Here, at Public Discourse, is an essay by Elizabeth Kirk in which she underscores the many missteps in the recent majority opinion of the Kansas Supreme Court which, in a "failed attempt at serious philosophy," discovered/created a natural right to abortion, protected by that state's constitution. Kirk also highlights the clear dissenting opinion of Justice Caleb Stegall.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Elizabeth Kirk on the Kansas abortion decision . . . and dissent
Great news: Ukrainian Archbishop Borys Gudziak to receive Notre Dame Award
More here.
Ukrainian Archbishop the Rev. Borys Gudziak will be presented with the Notre Dame Award at a ceremony June 29 in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, the University of Notre Dame announced Monday.
Gudziak is the founder of Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He recently was elevated by Pope Francis to become metropolitan-archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia (the equivalent of an archdiocese).
Ukrainian Catholic University was the first Catholic university to open in territory of the former Soviet Union and the first university opened by one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. It was formally founded in 2002.
The Notre Dame Award is presented to “men and women whose life and deeds have shown exemplary dedication to the ideals for which the University stands: faith, inquiry, education, justice, public service, peace and care for the most vulnerable,” according to the university.
Learn more about Archbishop Gudziak in this moving piece by George Weigel in First Things.
Friday, May 3, 2019
Hittinger on "The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine"
Everything Russell Hittinger writes about the Church's social teachings is worth reading, so I suppose there's no need to say that this essay, "The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation", is, too. (The "four basic principles" he discusses are human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good.) Along the way, there's a lot about "social ontology" and the challenge that the Catholic understanding of persons poses to methodological individualism, and to some understandings of religious freedom.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Another Garnett on solidarity and suffering
Here at MOJ, we've often discussed the content and application of the core principles of the Catholic Social Thought tradition, including "solidarity." I'm pasting, below, a short reflection that my daughter Maggie (a student at Notre Dame) wrote on the idea:
. . . In his encyclical letter, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI writes: “the true measure of humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer.” Humanity is measured by the ways in which we live in relationship when it is most difficult. Suffering challenges, breaks, and burdens us. It can quickly isolate us, or separate us from our relationships. When we love well in suffering, not despite of it, we are loving as we are called to. And, this relationship is more than just the acknowledgement of someone else’s suffering: “to accept the “other” who suffers, means that I take up his suffering in such a way that it becomes mine also.”
That, dear readers, is what I want to say that solidarity is. It is shared outrage, sure. It can be a recognition and resistance to injustice, absolutely. But it seems to me that solidarity exists most profoundly where it is hardest to find: in the taking up of another’s cross as my own. By sharing in suffering, being in solidarity with another in their pain, light and love enters in.
In this solidarity in suffering we encounter Christ in a powerful way. Jesus Christ became man so that he could suffer “for and with us”. “Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way” (Spe Salvi). In our pain, underneath the weight of our crosses, we remember that he lived in that same pain, underneath the weight of his own cross. Solidarity is not found in a Facebook-organized leggings protest: it is found on a tree on Calvary.
That is, of course, a challenging example to live out. I do not handle suffering as well as I would like to. When I encounter hurt, it’s often with discomfort. I feel useless, unable to fix things, and eager to escape that feeling. It is easy to feel insufficient when others are suffering. But God is not calling me to be the perfect fix-it-girl. He is not asking me to have all the answers. When I am blessed enough to have a friend approach me in their suffering, they don’t want me to rattle off a solution. They are just asking me to be with them.
As much as I want to fix everything -- to end the hurt, heal the pain, calm the anxiety, shut out any and all darkness -- I cannot do that, for myself or for those I love. What I can do is be in solidarity, simply in presence. For me, that has been a friend sitting with me on a chapel floor, staring at the tabernacle with a friend. It’s been a cold walk around the lakes, or a meal that is longer than it “should” be, because of a conversation that needed to be had. It is, and ought to be, quiet prayer intentions, tight hugs, shared tears, vulnerable moments, and admittance of weakness that allows us to be more fully and completely human.
If we approach solidarity with compassion, if we “suffer with”, we might be able to set aside the instinct to fix, and settle instead for the presence and empathy that we can offer. And, if we enter into that compassion with consolation, if we are with those we love in their solitude, suffering ceases to exist in isolation. We then exist in solidarity, not because we offer solutions but because we are willing to be present.
