Since Mary has been discussed on this feast day of the Immaculte Conception (with another - Guadalupe - coming up in four days), I thought I'd engage in a little shameless family promotion. Two good introductions to Mary are the Seekers Guide to Mary (Loyola 2004) and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary of Nazareth (Penguin 2006).
Friday, December 8, 2006
Immaculate Mary
"Making God Known, Loved, and Served"
For the past year or so, I've been working with the Notre Dame Task Force on Catholic Education, studying and thinking of ways to respond to the challenges facing Catholic schools. Today, Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., released the Task Force's final report, "Making God Known, Loved, and Served: The Future of Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools in the United States." I'm biased, of course, but I think the report is excellent: inspiring, challenging, and -- potentially -- valuable.
I was especially excited about the section entitled "School Choice: A Matter of Justice":
The Catholic Bishops in the
have, time and again, demonstrated courage and leadership by challenging Catholics and all people of good will to engage and embrace the Church’s rich social-justice teachings. On a variety of issues and in many different contexts – the sanctity of unborn life, the death penalty, war and peace, economic justice, and so on – the Bishops have exercised, prudently but forcefully, the teaching authority of their offices. In this way, they have served as faithful shepherds and pastors. United States
We believe it is crucial that the Bishops in the United States teach clearly and with one voice that parents have a right to send their children to Catholic schools, that these schools contribute to a healthy civil society and provide special benefits to the poor and disadvantaged, and that it is unjust not to include students who choose to attend Catholic schools in the allocation of public benefits. School choice is not just a policy option or a political question; it is an issue of religious freedom and social justice.
In recent years, the arguments in the public square for school choice and equal treatment of religious schools have moved from libertarian arguments about competition to moral arguments about equality, opportunity, and religious liberty. At the same time, support for school choice has expanded beyond a politically conservative base and now enjoys increasing bipartisan support, particularly among the poor and ethnic minorities. School choice and Catholic schools treat the poor as citizens of equal dignity. They promote the independence upon which constitutional government depends. And, they empower parents to pass on their values to their children.
These developments resonate strongly with principles of social justice, with principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, and with the preferential option for the poor. Public funds should be disbursed in such a way that parents are truly free to exercise their right to educate their children in Catholic schools, without incurring hardships or double-taxation. Accordingly, in the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, the Church proclaims that “Government . . . must acknowledge the right of parents to make a genuinely free choice of schools and of other means of education, and the use of this freedom of choice is not to be made a reason for imposing unjust burdens on parents, whether directly or indirectly.”
Immaculate Conception, cont'd
Right after reading Rob's post about the Immaculate Conception and its meaning, I read this, by J. Peter Nixon, over at Commonweal's blog:
I’ve always sort of struggled with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Reading descriptions of its development is sort of like reading a very complicated legal brief. Lots of talk about the “imputed merits of Christ,” the theology of Duns Scotus, and all that. Most of the time, I enjoy that sort of thing. But not today.
Today I’m thinking about mothers. One of the reasons that Mary is so important is that, in some sense, she is the guarantor of the humanity of Jesus. Jesus had a mother, just like all of us. Much of what Jesus became as a human being, he became because of his mother.
If you met me and got to know me for a while, and then met my mother, you would immediately see some of the traits that she passed down to me. I suspect that those who got to know Jesus, and then met Mary, had the same experience. Maybe it was her smile, maybe certain turns of phrase. Maybe Jesus inherited his fiery passion, his fearlessness from her. She must have been a formidable woman!
One of the ongoing temptations in Christianity has been to deny, sometimes without even meaning to, the humanity of Christ. A lot of us are still carrying around a mental image of a fleshy “costume” animated by an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. The idea that Jesus could have been shaped in some fundamental way by his human environment sometimes seems threatening. But that is precisely why the Incarnation is so stunning.
It doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me that if God was going to become incarnate in human flesh, that he would do a little advance planning. And perhaps one of the things He might be most concerned about is the woman who would bear Him, who would shape Him and guide him to adulthood, a poor peasant girl from the Judean countryside. How would she ever have the strength to bear the burden that would be laid upon her?
The answer? He gave it to her.
Oh, I’m sure this is very poor theology and someone far more learned than I could poke numerous holes in it. But in some sense, I think this is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is all about: a son’s love for His mother.
Nice. (I'm not a trained theologian, of course. But I liked it.)
The "Gender Complementarity" Objection to Same-Sex Unions
[Some MOJ-readers may be interested in this paper:]
"God's Created Order, Gender Complementarity, and the Federal
Marriage Amendment"
Hofstra University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 06-33
Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, Vol.
20, 2006
Contact: LINDA C. MCCLAIN
Hofstra University - School of Law
Email: [email protected]
Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=233178
Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=950109
ABSTRACT: Does marriage, in the United States, need the
protection of an amendment to the federal constitution, which
would enshrine marriage as only the union of a man and a woman?
