Those crazy "millennials" . . . it turns out they "have a reverence for national institutions, traditions and family values" and "overwhelmingly . . . support monogamy, marriage, the U.S. Constitution and the military[.]" Who knew?
Monday, March 31, 2008
"Young Americans Revere Monogamy"
"Conversion and Conflict"
Next Monday (April 7), I'll be giving a lecture as part of a program, "Conversions and Conflict: An Interreligious Discussion of Evangelization", at the University of St. Thomas's Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy. I'm looking forward to spending time with my MOJ-colleagues at St. Thomas and, perhaps, any MOJ readers in the Twin Cities. My remarks will be based on this paper, which I wrote a little while back, called "Changing Minds":
Proselytism is, as Paul Griffiths has observed, a topic enjoying renewed attention in recent years. What's more, the practice, aims, and effects of proselytism are increasingly framed not merely in terms of piety and zeal; they are seen as matters of geopolitical, cultural, and national-security significance as well. Indeed, it is fair to say that one of today's more pressing challenges is the conceptual and practical tangle of religious liberty, free expression, cultural integrity, and political stability. This essay is an effort to unravel that tangle by drawing on the religious-freedom-related work and teaching of the late Pope John Paul II and on a salient theme in the law interpreting the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
Running through and shaping our First Amendment doctrines, precedents, and values is a solicitude for changing minds - our own, as well as others'. Put differently, the Amendment is understood as protecting and celebrating not just expression but persuasion - or, if you like, proselytism. There are, therefore, reasons grounded in our Constitution and traditions for regarding proselytism and its legal protection not as threats to the common good and the freedom of conscience, but instead as integral to the flourishing and good exercise of that freedom. This same solicitude for persuasion and freedom pervades the writing of the late Pope, who regularly insisted that the Church's evangelical mission does not restrict freedom but rather promotes it. The Church proposes - thereby inviting the exercise of human freedom - she imposes nothing. The claim here, then, is that proposing, persuading, proselytizing, and evangelizing are at the heart of, and need not undermine, not only the freedoms protected by the Constitution, but also those that are inherent in our dignity as human persons.
Catholic Voters and the Presidential Election
"Trying to Vote in Good Conscience
ELIZABETH F. BROWN, University of
St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN - School of Law
Email: [email protected]
[ABSTRACT:] In November 2007, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued "Forming
Consciences for Faithful Citizenship - A Call to Political Responsibility from
the Catholic Bishops of the United States." This statement by the American
Catholic Bishops provides guidance to Catholic voters on how to execute their
responsibilities in accord with Catholic social teaching.
Despite some
flaws, "Forming Consciences" has three major virtues that will aid American
Catholics as they try to vote in good conscience. First, it reaffirms the need
for American Catholics become more familiar with and to apply the broad range of
Catholic social teachings when voting and exercising their other civic duties.
Second, it explicitly rejects the notion that Catholics should be single issue
voters. Third, Forming Consciences encourages, but certainly does not require,
American Catholics to adopt a holistic ethical approach when evaluating
candidates and issues. Such a holistic approach tends to provide better
solutions, certainly on economic and environmental issues, than the narrow
definition of issues and problems currently used in politics.
This essay
comments on how useful the document is in actually helping the average American
Catholic, who is not already an expert in Catholic social teachings, discern how
to vote. As part of this assessment, it focuses on how much weight Catholics
should give to economic and environmental issues based upon the guidance
provided by the Bishops' statement. These issues were chosen because they are a
growing areas of concern both for Americans and for the Vatican.
This
essay was written for the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies Symposium issue on
"Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship - A Call to Political
Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States."
[To download/read the paper, click here.]
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Deadly Medicine
My daughter and I visited the Science Museum of Minnesota yesterday. (A very cool science museum, by the way, for children of all ages.) The museum is currently home to a circulating exhibit organized by the United States Holocause Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibit details the development of Germany's efforts to "cleanse" itself of those viewed to be a "biological threat" to the its growth and prosperity. One horrifying example of what proceeds from a failure to recognize that each human person has a dignity that comes from our creation in the image of God. And, although there are obviously differences between what occurs by power of the government and what occurs by individual choice, it is hard to look at this and not think about decisions being made today in various ways about what lives are worth living.
I have posted more about the exhibit and my reactions on my blog here. I highly recommend a visit to the exhibit. For those in the Twin Cities area, it will be at the Science Museum here until May 4; future sites can be found here.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Turning the other cheek
This guy is my hero: (HT BoingBoing)
· Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.
But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn. He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says. As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."
The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'" Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.
"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says. Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.
Go read the rest.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
CA Court Will Rehear Homeschooling Case
The California Court of Appeal has granted a rehearing petition in the case in which it held that home-schooling parents must have teacher credentials and rejected any constitutional right to engage in home schooling. The Alliance Defense Fund news release is here. Rick's earlier post on the case is here.
The usual pattern in the past with home-schooling has been that courts have rejected constitutional claims by home schoolers and then the political branches have enacted statutes or regulations protecting them. We'll see if this case ultimately ends up in a court win.
