I would like to follow up on Rick’s earlier posting of the Oregon federal district court case of John Doe v. the Holy See. It seems that Mr. Anderson, counsel for John Doe, has prevailed in convincing the court that the tort exception to the law of foreign sovereign immunity makes the Holy See vulnerable to civil suit. Judge Mosman’s Opinion and Order [Download Holy_See.pdf ] merit careful study. With the deepest and sincerest respect to the judge, I believe that he has the law wrong. Priestly and religious life are not constitutive of an employer-employee relationship. In my opinion, this is one of the errors made by the court in its conclusion. Rick is correct in asking for the assistance of canonists here. But if it is a correct assessment, I am sure many priests, brothers, sisters, and laity would be surprised to find themselves labeled as employees and agents of the Holy See. Within the judge’s decision lies a variety of mischiefs that I think the judge, Mr. Anderson, and many others do not intend. But, there they are. As I said, the judge’s decision requires a careful study taking into account the expanse to which his conclusions may affect international relations. In the meantime, the two trains to which I have alluded to in earlier postings continue running in opposite directions on the same track. But now, they have increased their speed, and I fear for the outcome. RJA sj
Thursday, June 8, 2006
John Doe v. the Holy See
We're Busted!
Curses! Today's Know Nothings have uncovered the Romish immigration - Reconquista plot. The "Pilgrim Covenant Church" reports:
Over the past few years, I have spent time pointing out that the Roman Catholic Church is aiding and abetting the criminal invasion of America from Mexico because the illegals are almost all Roman Catholics. That church/state which maintains political, diplomatic relationships with the UN, the EU, the Russian Federation, the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine, and 174 nations around the globe is working both legally and criminally on behalf of a movement, the goal of which is to bring as many Mexicans into America as possible so as to eventually take over a large chunk of our nation for Mexico. This multifaceted movement, made up of radical organizations such as La Raza (The Race), Aztlan, and MEChA, is called Reconquista (Reconquest).
The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has a stake in Reconquista. The pope and his henchmen are looking to turn America, founded and still a Protestant country, into a Roman Catholic country. . . .
The Roman Catholic Church is determined to turn Protestant America into a Roman Catholic country, and her best bet to do that is to bring as many Catholics into our nation as possible.
And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
"The Vatican" loses on sovereign-immunity claim
The Washington Post reports:
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a sex abuse lawsuit against the Vatican can move forward with its claim that the Holy See bears responsibility for a priest who was transferred from city to city even though he was known to be a molester.
U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman said in his decision that there are exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, under which the Vatican is typically immune from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
Rejecting the Vatican's bid to dismiss the case, Mosman ruled that there was enough of a connection between the Vatican and the priest, who died in 1970, for him to be considered a Vatican employee under Oregon law.
The lawyer bringing the case, Jeffrey Anderson, "frequently represents abuse victims" (and has made millions of dollars by -- in his words -- "suing the shit" out of the Church. ed.) called the ruling a "titanic legal victory":
[This is] the first time any court has held or acknowledged there is a basis in law to hold the Holy See accountable for cover up and concealment and this international movement of predatory priests.
I'd be interested to hear from any canonists out there whether it is plausible -- from the Church's perspective, anyway -- to characterize the relationship between a priest and the Holy See as an employee-employer relationship.
Church autonomy decision
Professor Friedman has the good news about the Third Circuit's decision in the Ursuline Academy case. As Friedman notes, "the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected employment discrimination claims by a female teacher who was fired from her position as a 7th/8th grade teacher at a Catholic school after she signed a pro-choice advertisement in a local newspaper." Congrats to the Becket Fund for the win in this important case.
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Jeb Bush vs. Richard Rorty
Convinced that post-modernism is a threat to common decency and public virtue? Well, the elected officials of Florida agree, and they're not going to take it anymore, as Sandy Levinson reports.
Rob
Violence, Nudity, Jesus-Talk!
