Here is a post, from the First Things blog, about the work of the called the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management. Fr. Neuhaus writes:
The initiative has produced a book, Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church, and a report, “The Church in America: The Way Forward in the 21st Century.” (Information is available on the website of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Life, which is directed by Alan Wolfe.) In its initial and subsequent meetings, the Roundtable has continued to advance its goal, which, according to Mr. Boisi, is to provide a “check and balance” on the role of the bishops and, according to Mr. Butler of Foundations and Donors, to “allow lay people to speak in the name of the Church.”
Undoubtedly, some who have been recruited by the Roundtable only want to assist the bishops in their leadership of the Church. And nobody would dispute that the bishops need all the help they can get in improving management and financial practices, and, to that end, should draw more fully on the talents of lay people. Yet it seems evident that the Roundtable has much bigger things in mind. The apparent goal is to create an institutional structure that will propose itself as representing the lay people in speaking for the Catholic Church, whether in tandem with or as an alternative to the voice of the bishops. The further apparent goal is to gain control of—or at least to exercise major influence in—a large measure of Church governance, employing the immense wealth to which the Roundtable has access.
These are goals long espoused by the academics, editors, and Church activists associated with this project. In its more modest statement of purpose, the project is to be a “clearinghouse” for the bishops, providing them with “best practices” in business management. But there is also the plan to establish a permanent national “Leadership Roundtable” of up to 225 members. Such an institution seems disproportionate to the task of giving the bishops business advice. Not surprisingly, some think they detect an effort to “democratize” the Church by establishing—somewhat along the lines of the Episcopal Church—a “house of delegates” composed of laity to balance the “house of bishops.” If that is the long-term goal, it would indeed be a radical change in the way the Catholic Church understands her constitution. . . .
The introduction to Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church notes that the book’s essays “focus on the urgent and far-reaching changes in ecclesial governance, administrative style, and financial accountability called for if the congregation of the faithful in the future is to fulfill its hallowed aspiration to be the salt of the earth and the light of the nations.” In his own essay, Francis Butler writes, “Many, if not most, bishops have proven themselves unable to measure up to the demands of running the multimillion-dollar organizations which U.S. dioceses have become.”
Again, nobody should deny that the bishops need all the help they can get. But talk about “far-reaching changes in ecclesial governance” would be less problematic were it more obvious that those pressing for such changes have a firm understanding of and commitment to the ecclesiology by which the Catholic Church is constituted.
I have not read the initiative's book, but it does seem to me worth being concerned about an uncritical importing of "checks and balances" language -- which is great in the constitutional law context! -- into our ecclesiology.
Here is an interesting essay, by John F. Cullinan, on the "Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI" which was written a few weeks ago by a group of Muslim clerics and scholars. Here is the Open Letter. (It is amazing to me that this response has not received more news coverage. The press is -- surprise, surprise -- really dropping the ball.)
The Daily Mail reports: "A move to allow town halls to force new faith schools to offer up to a quarter of places to pupils from other religions has been blocked by peers. They voted 119 to 37 to reject former Tory education secretary Lord Baker's amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill." More coverage of the proposal -- and of the Catholic mobilization against it -- is here.
Over at the Commonweal blog, J. Peter Nixon has a post that, it seems to me, all of us who (a) follow politics and (b) try to follow Christ might take to heart. Here is a bit:
In their statement Faithful Citizenship, the U.S.
bishops argue that participation in the political process is a “moral obligation.” This may be true, but there are moral dangers here too. You can get so caught up with a cause, a candidate, or a party that you start shaving small bits off the truth and sanding down the sharp edges of the Gospel.
In an election where issues of great moral import—abortion, war, torture, poverty, marriage—are at stake, it may seem absurd to suggest that there is something more important than who wins this November or how these issues are dealt with in the months to come. But there is. First and foremost, we need to be faithful and we need to be truthful. We need to preach the fullness of the Gospel, even if—perhaps especially if—it embarrasses our comrades and gives comfort to our opponents. We need to remain committed to the search for truth, even if the truth we discover undermines our arguments. We need to trust enough in eternal victory to risk temporal defeat.