Tom
"Forget Juno"
Slate's "Dear Prudence" has an insightful and concise column on the "national catastrophe" of out-of-wedlock births. Here's an excerpt:
That out-of-wedlock births are a problem for society does get some political attention—the kind of attention that shows there's not a good plan for what to do about them. Mitt Romney mentioned the statistics in his presidential withdrawal speech. He cites declining religious observance, easily available pornography, and the possibility of gay marriage as the causes—a platform that seems unlikely to reverse the birth trends. Barack Obama, who grew up without a father, believes that a central reason for the ever-increasing rates is the difficult economic circumstances of the working class. In one speech on fatherhood, he talked about the need for government programs to help men become more of a presence in their children's lives and admonished fathers to take their duties seriously. But he didn't mention that one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband.
Economists believe humans act rationally (a somewhat irrational belief, if you ask me), so some conclude that all this out-of-wedlock childbearing is a logical response to market forces, not the result of something as amorphous as "culture." Since many working-class men do not offer the financial stability they used to provide, women see little incentive to marry them. As Obama said, "[M]any black men simply cannot afford to raise a family." (The out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is close to 70 percent.) I'm trying to follow the logic here. I can understand that a woman looking to get married may decide that a man is such a poor economic prospect that he's not husband material (even if a husband with a low income is better than no husband and no income). But how then is that same man, or a string of them, worthy of fathering her children?
Scholar Kay Hymowitz, author of Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, turns the argument around and says it's not that harsh economic conditions lead to women having children without fathers, but that the decision to have children without fathers leads to harsh, and self-perpetuating, economic conditions.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
In Gratitude to Chiara Lubich
I have just returned from Rome where I spent the hardest and most beautiful week of my life…. As many of you know, the founder of the Focolare Movement, Chiara Lubich, concluded her earthly journey on March 14, 2008. I happened to be in Rome that day, at the conclusion of the tour which followed an interfaith workshop for a small group on “Love of Neighbor and the Legal Profession” held in Loppiano, the Focolare’s international community near Florence. So I received the enormous gift of being present for the wake at the Movement’s headquarters in Rocca di Papa, and for the funeral on March 18, held at the papal basilica St. Paul Outside the Walls.
The church was packed, with overflow crowds (the reports run from 20,000 to 40,000) following on big screens in the courtyard, and through internet and satellite links throughout the world.
Her coffin was adorned in the simplicity of three red carnations, in memory of the flowers she bought for a few cents to celebrate her consecration to God in 1943; and the open book of the Gospel, the guiding and revolutionary force for the beginning of the movement and throughout her life.
The message from Pope Benedict read by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone during his homily captures the sentiments of gratitude that permeated every detail of the funeral: “There are many reasons for thanking the Lord for the gift given to the Church of this woman of intrepid faith, humble messenger of hope and peace, founder of a vast spiritual family that embraces many fields of evangelization. I would like to above all thank God for the service that Chiara has rendered to the Church: a both silent and incisive service, always in harmony with the teaching of the Church.”
Cardinal Bertone’s homily captured in a stunning way the heart of her life and her legacy: here is Zenit’s summary. I had the challenge of being in the translation booth when the Cardinal’s own voice started to crack as he quoted one of Chiara’s own poems: “When I arrive to your door and you ask me my name, I will not say my name, I will say my name is ‘thank you’, for everything and forever.”
If you’d like a taste of the atmosphere, here’s a snippet, and further coverage by Zenit. And at least for the moment the entire ceremony is up on the web and accessible. The first half an hour prior to the funeral includes tributes from representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu communities that were touched deeply by her work in interreligious dialogue, followed by moving messages from Greek Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican bishops. The parts I found especially moving were the witness of a Buddhist monk (on the counter at about 9:06); Cardinal Bertone’s homily (at 39:45); and the concluding good-byes (on the counter, 2 hrs and 2 minutes).
Together with hundreds of thousands of other people throughout the world, I have countless reasons to be thankful for the gift that Chiara's life was for the Church and for humanity, and now simply pray for the grace to be faithful to the profound legacy of life and love that she leaves, so as to continue her work toward the fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer, “that all may be one.” Amy
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Huckabee on Wright
This seems right to me:
And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
This is also why I think facile counterfactuals in which a white preacher makes a mirror image statement about black people are not at all compelling.
Formation of the Well-formed Conscience
The endorsement released by Professor Doug Kmiec of Senator Obama’s candidacy is a potent reminder that each of us will soon have to make his or her own endorsement, or not, of candidates for public office within the privacy of the voting booth. When he spoke before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September of 1960, then Senator and Candidate John F. Kennedy (not the Catholic candidate, but the candidate of the Democratic Party who was Catholic) asserted that he would address the issues that came before him based on what his conscience informed him to be in the national interest “without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” While then Senator, later President, Kennedy mentioned conscience, Professor Kmiec did not; therefore, I cannot comment on his exercise of conscience, but I can on John Kennedy’s.
I think Senator Kennedy was partially right but also partially wrong when he made his statement. He was correct insofar as he acknowledged the importance and relevance of conscience; however, he was wrong insofar as he concluded that religious belief was an impermissible influence in the formation of conscience. Many, if not most, of the issues that a citizen or public official must address contain both political and moral dimensions, but to exclude the moral reasoning that religious belief can offer would be a disservice to the implementation of one’s civic duties and would dishonor the exercise of religious liberty—especially when the individual in question asserts Catholic identity.
