounded.
My point -- which I certainly didn't hold out as the only "takeaway" from DeParle's piece and which I don't think was too hard to get -- was that (we know that) it is a good thing for children to be raised in intact, two-parent families, and therefore (here's the relevance of the "Dan Quayle" reference) it is not a good thing for us to celebrate the kids-without-marriage choices of celebrities and others who are able, by virtue of their economic advantages, to protect themselves and their children from the consequences that often attend, for those who lack such advantages, those choices. (To say this is not to imagine that educational and economic opportunities and situations do not put some people in a better position to make the better -- i.e., better-results-yielding -- choices instead of the worse -- i.e., worse-outcomes-yielding -- ones.) I would not have thought that this was more an empirical claim -- coupled with a critique of the more fortunate sector to which, I admit, I belong -- than a "sanctimonious" or "self-congratulatory" point.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Marriage, class, opportunity, and outcomes
This New York Times piece, by Jason DeParle, called "Two Classes in America, Divided by 'I Do,'" strikes me not only as a must-read, but as a must-engage and must-take-to-heart. It's not a new observation, i.e., that the less-traditional "lifestyle" choices that are increasingly available when it comes to cohabitation, single parenting, divorce, etc., tend to have worse results for poor people than for the better-off. A bit:
[S]triking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.
Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes. . . .
It's not just that marriage might be "confined" to the fortunate classes; it's also, it seems, that mobility into those classes (or not) is connected to the decisions that people make -- and that people's parents make -- about marriage and childrearing. The supermarket glossies coo about this or that celebrity having a baby outside of marriage, but "a large body of research shows that [children of single parents] are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school."
Maybe the piece should be called "Dan Quayle was right"? In any event, for the lawyers (and everyone else!): Can can law do, if anything, about the challenges identified in the piece?
UPDATE: An interesting reaction to the DeParle piece, here, at Get Religion.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Camosy discusses his Peter Singer book
The audio of Charlie Camosy's discussion of his new book on Peter Singer and Christian Ethics is available here.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Tom Farr on a troubling development
I know that it has been declared that it is partisan, bad form, alarmist, etc., to worry about the administration's understanding of, and dedication to, religious freedom, well understood. Still, what Tom Farr writes here ("Religious Freedom Under the Gun") seems worrisome.
The State Department recently announced that it was dropping coverage of religious freedom from its annual Human Rights Report. The declared reason: to avoid duplicating coverage available in the annual Report on International Religious Freedom.
[M]illions of people are suffering because of violent religious persecution. We should care about that, especially in places like Iraq, where U.S. military action—and our utter failure to advance the cause of religious freedom—has led to the devastation of Iraqi Christian and other minority communities (see the recent speech of Iraqi bishop Shlemon Warduni to the convocation of American Catholic bishops).
[Also,] he advancement of religious freedom would serve vital American interests. Both history and social science make it clear that highly religious nations like Egypt and Pakistan will not achieve stable democracy unless they embrace religious freedom in full. Nor will they be able to defeat the toxic religious ideas that feed violent Islamist terrorism, including the kind that has reached American shores.
In short, the Obama administration’s sidelining of religious liberty . . . is terribly shortsighted. America needs a resurgence of religious freedom, both here and abroad. The stakes are too high for this issue to be ignored any longer.
"We Belong to God, and Only to God"
Here , with thanks to Rocco, is a link to Archbishop Chaput's excellent close-of-the-Fortnight-for-Freedom homily, "We Belong to God, and Only to God." An important point:
Thinking about the relationship of Caesar and God, religious faith and secular
authority, is important. It helps us sort through our different duties as
Christians and citizens. But on a deeper level, Caesar is a creature -- a
creature of this world -- and Christ’s message is uncompromising: We should give
Caesar nothing of ourselves. Obviously
we’re in the world. That means we have obligations of charity and justice to the
people with whom we share it. For Christians, patriotism is a virtue. Love of
country is an honorable thing. As Chesterton once said, if we build a wall
between ourselves and the world, it makes little difference whether we describe
ourselves as locked in or locked out.
But God has made us for more than the world. Our real home isn’t here. The point of today’s Gospel passage is not how we might calculate a fair division of goods between Caesar and God. In reality, it all belongs to God and nothing
– at least nothing permanent and important – belongs to Caesar. . . .
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