In answering "yes" to this question, sponsors and supporters of
the Federal Marriage Protection Amendment (FMPA), in the House of
Representatives and the Senate, have made various appeals to the
gender complementarity of marriage: (1) opposite-sex marriage is
part of "God's created order;" (2) procreation is the purpose of
marriage and has a tight nexus with optimal mother/father
parenting; (3) marriage bridges the "gender divide" by properly
ordering heterosexual desire and procreation; (4) marriage is
"about children," not adult love; and (5) traditional marriage
transmits values crucial to democracy. This article canvasses and
critically evaluates a sampling of these arguments, as they have
featured in Congressional hearings and debates about the FMPA. It
asks whether FMPA supporters can reconcile their stance about the
imperative of protecting the gender complementarity of
traditional marriage with the transformation of marriage brought
about by family law reforms and contemporary Equal Protection
jurisprudence. It argues that FMPA supporters continually and
uncritically appeal to gender complementarity as a justification
for preserving "traditional marriage" without addressing
marriage's evolution and whether marriage's definition should
continue to evolve.
Immaculate Conception
I confess that the Church's requirement that Catholics believe in the immaculate conception of Mary has been more of a source of befuddlement than inspiration for me. (St. Bernard of Clairvaux ridiculed the belief as a "puerile absurdity.") David Scott has an essay that tries to sort it out. (HT: Open Book)
Response to Michael S's Invitation
Thanks, Michael, for your invitation. I would simply be channeling some Catholic moral theologians whose work I find compelling. I suggest you bypass me and go to the source! Here's something of relevance I posted last September:
September 07, 2006
Catholic Theologians, the Catholic Church, and Homosexual Sexual Intimacy
THEOLOGICAL STUDIES--widely regarded as one of the premier theological periodicals in the United States--is published on behalf of the Jesuits in North America. The editor, a Jesuit priest, is a member of the Department of Theology at Marquette University.
I want to call the attention of MOJ-readers to an article In the most recent issue--an article by two Catholic theologians: Todd A. Salzman, who is Chair of the Department of Theology at Creighton University, and Michael G. Lawler, Director of the Center for Marriage and Family Life at Creighton (and an emeritus professor in the theology department there). Salzman and Lawler are co-authors of the forthcoming volume, Committed Love: A Catholic Sexual Morality. The title and citation: "Catholic Sexual Ethics: Complementarity and the Truly Human," Theological Studies, 67 (2006), 625-52.
In their article, Salzman and Lawler explain why the Catholic Church's official position on the morality of homosexual sexual intimacy--the intimacy that Robby George dismissively calls "sodomy"--is deeply problematic.
In their conclusion, Salzman and Lawler write:
This disputatio is an inquiry into the nature of the truly human sexual act. We inquired, first, into the types of complementarity--heterogenital, reproductive, communion, affective, and parental--that the magisterium finds in a truly human sexual act and challenged the primacy granted to heterogenital complementarity as the sine qua non of such a truly human sexual act. We suggested that the scientific evidence for the genetic, physiological, psychological, and social loading that creates either hetersexual or homosexual orientation as a part of a person's sexual constitution requires the addition of orientation complementarity to the equation. This addition yielded our conclusion that an integrated orientation, personal, and biological complentarity is a more adequate sine qua non of truly human sexual acts. The truly human sexual act is doubly defined, therefore, as an act that is in accord with a person's sexual orientation and leads to the human flourishing of both partners. If accepted, that definition will lead to the abandonment of the absolute norm prohibiting homosexual acts for persons with a homosexual orientation. We repeat, the integration and expression of holistic complementarity, that is, the integration of orientation with personal and biological complementarity determines whether or not a sexual act is moral or immoral.
Interested readers may also want to consult this article by another Catholic theologian, Stephen J. Pope, of the Department of Theology at Boston College: "The Magisterium's Argument against 'Same-Sex' Marriages: An Ethical Analysis and Critique," Theological Studies, 65 (2004), 530-65.
But what about scripture? Those who wrote the Bible did not know
that the earth revolves around the sun; they understandably presupposed
with others of their time that the sun revolves around the earth.
Nonetheless, we now know that their presupposition was mistaken.
Similarly, those who wrote the Bible did not know what we are now
learning about the determinants and character of homosexual
orientation. Let me quote, as I did in an earlier post, Galileo:
The
reason produced for condemning the opinion that th earth moves and the
sun stands still is that in many places in the Bible one may read that
the sun moves and the earth stands still. Since the Bible cannot err,
it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes an erroneous
and heretical position who maintains that the sun is inherently
motionless and the earth movable.
With regard to this
argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and
prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth--whenever
its true meaning is understood. But I believe that nobody will deny
that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite
different from what its bare words signify. Hence if in expounding the
Bible one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical
meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and
propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible,
but even grave heresies and follies.