The objective of this posting is to provide an explanation, taking into consideration Catholic teaching, on how the Catholic—either as citizen or as holder of public office—is to form personal conscience that is well-formed and, therefore, consistent with the teachings of the Church. It is essential in addressing this matter to understand that conscience is “the most secret core and sanctuary of a person. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.” [Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, N. 16]
Conscience, its formation, and its exercise have long been important to the Church and its members. This is evident in the recent US Bishops’ statement, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship—A Call to Political Responsibility. The statement reiterates the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in the Declaration on Religious Liberty that the minds and hearts of Catholics must be formed in such a way as to promote knowledge and practice of the “whole faith”, which must necessarily include the critical, indispensable ability of Catholics to “hear, receive, and act upon the Church’s teaching in the lifelong task of forming his or her conscience.”
The Church does not tell its members whom they should vote for or against. However, she emphasizes that a critical element of this crucial individual responsibility is that the Catholic must exercise civic duties “in light of a properly formed conscience.” Thus, local bishops have the primary duty, as apostles in union with the Pope, to inform, through their teaching responsibility, each individual’s conscience so as to assure that it is a “properly formed” one. The failure to do so would constitute an inexcusable abdication of their responsibility to the Church and those souls entrusted to their teaching authority.
The formation of a well-formed conscience must also take into consideration the complementarity of faith and reason because it is reason, compatible with the Catholic faith, that reinforces the Church’s claim to teach and to proclaim the Gospel to the faithful and all people of good will. The well-formed conscience inexorably reflects this complementarity. But the free and well-formed conscience that accords and thinks with the Church cannot follow the problematic course of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where personal liberty is based on the ability to define one’s own concept of existence, the meaning of the universe, and the mystery of human life. The reason should be obvious: competing conceptions of liberty and conscience will inexorably lead to a collision course even within the most democratic of societies.
What will avoid the collision? Let me suggest these tools: patience, thought, and faith. The bishops, along with those who assist in their teaching authority, have the clear and distinct obligation to instruct the faithful in fundamental moral principles that help form consciences correctly with patience, critical reason, and faith. Those charged with this teaching duty must provide the antidote to the conundrum of exaggerated subjectivism posed by the Casey method of liberty’s role in the formation of conscience. The Church provides a transcendent and objective moral order which assists persons in making distinctions between right and wrong and forming actions based on these distinctions.
From the perspective of the exercise of the Christian, Catholic conscience, self-reliance is a problem when it is the only resource used in the formation of conscience. Fortunately, the Gospel and the Magisterium come together in an organic synthesis of faith that needs to exist in each person’s discipleship that leads to the inescapable path of objective truth whose consummation is God. This is the point at which Christ’s statement, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” becomes a reality present in and of the temporal world. What a panacea this would be to the problems of our times and those that will emerge in the future that challenge our wits of civic duty.
As Americans, we place an uncompromising value on liberty, yet it is with the Church’s teachings that rely on the truth, Himself, that human conscience is expanded and liberated. For the Christian, authentic liberation comes from the fact that the individual is not truly “free” when freedom is of the sort that distances a person from the truth. When a person is free from the truth, the person often becomes enslaved either by the paralysis of exaggerated autonomy and self-centeredness or by the dictates of some external entity that is not in accord with Christ’s truth as proclaimed by the Church.
Here it is vital to take account of Fr. John Courtney Murray’s commentary on the Decree on Religious Freedom of which he was a major drafter. In his discussion of the formation of conscience, Fr. Murray observed that it would be false to conclude that a person has the “right” to do whatever his or her conscience tells the person to do “simply because my conscience tells me to do it.” Fr. Murray asserted, correctly in my view, that to follow this kind of conclusion as a proper way of proceeding would be inconsistent with Catholic teachings because it is based on “a perilous theory.” The core justification proffered by Fr. Murray is that the centrality of the peril is its reliance on the kind of subjectivism in which a person’s conscience is based on self-reliance rather than “the objective truth” which therefore determines what is right or wrong, true or false. Hence, the judge of what is right or wrong, true or false is solely the individual rather than objective certainty. This is in large part why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2002 noted that a well-formed Christian conscience imposes certain responsibilities on Catholic citizens to counter a vote for or support of a political program or legislation “which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”
The CDF went on to state that the faith is “an integral unity” and it would be incomprehensible for a Catholic to justify his or her action, in the name of conscience, to support a decision that is detrimental to the whole of Catholic teachings. In essence, then, a well-formed conscience must not vote for a candidate, support legislation, or endorse a program on the basis of one particular element of evidence that would inevitably sacrifice the whole of the Church’s teachings and the entirety of its social doctrine. As wearers of the garment of Christ that we take on a baptism, we must bear the whole cloth and not that portion which is convenient for the moment. While a candidate’s positions or a party’s platform may be quilted from many fabrics, the conscience of the well-formed Catholic citizen or official must necessarily be of the whole cloth. RJA sj
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