Amy Uelmen and Fordham's law school graciously hosted a "brainstorming" on Catholic Social Thought and the Law this past week. Although I was only able to participate during one of the three days, it was great to see and talk with so many MOJ folks. Thanks so much to Mike Scaperlanda, Alison Sulentic, Amy, and Lisa Schiltz for putting the event together.
The agenda for the sessions included (1) a crash course, provided by Fr. Ken Himes, on the basics and background of the Catholic Social Thought tradition; (2) a discussion about how to structure and teach "CST and the Law" classes; and (3) planning for a "CST and the Law" summer institute (or, "boot camp"), the point of which would be to provide law profs who are interested in, but perhaps new to the subject, with (1) and (2).
During the six hours I sat on the runway at JFK, I had plenty of time to mull over a few thoughts about the sessions, and the broader "CST and the Law" enterprise. For starters, it seems to me that it is, and will remain, a challenge to deploy and teach "CST and the Law" in a way that avoids simply baptizing or anathamatizing certain policy outcomes or programs, and that does not excerpt, or cut-and-paste, from the tradition in a way that might line up comfortably with a particular scholar's views but might not be true to the tradition's premises, taken as a whole.
Now, I've never taught a CST and Law course (though I will next year). Still, it seems misguided to me to think that one could excise or skate over the marriage-and-family teachings and Evangelium vitae -- focusing instead on documents relating to, say, the economic order or political participation -- and not lose something. We cannot really understand "subsidiarity" without thinking about the Church's understanding of marriage and family; we cannot really understand "human dignity" if we separate human dignity's implications in the realm of labor and welfare policy from its implications with respect to abortion and euthanasia; and so on.
It strikes me that another real challenge (for me, anyway) in teaching this material, in a way that is faithful and rigorous, is to carefully distinguish applications of principles, about which reasonable and faithful people can disagree, from the principles themselves and the premises on which they are grounded. At the same time, I imagine all of us are sometimes tempted to deploy the "prudential judgment" in a way that protects policy outcomes we prefer, but that might still be in tension with the relevant writings and teachings.
Another challenge, I think, has to do with the nature of law, the vocation of lawyers, and the meaning of "the rule of law." I can imagine wrestling, in a CST and the Law class, with the temptation to evaluate the big constitutional cases -- Roe v. Wade, for example, or the death-penalty cases, or cases about sovereign immunity and the Americans with Disabilities Act -- entirely in terms of the consonance between the policies promoted by the cases' outcomes and the principles of CST. As I see it, though (and I know we've talked about this before), the rule of law is constitutive of the common good, and so a commitment to the rule of law is as thoroughly Catholic a commitment as one to subsidiarity and solidarity.
Finally, I came away thinking that a "CST and the Law" class should probably be constructed and taught more as a "Law and the Catholic Tradition" class. I'm inclined to think that we cannot just start with Rerum novarum; the natural law tradition, the Church's sacramental vision and understanding of the person as both fallen and imago Dei, the Church's long experience of wrestling with the state and its claims, etc., all need to be a part of the course.
Thanks again to those who arranged this event. I'd love to hear the thoughts of others who were there . . .
Jim Hoagland had an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday, called "A Chinese Dissident's Faith." He notes, at the outset, that journalists are "suckers" for "political dissidents," but "skeptics about religious activists." This is a problem, he suggests, in our "era in which religion has again become the driving engine of world politics." Discussing the recent visit to Washington, D.C. of "Yu Jie, a Chinese writer who says his political opposition to the Beijing dictatorship is deeply rooted in Christian faith," Hoagland worries about the "journalistic habits of compartmentalizing the political and the pious."
. . . in the story of religion in American politics over the last 50 years, according to the philosopher William Galston (thanks to Rod Dreher):
1. The fall of the informal Protestant establishment. Started in 1960 with election of a Catholic president, followed shortly thereafter by the school prayer decision.