Posted by Michael Perry on September 7, 2006 at 02:36 PM in Perry, Michael
Is the "moment" of conception a myth?
Univ. of Missouri law prof Philip Peters has posted his new paper, The Ambiguous Meaning of Human Conception. (HT: Solum) Here is the abstract:
Nearly all of the state and federal laws that treat embryos as persons contain a fundamental ambiguity. Contrary to common belief, there is no “moment” of conception. Instead, conception is a forty-eight hour process, during which the haploid genomes of the sperm and egg are gradually and precisely transformed into the functioning diploid genome of a new human embryo. During that two-day period, many common clinical and laboratories activities take place, including the culling of unsuitable embryos, the freezing of others, and the testing of embryos for genetic abnormalities. The legal status of these activities will turn on the point in the two-day process of conception that is chosen to trigger the life-begins-at-conception laws.
In this Article, I argue that laws triggered by conception should not take effect until the process of conceiving a new diploid embryo is complete. This occurs when the embryonic genome begins to function, roughly forty-eight hours after insemination, at the eight-cell stage. Prior to that, a new human life is being conceived, but has not yet been conceived. Although many people will find this a surprising conclusion, it is consistent with both the gradual nature of the transformation from gametes to embryo and with the goals that the authors of these laws sought to accomplish.
Sex and Catholic Legal Theory
Dear Michael P.: In light of your two most recent posts - on Vice President Cheney's pregnant daughter and the movement within conservative judiasm to allow gay rabbis and unions - I encourage you to respond to my post "Sex and CLT" and Rob's post "Sex as Metatheory"? As I mentioned my last post, I won't be able to respond for a while, but I would be interested to learn (and learn from) your reflections on these posts. Thanks, Michael S.
The Republican Leadership, Same-Sex Unions, and Same-Sex Parenting
I had thought that the Republican leadership was opposed to same-sex unions and same-sex parenting, but now I see that the truth of the matter is much less clear and much more complicated.
New York Times
December 7, 2006
By JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — Mary Cheney, a daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is expecting a baby with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, Mr. Cheney’s office said Wednesday.
Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, said the vice president and his wife, Lynne Cheney, were “looking forward with eager anticipation” to the baby’s birth, which is expected this spring and will bring to six the number of grandchildren the Cheneys have.
Mr. Cheney’s office would not provide details about how Mary Cheney became pregnant or by whom, and Ms. Cheney did not respond to messages left at her office and with her book publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The announcement of the pregnancy, which was first reported Wednesday by The Washington Post, and Ms. Cheney’s future status as a same-sex parent, prompted new debate over the administration’s opposition to gay marriage.
Family Pride, a gay rights group, noted that Ms. Cheney’s home state, Virginia, does not recognize same-sex civil unions or marriages.
“The news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy exemplifies, once again, how the best interests of children are denied when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens are treated unfairly and accorded different and unequal rights and responsibilities than other parents,” said the group’s executive director, Jennifer Chrisler.
Focus on the Family, a Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.
“Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children,” said Carrie Gordon Earll, the group’s director of issues analysis. “Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child.”
In 2004, Ms. Cheney worked on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, which won in part because of the so-called values voters who were drawn to the polls by ballot measures seeking to ban same-sex marriage.
Mr. Bush voiced strong approval that year for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, as he did this year, too. While gay rights groups called on Ms. Cheney to speak out against the proposed ban in 2004, she remained silent.
But Ms. Cheney wrote in a book published this year that she had considered resigning from the campaign after learning that Mr. Bush would endorse the proposed amendment. She said that she decided to stay because other important issues were at stake in the 2004 campaign.
As she promoted her book last spring, she said a federal ban on same-sex marriage would “write discrimination into the Constitution.” The vice president has hinted at disapproval of the proposed amendment. Asked where he stood on the issue during a campaign stop in Iowa in 2004, Mr. Cheney said, “Freedom means freedom for everyone.”
Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bush, said that Mr. Cheney had recently told the president about the pregnancy and that “the president said he was happy for him.” The Cheneys have five grandchildren by their other daughter, Elizabeth.
Mary Cheney, 37, is a vice president at AOL; Ms. Poe, a former park ranger, is 45.
Conservative Judaism and Same-Sex Unions
New York Times
December 7, 2006
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The highest legal body in Conservative Judaism, the centrist movement in worldwide Jewry, voted yesterday to allow the ordination of gay rabbis and the celebration of same-sex commitment ceremonies.
The decision, which followed years of debate, was denounced by traditionalists in the movement as an indication that Conservative Judaism had abandoned its commitment to adhere to Jewish law, but celebrated by others as a long-awaited move toward full equality for gay people.
“We see this as a giant step forward,” said Sarah Freidson, a rabbinical student and co-chairwoman of Keshet, a student group at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York that has been pushing for change.
[To read the whole piece, click here.]
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