Pope Francis's annual address to diplomats is getting a fair bit of coverage (here, e.g., is America's story) and, in many instances (here is an example), the coverage is framing the talk in terms of its relevance to President Trump. Here is John Allen's as-per-usual indispensable coverage.
For my own part, I was struck by the emphasis on "integral human development" and the (both implicit and explicit) recognition that (as many of us have written over the years here at MOJ) at the heart of any Catholic approach to law, policy, and politics is a proposal of "moral anthropology."
For true peace can only come about on the basis of a vision of human beings capable of promoting an integral development respectful of their transcendent dignity. . . .
One enemy of peace is a “reductive vision” of the human person, which opens the way to the spread of injustice, social inequality and corruption. . . .
As Allen noted, the Pope re-expressed his concern that the language and practice of "human rights" can, sometimes, be put to use as a kind of "ideological colonization":
From the beginning, Pope Francis has been a notoriously difficult figure to classify by the usual Western standards of left v. right - seemingly quite progressive on many matters, and yet stubbornly traditional on others. . . .
Francis also warned of what he described as “debatable notions of human rights” which gathered force in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, which, he said, risk becoming a form of “ideological colonization.”
“Debatable notions of human rights have been advanced that are at odds with the culture of many countries,” the pope said. “The latter feel that they are not respected in their social and cultural traditions, and instead neglected with regard to the real needs they have to face.”
“Somewhat paradoxically, there is a risk that, in the very name of human rights, we will see the rise of modern forms of ideological colonization by the stronger and the wealthier, to the detriment of the poorer and the most vulnerable,” Francis said.
I binge-watched the recent HBO / BBC series, "Gunpowder," and enjoyed it. There are some liberties taken in terms of history but I'll confess to being (pleasantly) surprised that the "Catholic side" of those times comes off as well as it does. There are some pretty graphic torture scenes (drawing-and-quartering, burning (in Spain), and peine forte e dure -- in a scene borrowed anachronistically from the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow). The main characters (Cecil, Vaux, Garnet, Catesby) are well-cast.
Sigh. The happy warriors at The Becket Fund are on the case, and have more information. The ACLU's position is, it seems to me, yet another reminder of (what I've called) the widespread "confusion about discrimination."
Run (figuratively speaking), don't walk over to the Church Life Journal and check out my colleague (theologian) Cyril O'Regan's "97 Aphorisms and Apothegms Inspired by Reading John Henry Newman." Great stuff. A few:
If you are praised continually, then it is necessary for you to ask what are you doing wrong. . . .
An apology for Christianity is not to beg your leave, but to boldly defend what is beautiful, good, and true about what has formed and transformed you. . . .
Let’s call it by its name. The Reformation is not a reformation, it is a revolution. It not only tore down, it tore up. We are looking for the roots since. . . .
A major value of the secular is that it ratifies the separation of church and world, church and the state. A major disvalue of the secular is that it has the tendency to turn differences into antagonisms. . . .
The risk Catholicism runs in the university is that faith will be lost. The prize it seeks is that faith will be made stronger and become mine. . . .
See also, while you're at it, Cyril's "97 Aphorisms Adduced from the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI."
Run (figuratively speaking), don't walk over to the Church Life Journal and check out my colleague (theologian) Cyril O'Regan's "97 Aphorisms and Apothegms Inspired by Reading John Henry Newman." Great stuff. A few:
If you are praised continually, then it is necessary for you to ask what are you doing wrong. . . .
An apology for Christianity is not to beg your leave, but to boldly defend what is beautiful, good, and true about what has formed and transformed you. . . .
Let’s call it by its name. The Reformation is not a reformation, it is a revolution. It not only tore down, it tore up. We are looking for the roots since. . . .
A major value of the secular is that it ratifies the separation of church and world, church and the state. A major disvalue of the secular is that it has the tendency to turn differences into antagonisms. . . .
The risk Catholicism runs in the university is that faith will be lost. The prize it seeks is that faith will be made stronger and become mine. . . .
See also, while you're at it, Cyril's "97 Aphorisms Adduced from the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI."
This upcoming event - at the University of Chicago's Lumen Christi Institute - looks great. A fascinating cast of presenters: Geoffrey Stone, William Cavanaugh, Bill Schweiker, Laurie Zoloth, Willemien Otten, and Ross Douthat.