2. The expulsion of urban Catholics from the Democratic Party after McGovern.
3. The Roe v. Wade mobilization. By 1984, both party platforms on abortion had hardened.
4. The Carter disappointment. "I have a feeling that Evangelicals would not have moved so strongly toward the Republican Party as they did if Carter had not teased them and disappointed them. I think that sent the signal that if not even Jimmy Carter can be trusted to hold high the banner, what Democrat could?"
5. The Boomer schism. "I see Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as matter and antimatter, the two basic things that can happen to you if you went to Yale University." This is why things got very different in 1992. The traditional electorate looked at Clinton, the first Boomer, as different from his predecessors among the Democrats.
Last week, Glenn Reynolds had this op-ed, "The Parent Trap: How Safety Fanatics Help Drive Down Birthrates," in the Wall Street Journal. Discussing (among other things) declining birth rates in developed (and other) countries, Reynolds notes:
Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. Yet in recent decades, a collection of parenting "experts" and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what's amazing isn't that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.
He wonders also about the declining "prestige" of having children:
People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan's close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn't prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.
In response, Ann Althouse had this post, asks how we can make parenting (in Reynolds's words) more "prestigious." She writes: "You can't make it cool to have kids just because we need kids. And the people with the kids aren't helping. Aren't they the ones who do the most to make folks without kids see raising kids as an unattractive proposition? It's a deep, deep problem, and it's not going to change."
Is this a problem? And, if it is, what (if anything) can law do?
. . . might just have been teed up by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (thanks to Religion Clause blog):
Yesterday in Petruska v. Gannon University, (3d Cir., May 24, 2006), the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals expanded the ability of ministerial employees to bring Title VII employment discrimination cases against churches and religious institutions that employ them. In this case, Lynette Petruska, the first female chaplain at Gannon University, a diocesan college, claimed that she was demoted solely because she was a woman. The Court rejected the defendants' claims that the suit should be dismissed under the "ministerial exception" doctrine. It held that the First Amendment exempts religious institutions from Title VII when gender or other illegal discrimination is based on religious belief, religious doctrine or internal church regulations. But if a church discriminates for reasons unrelated to religion, the Constitution does not foreclose a Title VII suit. The court said, "we decline to turn the Free Exercise Clause into a license for the free exercise of discrimination unmoored from religious principle." Judge Smith dissented on this issue.
In holding as it did, the majority disagreed with six other circuits that have found the ministerial exception to be broader. Inside Higher Ed today reports on the case.
Prof. Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard law) has this essay, "Principled Immigration," in the current issue of First Things magazine. Immigration is, as we have discussed on this blog several times, a hard, complicated issue -- one to which (in my view, anyway) our current political debates do not do justice. Glendon's essay strikes me as reasonable, balanced, and clear.
Among other things, she asks, "why isn’t the United States glad about Latin American immigration?" To which she answers:
Part of the answer is the economic cost of large-scale immigration. American wage earners often fear that migrants will drive down wages and take the jobs that remain. This fear is sometimes exaggerated, but it is not unfounded: The consensus among labor economists is that immigration has somewhat reduced the earnings of less-educated, low-wage workers. Many Americans are also concerned about the costs that illegal immigration imposes on taxpayers, with its strain on schools and social services, particularly in the border states. The desire to protect the national security of the United States, especially after the trauma of September 11, has played a role as well.
There are also some in the United States who want to close the door to newcomers simply because they are outsiders. Over the course of the twentieth century, that attitude seemed to be fading away, but in recent years sleeping nativist sentiments have been irresponsibly inflamed by anti-immigration groups. A few years ago, I wrote of the financial and ideological connections among extremist anti-immigration groups, radical environmentalists, and aggressive population controllers. What unites that loose coalition in what I called an “iron triangle of exclusion” is their common conviction that border controls and abortion are major defenses against an expanding, threatening, welfare-consuming, and nonwhite underclass. (I never suspected when I wrote those lines that they would cost me a half-year’s salary. But on the basis of a promised grant from a foundation whose causes included environmental protection, I had taken an unpaid leave from Harvard. Shortly after my article was published, the foundation reneged on its promise. It turned out that their idea of protecting the environment included keeping out immigrants and keeping poor people from having children.)
