One thing I did not see reflected in the recent back and forth between Rick and Eduardo about climate change is any mention of the concern expressed in a recent UN Human Development Report about the disproporationate impact of climate change on the poor. Although climate change will affect everyone, the poor will “face the immediate and most severe human costs” in the form of malnutrition, water scarcity and loss of livelihood. As discussed in an article in this morning's NYT, it does appear that the climate change talks currently under way in Bali are focusing some attention on this issue.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Climate Change and the Poor
The Church and Human Sexuality, Revisited
THE TABLET
THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY
Founded in 1840
December 1, 2007
Editorial
An important distinction must be made about the
content of Catholic teaching and the language used
to present that teaching to a wider public. Words
like “evil” in connection with homosexuality, and
“murder” in connection with abortion, may resonate sweetly
with some of the faithful but will be heard as strident discords
by everyone else. By using such language the Church
brands itself as harsh and unworthy of serious attention.
In so far as Sir Stephen Wall’s criticism of recent church
statements (see page 12) is a criticism of this sort of inflexible
tone, it is timely. The message “watch your language”
is one that needs to be widely heard, not least in the Vatican.
Indeed, Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Christian
Unity department at the Vatican, has just publicly attacked
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the insensitive
language it used in its “One True Church” statement
in July this year. This “aroused perplexity and created
discontent” among non-Catholic Churches, with whom he
is, on behalf of the Vatican, trying to improve relations. If
he felt sabotaged, that would be entirely understandable.
Sir Stephen, a senior aide to the former prime minister
who gave up his government job to work for a time as adviser
to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, goes further
than that. He is concerned with content, not just with presentation.
In his article here he argues that the cardinal’s recent
pronouncement stating the Church’s case against the
legal approval of all-female (in effect, lesbian) parentage via
IVF was giving “pre-eminence to its concept of law and disregarding
its duty of love”. This is partly a challenge to the
traditional Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are invariably
seriously sinful. There will be many Catholics who
would go at least some way towards his position on that. But
the cardinal’s essential point was that children need parents
of either sex, and that the proposed legislation ignored that
powerful consideration – as does Sir Stephen. Nor does he
sufficiently acknowledge that his former eminent employer
moved a long way from the language of law to the language
of love in his recent joint statement (with Cardinal
Keith O’Brien of Edinburgh and St Andrews) on abortion.
As to the substance of the teaching, a new and more satisfactory
sexual ethic is unlikely to emerge simply from reversing
the old one. Church leaders must find the courage
to reopen a debate that should range over issues from contraception
to homosexuality – including lesbianism, on which
it appears to have no coherent view at all. Instead, in what
looks with hindsight almost like an attempt to justify the
extreme caricature of the Magisterium in the work of novelist
Philip Pullman – including the controversial new film
The Golden Compass – the Vatican has repeatedly and unjustly
silenced any theologian who tried to begin such a debate.
Sir Stephen’s rebuke that “as a Church beset by scandal
has become less authoritative, so it has become disproportionately
more authoritarian” is well said in this context. Authoritarians
do not listen. The witness of Catholic married
couples of all sorts, as well as Catholic homosexuals of either
sex, needs to be heard. Until the Church’s leaders really understand
what they have to say, they must expect impatient
and frustrated outbursts from even its most loyal members.
[Too read the article, by Steven Wall, to which the editorial refers, click here. These are the final paragraphs of the article:]
Above all, the Church's approach should be rooted not in power, authority and threat, but in love and understanding and, dare I say it, in acknowledging that it can be wrong or that many of life's most poignant problems raise issues of right and wrong, love and duty, pain and suffering that are not susceptible to simple answers.
The Church portrays itself as the victim of an aggressive secularism. It looks to me, rather, as if the Church is itself in danger of adopting an aggressive fundamentalism and that the secular societies it excoriates demonstrate a tolerance that is often closer to the ideal of Christian charity.