Culture Watch: Apparently the Motion Picture Association of America now affixes parental warnings not only to films depicting violence and sexuality, but also to films with characters who openly discuss their Christian faith. (HT: Open Book)
Rob
Toward a Catholic Legal Theory of . . .
. . . childhood games of chance as dispute resolution tools? The conversation begins here.
Rob
The Civil War as Theological Crisis
Mark Noll has a new book, The Civil War as Theological Crisis. One reviewer, writing in The Christian Century, explains Noll's central claim that the "political crisis" leading to the war "was necessarily a theological one, because theology and republicanism shared the same rhetoric," and:
The key to the antebellum synthesis—and, for Noll, the heart of the problem—was a widespread belief in a commonsense approach to the Bible. A faith available to all had for its authority a book accessible to all. The Bible yields its plain meaning to the believer. And so if the apostle Paul commanded, "Slaves, obey your masters," and told a Christian slave to return to his master, no sophistication was needed to see that the Bible condones slavery. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," Jefferson wrote of the nation's founding ideals, and Noll sees the same democratic instinct guiding biblical understanding. No bishop or Harvard scholar was needed to tell the unordained evangelist or even the man in his cabin reading the Bible by firelight what the Bible does and does not say.
But common sense applied to morality as well as to understanding the Bible. To some, including many readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the moral reprehensibility of slavery became more and more obvious, and the simplicity of an individual verse less decisive. Stowe's novel was powerful because it showed the limits of a morality shaped by exegesis alone.
The ensuing theological crisis was in some ways, then, a battle between moral common sense and exegetical common sense.
Protestant America lacked the theological resources to avert the stalemate; Noll praises the Catholic thinkers of the time as offering resources to fill the void, including Orestes Brownson, with his famous insistence that "popular liberty can be sustained only by a religion . . . speaking from above and able to command." Two quick points: first, for an evangelical like Noll to praise 19th century Catholics as the authentic defenders of political liberty, he must be making a well-timed effort to curry favor and minimize hazing by his new colleagues; second (and more seriously), our need for resources to avert the stalemate between exegetical common sense and moral common sense continues, particularly on the question of homosexuality. Another important contribution from one of my favorite scholars.
Rob
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Marriage and The Public Good: Ten Principles
The Witherspoon Institute, located in Princeton, New Jersey, recently published a document entitled Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles. Here is the Executive Summary:
"In recent years, marriage has weakened, with serious negative consequences for society as a whole. Four developments are especially troubling: divorce, illegitimacy, cohabitation, and same-sex marriage.
The purpose of this document is to make a substantial new contribution to the public debate over marriage. Too often, the rational case for marriage is not made at all or not made very well. As scholars, we are persuaded that the case for marriage can be made and won at the level of reason. Marriage protects children, men and women, and the common good. The health of marriage is particularly important in a free society, which depends upon citizens to govern their private lives and rear their children responsibly, so as to limit the scope, size, and power of the state. The nation's retreat from marriage has been particularly consequential for our society's most vulnerable communities: minorities and the poor pay a disproportionately heavy price when marriage declines in their communities. Marriage also offers men and women as spouses a good they can have in no other way: a mutual and complete giving of the self. Thus, marriage understood as the enduring union of husband and wife is both a good in itself and also advances the public interest.
We affirm the following ten principles that summarize the value of marriage- a choice that most people want to make, and that society should endorse and support.
Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good
- Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.
- Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
- Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.
- Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.
- Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.
- Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.
- When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.
- A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.
- The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.
- "Civil marriage" and "religious marriage" cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.
This understanding of marriage is not narrowly religious, but the cross-cultural fruit of broad human experience and reflection, and supported by considerable social science evidence. But a marriage culture cannot flourish in a society whose primary institutions-universities, courts, legislatures, religions-not only fail to defend marriage but actually undermine it both conceptually and in practice.