Solidarity is difficult. Asking for the presence of others, even those you know love you, is hard -- I can be really bad at it. But by entering into real and intentional relationships, we find people than can, imperfectly and temporarily, help us to carry what we must. Those people, in turn, point us to the One that, perfectly and eternally, carries us. . . .
Saturday, April 20, 2019
Berkowitz reviews Wilken on the Christian Foundations of Human Rights
Here. A bit:
In “Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom,” Robert Louis Wilken provides a wealth of evidence drawn both from major events and seminal texts to show that the unfolding of Christian faith and the development in the West of the idea of individual freedom have been intimately intertwined.
This is not to deny the religious persecution across centuries perpetrated by Christianity. The enforcement of religious orthodoxy and the repression of dissent have been a default option throughout history. What distinguishes Christianity has been the steady and deepening appreciation that its core teachings require not merely toleration — in the sense of grudging or politically expedient acceptance of differences in religious belief and forms of worship — but rather robust freedom because by its very nature faith cannot be coerced. So powerful was this idea within Christianity and so profound has been Christianity’s influence in the West and around the world that it has furnished an “intellectual framework” that established freedom of religion as a basic assumption of liberal democracy and eventually as a fundamental human right. . . .
Thursday, April 4, 2019
"Catholic Thought and the Challenges of Our Time"
Here, at Public Discourse, is an essay by Ryan Anderson called "Catholic Thought and the Challenges of Our Time." There's a lot going on in the essay, and I recommend reading the whole thing. Among other things, it engages a topic that has been a focus of the Mirror of Justice project from the beginning, i.e., the importance of a sound, Christian moral anthropology for, well, just about everything. A bit:
The capacity to know right and wrong, good and evil, is key to recovering today a sound understanding of freedom. For the liberty on offer in many post-Christian liberal societies today is not the liberty of the ancient Greeks, Romans, or Christians. For them, the most important freedom was freedom from slavery to sin, freedom for self-mastery. Today we face two competing conceptions of freedom, in what the Belgian-born Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers has termed a freedom of indifference and a freedom for excellence.
On the modern conception of freedom, freedom is indifferent to what is chosen. What matters is simply that I chose it. Whether I chose to degrade myself or to respect my dignity is ultimately irrelevant, provided that I freely choose either way.
The more traditional understanding of freedom flowed out of a different conception of human nature. If freedom is grounded in man’s rational and animal nature, and in how such freedoms allow man to flourish given his nature, then freedom is directional—it has a purpose, an end, and thus has limits. It is not primarily a freedom from something, but a freedom for something. A freedom for excellence, a freedom for human flourishing.
"Education in a Catholic Key"
I read recently a short essay/pamphlet on the nature and mission of Catholic education, published by Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education and written by some friends and colleagues associated with that (wonderful) program. It's called "Education in a Catholic Key" and I recommend it. You can download it here: Download Education in a Catholic Key. Check it out. (And pray that many bishops, superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents do, too!)
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Recalling the legacy of St. Pope John Paul II
April 2 was the 15th anniversary of the death of Pope (now Saint) John Paul II. Here is a post I wrote, back in 2005, reflecting on some aspects of his life and legacy that seemed relevant to the work of Mirror of Justice:
Here's a post I did, the day after Blessed Pope John Paul II's death, back in April of 2005:
I'm sure that many of us are reflecting on the effect that the Holy Father had on our faith and lives, and thanking God for the gift of his ministry and example. It also makes sense, here on MOJ, for us to consider what the Pope's work and thought might mean for law and legal theory. A few thoughts:
First, many of the Pope's writings focus on the importance of culture as the arena in which human persons live, thrive, and search for truth. His was not a reductionist Christianity -- one in which the choices and hopes of persons drop out of the analysis, and are replaced merely by one "dialectic" or another. Nor is Christianity merely a matter of a rightly ordered interior life. We are precious and particular, bearing the "weight of glory," but also social, relational, political -- and cultural. And, he recognized, law both shapes and is shaped by culture.
Second, the Pope returned again and again to the theme of freedom. Certainly, for lawyers -- and particularly for lawyers living and working in our constitutional democracy -- questions about the extent to which law can and should liberate (and, perhaps, liberate-by-restraining?) are appropriately on the front burner. It's fair to say that John Paul II proposed an understanding of freedom -- and of its connection with (T)ruth -- that contrasts instructively with the more libertarian, self-centered understanding that seems ascendant in our law (particularly our constitutional law) today.