As a lifelong Catholic, I continue to be inspired by the many excellent Catholic men and women, lay and ordained, who live the spirit of the Gospels. I find hope and communion in the celebration of Mass and I believe in striving for reform from within. It is in that spirit that I hope that the window of fresh air that was Vatican II can be prised open once again.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
My limitation, my failure…
I am grateful for Susan Stabile’s and Rob Vischer’s postings earlier today on the question of conscience and the Church in the modern world. I am surprised that Susan thought my concerns about totalitarianism are restricted to the Catholic institutions. They are not. As she states, “Robert Araujo has raised concerns in several recent posts… about efforts to force Catholic institutions to conform to norms that threaten their religious beliefs and faith.” Indeed, I am concerned about Catholics and Catholic institutions and the Church, but I thought it was clear that my concerns extended to all, whether or not they had a Catholic connection. After all, I think that Catholic legal theory has a Catholic and catholic application. I must be clear now that the concerns which I hold and previously expressed in my previous postings, while including immense concerns for the Church, go beyond it. That is why I have used the term, most consciously, of “totalitarianism.” So, in good and gracious spirit, I must overcome what has been a perceived limitation and correct this failure on my part to be clearly understood.
The Boy Scouts, while including Catholics, comprise a lot of other people who are not co-religionists with me. My concern was for those who do not share my religion but share my beliefs, private and public. I am consoled by Susan’s reference to the Wisconsin matter brought to our attention by Sister Margaret John Kelly, D.C. regarding the bill before the Wisconsin legislature that will, if enacted, forbid an opt-out provision regarding “emergency contraception” (a fascinating euphemism) measures. My consolation does not extend to this legislative initiative but to Susan’s concern about it. Sister Kelly refers to the possibility that we are in a “Thomas More era” again. Indeed, I think we are—and we know what happens to those who did not subscribe nor acted in accordance with the demands of the state and those who influenced its decisions. As I have stated earlier, the need to believe in a uniform principle on the issues of the day existed in Tudor England as it existed in the twentieth century in Germany and Russia. To depart from the uniformity required by the authority of the state would inevitably lead to one’s doom.
But by joining a consensus with the state (and those who influence it), one could be saved. Nevertheless, by joining the uniformity of the moment, one may have, for the time being, saved one’s life only to lose it later. It profit no one to lose one’s life for the world (or, for Wales). Rob raises a parallel issue when he introduced the insensitivity to pro-life physicians by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Their message is this to pro-life doctors: regardless of your own beliefs, you must be prepared to cooperate and collaborate with those with whom you disagree on grave moral issues—if you do not, beware of the consequences. Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, himself a physician, medical school professor, university president, and ethicist, has previously commented on the issue Rob raises.
He noted that “ethicists” of the present day have begun to suggest that physicians “must separate their personal moral beliefs from their professional lives if they wish to practice in a secular society and remain licensed…” (I would add that we can begin to add here: pharmacists, Boy Scouts, and just about anybody else.) Dr. Pellegrino points out that “health care” is beginning to merge with “death care”, as he calls it and can cover the span of human life from its beginning to end. Consequently, physicians may begin to wonder that if they raise objections to abortion procedures, would they only be entitled to a limited license to practice the healing arts? The question can be taken one step further: would they be given a license at all? And, if they have a license, would it be stripped from them when they refuse out of conscience to engage in these procedures?
If you think that we are not facing the emergence of a totalitarian era, I urge you to reconsider. And as a part of my plea, I ask that you to take stock of what Christopher Dawson said in the early 1930s: “The sphere of action of the State has grown steadily larger until it now threatens to embrace the whole of human life and to leave nothing whatsoever outside its competence.”
Is this not an element of what is going on in Philadelphia? In Wisconsin? In Massachusetts? And elsewhere…? Dawson recognized that not only the totalitarian state but even the modern democratic state is not satisfied with passive obedience. It demands full co-operation from the cradle to the grave. This obedience appears to be necessary to avoid being pushed out of existence. Can the western modern state really be a democracy when it mandates uniformity in both beliefs and action? Time will tell. RJA sj
Conscience (with a few conditions)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ever sensitive to claims of conscience by pro-life physicians, has emphasized the duty of all physicians to ensure that patients have access to an abortion provider:
Providers with moral or religious objections should either practice in proximity to individuals who do not share their views or ensure that referral processes are in place so that patients have access to the service that the physician does not wish to provide.
Sure, we respect your claim of conscience -- as long as you exercise it while waving a referral slip and standing in the parking lot of a Planned Parenthood clinic.
Chris Eberle wants to know . . .
