Joan Vennochi asks, in the Boston Globe: "Every pronouncement from Pope Benedict XVI draws another line between official church doctrine and liberal ideology. When do liberals choose one side or the other? . . . The church in Rome thinks in centuries, not in news cycles. It isn't budging. Will liberals in America ever get the message?"
In my view, the piece is riddled with misplaced assumptions (i.e., that the Church's stances on disputed, controversial questions of social and economic policy are monolithically "conservative"). I suppose I am neither "liberal" (except in the sense that everyone is these days) nor a "liberal Catholic," but I found myself vicariously offended by the suggestion that Catholics who are liberals are Catholic only because of "nostalgia," and not because of a love of Christ and a hunger for the sacraments. We sometimes see, on the "conservative" side of the Church an impulse, to find a purer place, somewhere in the catacombs, where there will be no more liturgical silliness or bad music or squishy discipline; similarly, Ms. Vennochi advises liberal Catholics to abandon the Church for a purer, more satisfying, "liberal ideology." (It is interesting that Ms. Vennochi uses that word. Why would anyone -- liberal or conservative -- prefer "ideology" to the word and presence of God?)
My own sense -- based on many conversations here at MOJ and elsewhere -- is that Catholics who are liberals do not find this call attractive, or even comprehensible. My own sense is that, for most Catholics who are liberals, their liberal stances reflect efforts to live out and apply the Faith; it is not that they believe the Church's performance is to be evaluated based on its consonance with "ideology" of any kind.
What do the folks at the Commonweal blog think, I wonder? Mark?
Alas, in his post below, on the essay about Jacques Maritain, Rick failed to quote the most important paragraph of the essay--the final paragraph. Here it is:
Maritain returned for a last visit to the
United States in 1966 to say farewell to old friends and to visit the
grave of his sister-in-law Vera buried in Princeton. At the same time
he went to see others, one of whom was the poet and monk Thomas Merton.
The latter regaled him with recordings of Bob Dylan, "whom he [Merton]
considers a great poet, a modern Villon. What a strange scene it is,"
writes the friend accompanying Maritain, "listening in the monastery of
Gethsemani to the hard and expressive voice of a young rebel poet.
Jacques likes 'The Gates of Heaven' especially." (This is probably a
mistaken reference to "Gates of Eden.") It is with such an appealing
image, which seems to unite so many of the seemingly clashing facets of
Maritain's remarkable personality, that we can best grasp the secret of
his astonishing career.
_______________
mp
In the new First Things, Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs explores the Joshua Hochschild firing controversy. I hesitate to quote from it because the entire piece offers key insights for our ongoing conversation on Catholic identity and higher education, but here is his bottom line:
The Reformation may not be over, but many of the suspicions and hostilities that accompanied it should be. Wheaton could strike a great blow, not for insipid and vacuous “moral and religious influences,” but for true Christian unity, if it welcomed into its midst Josh Hochschild and other Catholic teacher-scholars who share his passion for Christian truth.
Rob
Hats off to the New Republic, for providing this review of two recent books about, among other things, Jacques Maritain. (I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of Maritain's friendship with the poet, Charles Peguy):
Jacques Maritain was an extremely complex and contradictory personality, a man with a disarming charm who always seemed to embody a somewhat subversive version of whatever cause he was espousing. A resolute partisan of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, he refused to confine them to the past and used them to defend the most extreme experiments of modern art. When he taught in the United States, he was considered to be a "Catholic Marxist." And he was perhaps the only important French intellectual since Tocqueville who ever wrote anything positive about the United States--in Reflections on America, published in 1958--without overlooking its problems and its deficiencies. The issue that preoccupied him throughout his life, the relation of religion, culture and politics, has recently taken on a new acuity, particularly in the United States, and thus history has given a renewed relevance to the flood of writings with which he analyzed this question from every conceivable point of view.
Also, I'm read last night an essay by Russell Hittinger about Maritain's Man and the State (1951). Hittinger writes:
Maritain argued that the political "madness" of twentieth-century Europe can be traced to the fact that modern democracies had never truly renounced the idea of "substantialism"--the "myth that the state is the people personified. . . . For Maritain, [this] generated [this] result: a conception of the state regarded not as a relatively higher power within a network of authorities constituting a body politic, but rather as a separate and transcendent power entitled to act on the body politic.
There's a lot more. The essay is available in Hittinger's book, The First Grace, and is well worth reading.
A thought, taken from a relatively recent lecture by George Weigel:
If democracy is more than institutions and procedures -- if democratic institutions and procedures are the expressions of a distinctive way of life based on specific moral commitments -- then then democratic citizenship must be more than a matter of following the procedures and abiding by the laws and regulations agreed upon by the institutions. A democratic citizen is someone who can give an account of his or her commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and equality before the law, to decision-making by the majority and protection of the rights of minorities. Democratic citizenship means being able to tell why one affirms "the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law," to cite the preamble to the European constitution.
Our own Michael Perry has emphasized a similar point, in his work on human rights. How can "Catholic legal theory" help to provide such an "account"? Can anything else?
Jonathan Watson asks some good questions about my praise for the Harvard Lambda students who are, in my view, exercising their marketplace power to make firms accountable for the causes they take on. He asks:
Since the students in question are not hiring Ropes & Gray (and therefore, don't have marketplace power in that sense) do you mean that they are attempting to force Ropes & Gray to reconsider, or else be forced to do without members of the Lambda student organization? That makes no logical sense to me either, since they could simply refuse to interview or apply for positions with R&G. I am curious how you would use this incident to illustrate the need for lawyers to take moral responsibility for their professional decisions? How does this relate to "moral responsibility" versus informed moral responsibility, and (in light of Prof. Araujo's comments about R&G also doing work for Gay and Lesbian groups) irresponsible or illogical moral responsibility?
When I refer to marketplace power, I'm not simply talking about the decision by individual students to seek employment with a firm doing work to which they object. I'm talking about the persuasive power of students banding together to convince their classmates not to seek employment with such a firm. By contrast, if the students were seeking to have Harvard exclude Ropes & Gray from on-campus interviews entirely because of the firm's work for Catholic Charities, I would not consider that to be an exercise of marketplace power so much as shutting the marketplace down.
And to be clear, I believe that Lambda's targeting of Ropes & Gray is misguided in this context given the nature of the legal claims at stake, regardless of one's view on the merits of gay adoption. But the fact that R&G also represents gay and lesbian causes doesn't erase the moral dimension. If a firm agreed to help an anti-Christian employer find creative ways to get rid of Christian employees without incurring liability, I would find that representation objectionable (especially if the firm took it on as a pro bono matter) regardless of the firm's other socially beneficial representations.
And I do not mean to belittle the value of the access to the law afforded by lawyers, a clear benefit of the amoral lawyering paradigm. But we are far from the point where individuals and groups lack access due to the controversial moral nature of their causes (lack of access for financial reasons is another story); the more pressing problem is that lawyers are trained to believe that the moral nature of the cause is irrelevant to the representation. If a firm devoted its pro bono resources to bringing cases that would seek to expand the abortion license through envelope-pushing challenges to parental notification laws and other legislative restrictions, would a pro-life law student be justified in declining an interview with the firm? Of course. But would they also be justified in trying to bring their classmates' attention to the firm's allocation of its limited resources? Absolutely, and that's the exercise of marketplace power I applaud.
Rob