An interesting post, by Tyler Cowen at Crooked Timber: "Is Social Democracy a viable model for the European future?" Here is a bit:
For all its virtues, social democracy stands in danger unless Europe can boost its rates of economic growth. Even if some of the more radical social democrats may feel that “people already have enough,” it is hard to imagine Europe persisting and flourishing if it ends up as the “poor man out” and in a state of relative impoverishment. If nothing else, the most talented Europeans would migrate elsewhere. There are already 400,000 EU researchers working in the United States, and it is not clear when they plan on returning.
Most of Western Europe experienced a long postwar boom, lasting at least through the late 1970s (the timing is later for Spain). This was sustained by rebuilding, an enormous growth in world trade, and by lower levels of government intervention than we see today. But welfare payments rose, taxes rose, labor markets became less flexible, interventions favored insiders to a greater degree, regulations were cartelized, and the entrepreneurial spirit ebbed.
Western European per capita income is now about 30 percent below that of the United States and I see the gap widening rather than closing. It is common for the United States rate of productivity growth to be twice as high as that of the core European nations[.] . . .
. . . Most European birthrates are under the 1.5 mark and it is quite possible that many national populations will be cut in half by 2050. Along the way there will be too many retirees per worker and current European tax rates – already among the highest in the world – will have to rise. Since older populations also tend to be less productive, it is hard to see how Western Europe might reassume world economic leadership or even hold its current relative ground. Nor has the EU, for all its benefits, proven itself a good mechanism for making economic policy; farm subsidies are over 45 percent of the EU budget.
Part of the demographic problem, of course, is that the real standard of living in Western Europe is remarkably high. Western European women have learned how much fun they can have, living in Europe and traveling abroad, when they are not tied down with four children. The extreme secularism of Western Europe – a philosophy which I share and indeed cherish – also promotes small families. Religious exhortations to have more children, combined with a child-friendly church culture, do in fact raise birth rates. In both economic and cultural terms, Western Europe is not investing enough in its future.
Responding to John Derbyshire's claim, to which Rob linked, that "[t]he idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product," philosopher and MOJ-friend John O'Callaghan writes:
[T]he doctrine of the imago dei does not imply that we are a finished product. The very notion of being an “image” of anything implies that it is not identical with that of which it is an image. Thus it differs to some extent from that of which it is an image, and that difference allows for growth in the image. . . . And at the level of individual human beings, both Augustine and Aquinas, the figures I am most familiar with, taught that we are always seeking to become greater images of God, that every human being can corrupt the image, but can also refine the image.
In addition, the doctrine does not imply that we are the only creatures that are images of God. . . . [Aquinas] claimed that not only is it the case that angels are images of God, but also that they are greater images of God than human beings are. Whether we believe in angels or not, the larger theological point is that nothing in Catholic faith entails that only human beings are images of God. Both Augustine and Aquinas taught that all creatures are likenesses of God. ‘Imago’ had for them a technical sense—an imago was a likeness that held its likeness in virtue of being an intelligent creature. From which it follows, that all creatures are in fact likenesses of God, and that any intelligent creature will be an imago dei, not just human beings. In other words, nothing of Catholic faith implies that human beings in any stage of development are the only possible images or likenesses of God.
UPDATE: Bryan McGraw -- a political theorist at Pepperdine -- adds:
It’s worth noting that in the “First” Creation story (Gen. 1) God doesn’t actually say that man is “good” – he only says that he looks at everything he has created and that it is “very good.” So why doesn’t God say – like he does with the birds and the beasts – that his creation of man is “good”? Leon Kass, in his book on Genesis, suggests that it’s because the term “good” as it’s used there means something like complete or whole and that man in the garden isn’t complete or maybe finished. Now, I think Kass is off base with his overly Rousseauian interpretation of man in the garden (basically, we’re just dumb happy brutes) but when coupled with the story of the Fall, I’m not sure at all that the text would itself support a claim that somehow we were made Imago Dei and that was it.