. . . why do we lawyers think it matters what the Founders thought about religion, politics, and public life? He writes, with respect to our discussion of Geof Stone's recent post on Gov. Romney's speech:
I don't get it: I hear that kind of debate all of the time -- "this is what 'the founders' believed about religion and public life.' "No, *this* is what they believed." Etc Etc. But who cares? Even if we assume, as is surely not the case, that there was some one position, even broadly construed, that the founders took with respect to the proper public role of religion, of what normative significance is that fact? After all, suppose that we agree that, as Prof. Stone says, "the Founders were not anti-religion. They understood that religion could help nurture the public morality necessary to a self-governing society. But they also understood that religion was fundamentally a private and personal matter that had no place in the political life of a nation dedicated to the separation of church and state." Why should that matter to me any more than their belief in Newtonian physics?
Actually, what I'm really wondering -- and I do wonder, because I think it's perhaps my Protestant individualism and latent hostility to tradition that's blinding me here -- is why two folks from MOJ should think his argument worth responding to. Is this some kind of Kabuki dance in which lawyers like to participate? Why waste the effort, other than to say: "Yes, perhaps the founders really did think what you say they thought. And now that we've mentioned that entirely irrelevant factoid, what should we, now, think about the proper role of religion in the United States?"
Well? Why do we "waste the effort"?
Response to Grant Gallicho
At Commonweal, Grant Gallicho has a post -- check it out -- that is critical of my part of the recent back-and-forth with Eduardo on climate change, etc. He writes (among other things):
Eduardo was endorsing the fairly recent phenomenon of Vatican officials–like the pope–increasingly mentioning environmental issues such as stewardship of the earth. Is Rick arguing that the curia should pipe down? Or should they simply avoid getting their hands dirty with troublesome “specific policy proposals”?
Wouldn’t it be great if the “shift” for which Eduardo hopes was, in an integrated and thorough way, distinctively Catholic, and involved talking about stewardship, solidarity, sustainable development, *and* the importance of valuing the truly human over chemically facilitated individualism? Surely the Church has more to add than “me, too!”
Sure it would, and no one suggested otherwise. But hooking the climate-change conversation to the contraception cart isn’t the only way to do it–or even a very good one.
I posted this comment:
For what it’s worth, the view of mine that (I think) runs through the back-and-forth between Eduardo and me is not that the “curia should pipe down” about important questions of environmental stewardship, resource use, development, etc. It is that, in speaking to these important questions, the Church (and Catholics in general) should be careful not to suggest, or to appear to suggest, that the costs and benefits of policies put forward as responses to, or prevention of, climate change are not crucially relevant to the task of deciding what should, may, or must be done. I do not think anything I wrote would justify the conclusion that I “doubt[]” that “pollution [is] bad, and not just for the environment.”
I do not think it is true that one cannot have “something worthwhile to say” if one “disagree[s] the church’s teaching against contraception.” Of course one can. I probably should have been more clear about this, or expressed myself better, but I was trying to suggest — and I think my correspondent was trying to suggest — that, wholly and apart from the “should the Church be more involved in speaking about environmental issues” question, that perhaps a *truly* “Green” worldview would be one that takes on board the moral critique of contemporary thinking about sex, fertility, reproduction, etc.
More on the Church and the Modern World
Robert Araujo has raised concerns in several recent posts (see here and here) about efforts to force Catholic institutions to conform to norms that threaten their religious beliefs and faith. Although I am still not convinced that the decision of the city of Philadelphia in the Boy Scout case is a step toward totalitarianism, there is certainly pressure on Catholic insitutions to conform to behaviors antithetical to the faith in a variety of ways.
Sister Margaret John Kelly, D.C., director of the St. John's University Vincentian Center for Church and Society, had this to say about a bill just approved by the Wisconsin state senate that, with no opt out ofr religious beliefs, would require hospitals to inform rape survivors that emergency contraception is highly effective at preventing pregnancy and to dispense the drug if requested:
"It seems to me that we are being forced into that "Mennonite Future" that Bryon Hehir cautioned us about. The choice seems to be homogenization or marginalization because the pressures against Catholic integrity are mounting at a time when the Church is most vulnerable and financially challenged in many areas. However, neither choice is acceptable if we are to remain faithful to both the tradition and the vision of our social service agencies and our hospitals. Perhaps this is a Thomas More era calling for a time-out for broad, serious reflection on Catholic identity. We may also need to do a cost-benefit study of the Church as sponsor of service institutions, a model which served well the Church of the 19th and 20th centuries. It may also be the time to go back and study again Dulles' models of the Church and Burghardt's application of those models to health care. I suspect we will find in them affirmation , inspiration and even direction."