This bit is also worth highlighting:
The five principles set forth in the 2003 Joint Pastoral Letter issued by the Mexican and U.S. bishops, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, might be helpful in setting the stage for new approaches that could expand the pie for both sending and receiving countries. The letter asserts that (1) persons have the right to find opportunities in their homeland; (2) when opportunities are not available at home, persons have the right to migrate to find work to support themselves and their families; (3) sovereign nations have the right to control their boundaries, but economically stronger nations have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows; (4) refugees and asylum seekers fleeing wars and persecutions should be protected; and (5) the human dignity and rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.
To those five principles, a sixth should be added: a principle recognizing the need for a highly diverse, rule-of-law society to be careful about the messages it sends to persons who wish to become part of that society. And the bishops might have done well to note, as Pope John Paul II did in Solicitudo Rei Socialis, that solidarity imposes duties on the disadvantaged as well as the advantaged: “Those who are more influential, because they have a greater share of goods and common services, should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess. Those who are weaker, for their part, in the same spirit of solidarity should not adopt a purely passive attitude, or one that is destructive of the social fabric, but, while claiming their legitimate rights, should do what they can for the good of all.”
Professor Friedman (Religion Clause blog) has a very helpful post, chock full o' links, on the recent Holy See / WCC document, "Conversion: Assessing the Realities." Here is a bit:
Freedom of religion is a fundamental, inviolable and non-negotiable right of every human being in every country in the world. Freedom of religion connotes the freedom, without any obstruction, to practice one’s own faith, freedom to propagate the teachings of one’s faith to people of one’s own and other faiths, and also the freedom to embrace another faith out of one’s own free choice.
We affirm that while everyone has a right to invite others to an understanding of their faith, it should not be exercised by violating other’s rights and religious sensibilities. At the same time, all should heal themselves from the obsession of converting others.
Freedom of religion enjoins upon all of us the equally non-negotiable responsibility to respect faiths other than our own, and never to denigrate, vilify or misrepresent them for the purpose of affirming superiority of our faith.
Hmmm. What, exactly, is or constitutes an "obsession with converting others"? Put differently, what distinguishes this "obsession" from, say, the Great Commission: "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations"? Perhaps the drafters simply made an unfortunate word choice. Certainly, the evangelization of those who are not Christian should proceed in accord with a Christian respect for persons and religious freedom. That said, it seems quite wrong to suggest that there is something unworthy about wanting -- a lot -- others to embrace the Truth that is Christ.
It strikes me as a bigger problem that, in the name of constraining "proselytism", countries are limiting conversions and religious expression, than that some evangelists are behaving or speaking in an unworthy and non-"transparen[t]" way.
Michael O'Hear has a new paper, "Faith, Justice, and the Teaching of Criminal Procedure," that should be of interest to MOJ readers. Here is the abstract:
The American criminal justice system is marked by a culture of speedy, bureaucratized case processing, which is in tension with the dignitary interests of defendants. The Christian Gospels, however, mandate respect for the essential dignity of all people, even of criminals. Faith-based values may thereby provide a framework for critical perspectives on the criminal justice system. In a basic criminal procedure class, these perspectives may be conveniently developed through a discussion of leading right-to-counsel cases.
O'Hear explores these matters through a discussion of, inter alia, the (limited) right to self-representation, acknowledged in the Faretta case. (I tend to agree, for what it's worth, with the dissent in Faretta, and to be skeptical of the view that a respect for the accused's dignity requires the political community to compromise the reliability of its fact-finding and punishment-imposing processes.) Anyway, check it out.