National Review has published the text of a recent lecture given by George Weigel on Dignitatis Humanae and the question whether it is best seen as a "fundamental change or [a] development." As he puts it, "[d]id DH mark a rupture in the Catholic tradition’s thinking about the relationship between religious and political authority in society and in the state? Or was DH a genuine, which is to say organic, development of Catholic church-state theory?" Along the way, he provides some helpful reminders about Westphalia and all that (e.g., "the Westphalian formula, cuius regio eius religio — the prince’s religion is the religion of the state and must be the religion of the people — can and should be considered the modern West’s first experiment in the totalitarian coercion of conscience by state power.") Here's a bit:
So Dignitatis Humanae was not a surrender document in which the Church finally raised the white flag to political modernity; it was a retrieval and development of the Church’s own tradition. Moreover, it was also a genuine contribution to modern secular political theory. For to define religious freedom as a basic human right that a just state must acknowledge is to say that there are certain spheres of life into which state power must not intrude — and that is to help create the social space for a vibrant civil society. The modern state comes in many forms and flavors, but all of them seem to have a built-in tendency to occupy more and more social “space.” Religious freedom, embodied in constitutional and positive law and warranted by widely held cultural norms, is a crucial barrier to that “occupation,” for it declares part of the “space” of society off-limits to state-power. Thus religious freedom is a crucial buttress to genuine social pluralism as well as a barrier to the totalitarian temptation that infects all forms of political modernity.
THE CATHOLIC LAWYERS GUILD OF CHICAGO cordially invites you, your family and other guests to attend its annual
2018 DAY OF REFLECTION
Faith: The Dynamism for Justice and Reconciliation
DATE & TIME: Saturday, February 24, 2018 8:30am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: Archbishop Quigley Center 103 E. Chestnut St., Chicago
Fr. Joseph Daoust, S.J., is the superior of the Jesuit community at the Holy Rosary Mission at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Fr. Daoust is also the former president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkley and former law professor at University of Detroit Mercy College of Law.
Over at Commonweal, Prof. Samuel Moyn has a review of Jeremy Waldron's One Another's Equals: The Basis of Human Equality. I'm not as sanguine as Prof. Moyn seems to be that (his concluding sentence) "[w]e can even resolve to fight harder for that equality without denying that our ancestors would have railed against it, or worrying that only God can guarantee our beliefs that all humans are both equal and equally special." That is, I do think we should "worry[]" -- and I do -- that "only God" can provide a firm basis for the kind of moral-equality claims that we want to, and should, make. After all -- as Moyn notes Waldron insists -- that human persons are moral equals is a "truth to endorse" and not merely a "decision to make."
Moyn writes:
The importance of what he calls a “range property” grounding equality, Waldron contends, is that it allows us to reject the view that any trait that comes in various forms cannot do the work. For example, religious thinkers have claimed that only a “transcendent” feature that everyone has in precisely the same way—for example, if each was equally made in God’s image—could serve to justify their equal standing. Waldron shows this is not so. It is enough that human capacities come within a given range to entitle people to regard themselves as one another’s equals. (As Waldron goes on to acknowledge, this very argument makes it difficult to grant the equality of the profoundly disabled.)
To me, though, the fact that a "range property" like a particular "capacity" cannot provide a ground for the "equality of the profoundly disabled" counts against this range-property-based argument. So, as Moyn says, perhaps "the fact that [Waldron makes the secular case for equality so difficult to make out almost inevitably points him in a religious direction. He goes so far as to suggest there are 'possible grounds we might have for thinking that a religious foundation for basic human equality is necessary.'” Indeed, I think.
For your reading and learning pleasure, here's Scott Gerber's new paper on "Law and Catholicism in Colonial Maryland." Abstract:
Montesquieu famously concluded in The Spirit of the Laws that each form of government has an animating principle — a set of “human passions that set it in motion” — and that each form can be corrupted if its animating principle is undermined. Maryland is a compelling case study of Montesquieu’s theory: founded in 1632 by Lord Baltimore as a haven for Catholics, a mere two decades later that animating principle was dead. This article explores why. More specifically, the article examines the birth, death, and resurrection of Maryland’s animating principle by identifying with as much precision as possible the impact of the law itself on regime change in colonial Maryland.