Relax, Rick and Eduardo: Here is the Solution to Climate Change!
lobal Warming Consensus Alert - Gassy 'Roos to Save Planet? Friday, December 7, 2007 Here at Global Warming Consensus Watch World Headquarters we’re bold. We push the limits. We tackle subjects that other bloggers just don’t have the guts to tackle. And if that means we need to do a post on kangaroo flatulance, then that’s what we do. But what, you may be asking, does the gassy emission of the herbivorous marsupial of the family Macropodidae, of Australia and adjacent islands, have to do with climate change? We’re glad you asked! It seems that our bouncy buddies from the land down under may play a central role in opening up a whole new class of offsets: AUSTRALIAN scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say. Pardon me.Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas. While the usual image of greenhouse gas pollution is a billowing smokestack pushing out carbon dioxide, livestock passing wind contribute a surprisingly high percentage of total emissions in some countries. "Fourteen per cent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep,’’ said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland Government. "And if you look at another country such as New Zealand, which has got a much higher agricultural base, they’re actually up around 50 per cent,’’ he said. Link courtesy of Weasel Zippers. One wonders - who was the courageous scientist who discovered that kangaroo gas contains no methane? Hat tip to Acton Power Blog -Mark
Is the Pope Green--Or Not?
[From the NYTimes Online: The Opinionator.]
December 12, 2007, 9:29 am
News Flash: Pope Prefers People to Polar Bears
“Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology,” report the Daily Mail of London. “The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.”
(Full text of the speech, which the pope won’t give until New Year’s Day, is in English, here.)
“Did the Pope recently swing to the right?” asks Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog. “If so, you’d never know it from the actual text of his message … It seems to me that his actual words have about the same relationship to the Daily Mail’s paraphrase that weak instant coffee has to injected methamphetamine, but hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion.”
Even Allahpundit at Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air agrees that the newspaper is “overselling the force of his remarks considerably,” so he tries to dig behind the remarks: “What’s motivating this? Is the Pope really a righteous skeptic? Or, per what the Mail has to say about his warning not to privilege the lives of animals over humans, is he trying to head off the green fundies at the pass?”
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Ok -- I'll Bite
Rick says:
I am talking about the "precise contours of the problem", not the basic fact of anthropogenic climate change. These contours are quite contested (and, again, I understand, as well as most other law professors do, what is and is not "largely uncontested within the scientific community"). And, they should be. It is unhelpful -- it is certainly not "Catholic" -- to suggest, as so many (not Eduardo) do, that to raise questions about the details of certain predicted scenarios (e.g., "the seas will rise ___ feet in ___ years causing ____ unless we ____") is to be anti-science, a capitalist tool, a Bush toady, etc.
I don't know anyone on who says this, and it sounds a bit like a straw-man. On the other hand, I can come up with loads of examples of people who make light of the problem and continue to assert and reassert things that have already been repeatedly discredited. Here's the illustrious Michael Novak, just a few months ago over at NRO:
It is too bad that Nancy Pelosi did not travel out to Greenland with Eric the Red in 983-986, when the climate was much warmer and Greenland was so named because of its lush meadows and fertile fields — before a new ice age began that over centuries made it seem more like Whiteland. Too bad Pelosi didn't see climate change THEN. People then were glad to see the last days of Global Warming, and dreaded the winters and white-outs to come The Apocalypse Then was the Coming Ice Age.
Look it up in an encyclopedia. Here is what Laura Nivers at the American Enterprise Institute found:
How did a glacier-covered island get the name Greenland? In Norse legends written in the 12th century and later, it is told that Eric the Red explored the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland in a.d. 983-986 and gave the country its name because people would be more likely to go there if it had an attractive name. Greenland was warmer in the tenth century than it is now. There were many islands teeming with birds off its western coast; the sea was excellent for fishing; and the coast of Greenland itself had many fjords where anchorage was good. At the head of the fjords there were enormous meadows full of grass, willows, junipers, birch, and wild berries. Thus Greenland actually deserved its name. Another attraction of Greenland was that Iceland and northwestern Europe, including England, had a grievous year of famine in 976, and people were hungry for food as well as land.
I get it. We're not living through the early stages of anthropogenic global warming. We're recovering from an ice age that plunged Greenland into its current (for the moment) icy state. This appears to be a reference to the so-called Medieval Warm Period, a standard climate skeptic argument, and one that has been repeatedly debunked.
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