As Mark Massa, SJ notes in his book Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (Crossroad, 1999), one of the formative experiences of American Catholic culture has been the improbable success of Notre Dame's football team, initially under the ingenious leadership of perhaps the greatest coach in the history of the game, the Norwegian Protestant-turned Catholic convert Knute Rockne. From 1924 to 1949, Notre Dame won seven national championships and bequeathed a sense of pride and identity to generations of immigrant Catholics.
But for almost 20 years, Notre Dame football has labored in mediocrity--flashes of promise under Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham, and Charlie Weis, but all were fired, each after a series of poor seasons and ignominious defeats (losing to Navy in 2007 after winning 43 games in a row in the series, losses at home to Syracuse and UConn in 2008 and 2009, a series of bowl embarrassments). A year ago, most of us who are rabid Notre Dame fans were prepared to face the fact that Notre Dame would never again compete at the elite level in college football and was consigned to being remembered in the display cases at the Hall of Fame--the geographical center of football had shifted from the upper Midwest to the South, and Notre Dame's academic standards, independent status, small size, and difficult schedule were slowly but surely pulling the program down.
Now, for the first time since 1993, Notre Dame is ranked the #1 team in college football. And perhaps there is a larger point here. As the Catholic Church in America faces the legacy of scandal and seeming collapse of institutional presence, there's hope that God somehow brings about dramatic changes of fortune, sometimes in mundane ways (like college football, maybe) and sometimes in ways that change the world. It may all come to a crashing end this Saturday in Los Angeles against USC or on January 7th in the BCS national championship game, but, for at least a week, we can rejoice at how quickly things can change and our hope affirmed.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
In the wake of the suicide boming of a Catholic church in northern Nigeria over the weekend, this piece in the Daily Telegraph by Rupert Shortt recounts the deeply troubling persecution of Christians in parts of the world and the neglect of the story in much of the West:
Why does all this matter? One obvious answer is that faith isn’t going to go away. Whatever one’s view of the coherence of religious belief, it has become clear that secularisation has gone into reverse, partly through the spread of democracy. Three quarters of humanity now profess a religious creed; this figure is predicted to reach 80 per cent by mid-century.
The prospect should not surprise us. Atheism feeds off bad religion, especially fundamentalism, whose easily disposable, dogmatic certainties now form one of atheism’s main assets. On the other hand, it is much harder for non-belief to replace the imaginative richness of a mature religious commitment, and the corresponding assurance that life is worth living responsibly, because it has ultimate meaning.
But faith is like fire, to cite an analogy used by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It warms; but it can also burn. Along or near the 10th parallel north of the equator, between Nigeria and Indonesia and the Philippines, religious fervour and political unrest are reinforcing each other. This point should be granted even if one accepts religion’s status as an immense – perhaps the preeminent – source of social capital in existence.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
As those of us in the East clean up from Hurricane Sandy and try to bring things back to normal, Walter Russell Mead reflects in a lovely essay here on the fragility of life before nature's power. A short excerpt:
Strangely, that admission of weakness opens the door to a new kind of strength. To acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth, and it turns out that to be grounded in reality is to become more able and more alive. Denial is hard work; those who try to stifle their awareness of the limits of human life and ambition in the busy rounds of daily life never reach their full potential.
To open your eyes to the fragility of life and to our dependence on that which is infinitely greater than ourselves is to enter more deeply into life. To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren’t all there is to existence, but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm, and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy. As another one of the psalms puts it, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Accepting your limits and your dependence on things you can’t control is the first step on the road toward finding that joy.
One of the most important elections next week is Question 2 in Massachusetts, which would legalize physician-assisted suicide. I fear that approval of Queston 2 in Massachusetts--more than the previous approval of such initiatives in Oregon and Washigton--would make suicide for the terminally ill part of mainstream American legal and moral culture with disastrous results for the elderly and disabled. Ezekiel Emanuel set forth some basic arguments against physician-assisted suicide in Sunday's
New York Times here. Ira Byock, Director of Palliative Care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and self-described progressive, speaks out in the
Atlantic Monthly here. It is also heartening to learn that Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Senator Edward Kennedy's widow,
has come out in opposition.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Villanova hosts an excellent
conference each fall in patristic, medieval, and renaissance studies, and this year's theme is
"After Constantine: Religion, Politics, Culture, and Counterculture." This Sunday, October 28, marks the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, establishing Constantine as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and beginning his conversion to Christianity. The keynote speakers are Robert Wilkin of Virginia and William Klingshirn of CUA (program
here). I will be presenting a paper on "Robert Bellarmine and the Freedom of the Church" on a panel alongside my Villanova colleague Matthew Rose and Stefania Tutino of UC-Santa Barbara, author of two splendid books:
Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (Ashgate, 2007) and
Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010).
Monday, October 22, 2012
Robert Bork’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate 25 years ago tomorrow, October 23. As it happens, I was on the floor of the Senate during the debate on Bork’s nomination and the vote--I spent my junior year of high school as the chief Republican page in the Senate. A mild-mannered moderate Republican senator remarked privately after the vote that Washington would never be the same, a point New York Times columnist Joe Nocera made (“The Ugliness Started with Bork”) last year. Adam White has a thoughtful and provocative essay at Commentary going over the history of the nomination and its legacy in constitutional law. As then-Professor Elena Kagan observed in her 1995 review in the University of Chicago Law Review of Stephen Carter’s The Confirmation Mess:
The Bork hearings presented to the public a serious discussion of the meaning of the Constitution, the role of the Court, and the views of the nominee; that discussion at once educated the public and allowed it to determine whether the nominee would move the Court in the proper direction. Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis. Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government. Neither can such hearings contribute toward an evaluation of the Court and a determination whether the nominee would make it a better or worse institution. A process so empty may seem ever so tidy--muted, polite, and restrained--but all that good order comes at great cost.
Our own Rick Garnett had a
review over the weekend in the
Wall Street Journal of
this new biography by journalist John Jenkins of Chief Justice Rehnquist. Like Eric Posner's
review in the
New Republic, Rick doesn't pull any punches about the shortcomings of the book. What Jenkins entirely misses is that Rehnquist was a brilliant Oakeshottian conservative pragmatist on the Court who, whether you regard him fondly or not, deserves a better judicial and intellectual biography.