Creating a marriage culture is not the job for government. Families, religious communities, and civic institutions-along with intellectual, moral, religious, and artistic leaders-point the way. But law and public policy will either reinforce and support these goals or undermine them. We call upon our nation's leaders, and our fellow citizens, to support public policies that strengthen marriage as a social institution including:
- Protect the public understanding of marriage as the union of one man with one woman as husband and wife.
- Investigate divorce law reforms.
- End marriage penalties for low-income Americans.
- Protect and expand pro-child and pro-family provisions in our tax code.
- Protect the interests of children from the fertility industry.
Families, religious communities, community organizations, and public policymakers must work together towards a great goal: strengthening marriage so that each year more children are raised by their own mother and father in loving, lasting marital unions. The future of the American experiment depends on it. And our children deserve nothing less. "
Subsidiarity and Participated Theonomy
For any capacity it may have to advance the argument, I am grateful for Rob's invitation to clarify where he and I diverge in our understandings of subsidiarity. I am not hopeful, though, as the disagreement, which has been aired here many times, goes to whether things -- individuals and societies -- have goods that are for them a natural law.
Rob's work on subsidiarity (in, e.g., "Subsidiarity as a Principle of Governance: Beyond Devolution," 35 Indiana Law Revew 103 (2001) and "Subsidiarity as Subversion," 2 Journal of Catholic Social Thought 309 (2005)), which I admire, proceeds, as his recent post reiterates, from a concern lest we "limit subsidiarity based on the (highly contested) contours of the natural law." I deny the dilemma.
Subsidiarity, as I understand the principle, is a correlative of the natural law of human individuals and societies, a principle of coordination and non-absorption among various seekers, individual and societal, of the good. More important than my holding this view of subsidiarity is the fact that, as I read them, this is the view advanced in the encyclicals. Subsidiarity is the principle governing our participated, natural-law shares in the divine governance; subsidiarity simply doesn't apply except as principle of social justice reflective of the true common good. It's not a question of, as Rob writes, "local empowerment" ex nihilo. The question, as I understand it, concerns where certain ruling powers having already been located by nature (or supernature). Marriage is one of those places, and subsidiarity calls for its respect and nurturance. Subsidiarity is not "self-serving;" it serves the proper goods of individuals and of societies, and it seves the common good. That, at least, is how I read the Roman teachings. They affirm a certain sort of pluralism by affirming that the authority of societies seeking their respective goods is natural, not a contingent concession of a totalitarian or centralizing state.
Rather than quote the encyclicals, which everyone has easy access to, this excerpt from Joahnnes Messner's influential Social Ethics: Natual Law in the Western World (1949, 1965) nicely captures what the Church has, I think, been prosposing:
"The common good principle and the principle of subsidiary function are concerned with two sides of one and the same thing. Thus it was that Pius XI, when he coined the term 'subsidiary function', called it the 'fundamental principle of social philosophy.'. . . If the principle of subsidiary function were only a formal principle, then all natural law principles would have only a formal nature. . . . The principle of subsidiarity is what brings the functions of the state into the perspective of the actual common good. This is characterized by the fact that the political community is an association of invidivual and social persons with their own existential ends and their corresponding tasks, rights, and powers, who can reach their essential self-fulfillment only by complying with the corresponding responsibilities implied in these ends" (pp. 209, 211, 630).
I understand that this won't satisfy sceptics about the natural law. But, needless to say, the encyclicals that advanced the modern Catholic concept of subsidiarity entertained no scepticism regarding the bindingness (and knowability) of the natural law. For the origin of the term subsidiarity, as folded into the tradition by Leo XIII and Pius XI, Luigi Taparelli's work is the place to go.
A given body politic may not be up to the task of implementing the natural law, but this would not be with subsidiarity's blessing. And, as often happens, I'm reminded of this line spoken by Maritain: "Men know [the natural law] with greater or less difficulty, and in different degrees, running the risk of error here as elesewhere."
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