Third, I imagine we will be working out for decades the implications of the Pope's proposal that the God-given dignity of the human person, and the norm of love, richly understood, should occupy center-stage in our conversations about morality -- rather than utilitarian calculations, historical movements, or supposed categorical imperatives. This proposal seems particularly powerful when it comes to the matter of religious freedom.
Finally, there is the (perhaps, at first) surprising fact that, at the end of the 20th Century, it was a mystical Pope who "stepped up" and reminded a world that had been distracted, or perhaps chastened, by reason's failures, and had embraced a excessively modest, post-modern skepticism, of the dignity and proper ends (without overlooking the limits) of reason.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Garnett on "Equitable Establishments"
I'm pleased to return, in the latest issue of First Things, to a subject that is dear to my heart, i.e., the statue of "Big Mountain Jesus" at Whitefish Ski Resort in northern Montana. My paper, "Equitable Establishments", is also available on SSRN for download. Here is the abstract:
This paper, which was prepared for discussion at the May 2018 Dulles Colloquium, convened by the Institute for Public Life, engages current discussions and debates regarding the nature of “liberalism” and the content of “religious freedom.” It considers, specifically, whether a “liberal" political community may and/or should recognize or establish a religion, drawing on the Second Vatican Council's “Declaration on Religious Freedom.” And, it addresses the controversy surrounding “Big Mountain Jesus.”
And, here's a quote:
First, it is not the case that political morality necessarily requires that societies—or political authorities or states—be liberal, or liberal in the same way. There have been, are, and will be some political communities that probably don’t count as liberal but still protect the well-being of persons, promote their flourishing, and observe the constraints that political morality imposes. To ask, then, whether a liberal society can favor one religion over the others is not simply to ask whether political morality permits (or requires) such favoring. I am inclined to think that at least some of the various features of liberal regimes and societies are morally required, but again, perhaps not all are.
Next, there is the related point that not every institution, association, or enterprise within a liberal society—or, that is governed by a liberal political authority—needs to be liberal. Quite the contrary: The political authority in a liberal society must not only tolerate, but also affirm and support natural and social elements that are themselves not liberal. The ontology of a liberal society need not be liberal “all the way down.” And so, whatever the answer is to the question whether a liberal order can prefer one religion over the others, it should be clear that such an order can, does, and should include societies that can, do, and should.
Third, it should be acknowledged that some ostensibly liberal societies and regimes do favor one religion over others: namely, a religion of liberalism. Indeed, to use the word “favor” might be to put things too delicately or to undersell the enterprise of muscular, evangelizing, “progressive” liberalism. While litigants have attempted and failed to convince American judges to label the secular humanism proposed (or imposed) in public schools as a religion, it does seem right to say that, at least in some of its manifestations, “liberalism has a sacramental character.”
Feedback is welcome! Thanks to the First Things team for including me in the magazine.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Lumen Christi Symposium on Perreau-Saussine's "Catholicism and Democracy"
This event looks great!
Rémi Brague Sorbonne, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Daniel Mahoney Assumption College
Gladden Pappin University of Dallas
Mary Keys University of Notre Dame
Looking at leading philosophers and political theologians—among them Joseph de Maistre, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Péguy—Perreau-Saussine shows how the Church redefined its relationship to the state in the long wake of the French Revolution.
Disenfranchised by the fall of the monarchy, the church in France at first embraced that most conservative of ideologies, "ultramontanism" (an emphasis on the central role of the papacy). Catholics whose church had lost its national status henceforth looked to the papacy for spiritual authority. Perreau-Saussine argues that this move paradoxically combined a fundamental repudiation of the liberal political order with an implicit acknowledgment of one of its core principles, the autonomy of the church from the state. However, as Perreau-Saussine shows, in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Catholic Church retrieved elements of its Gallican heritage and came to embrace another liberal (and Gallican) principle, the autonomy of the state from the church, for the sake of its corollary, freedom of religion. Perreau-Saussine concludes that Catholics came to terms with liberal democracy, though not without abiding concerns about the potential of that system to compromise freedom of religion in the pursuit of other goals.
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