Thursday, April 14, 2005
The movement to empower pharmacists to take moral responsibility for their professional conduct has run into an obstacle in Illinois. The governor has ordered all pharmacies offering contraceptives to dispense them promptly to customers, and has filed administrative charges against the downtown Chicago drug store where a pharmacist refused to dispense the morning-after pill. Apparently Planned Parenthood's protest rally worked.
Rob
Thanks to Gerry Whyte, of Trinity College, Dublin, for this item from today's Irish Times. Note that according to the report, the Roman Catholic Church is among the authors of the law: France's parliament has approved a law that will allow terminally ill
patients to opt for death instead of further treatment, but which supporters say
stops short of permitting euthanasia. In an overnight session, the senate adopted a text already approved by the
lower house that allows doctors to stop giving medical assistance when it "seems
useless, disproportionate or has no effect other than maintaining life
artificially". The draft bill says terminally ill patients should have the right to ask for
treatment to be stopped, even if that leads to death, and doctors should respect
their wishes after verification with the patient and medical colleagues. The law also suggests families should be able to request an end to life
support for unconscious patients, and says doctors can prescribe pain-stopping
drugs for a terminally ill patient, even if the medication increases the risk of
dying. The authors of the law - supported by the conservative government, opposition
Socialists and the Roman Catholic Church - have said the bill does not copy
voluntary euthanasia which is legal in Belgium and the Netherlands. They say it is distinct from euthanasia because it does not allow the doctor
actively to end the patient's life.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
MOJ readers may be interested in clicking on some or all of the reflections below. From the April 22d issue of Commonweal:
Six writers from different faith backgrounds examine the legacy of John Paul II:
Notre Dame theologian Rev. Richard P. McBrien looks at the strengths of his papacy, namely in John Paul’s “foreign policy” (events outside the church) and its strides in ecumenism, and also its weaknesses, such as the pope’s “hard-line course of enforcement of doctrine and canonical discipline.”
Duke Divinity School theologian Stanley Hauerwas praises the pope’s Christological focus by comparing him to Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.
Fairfield University theologian Nancy A. Dallavalle names the public face of the papacy as among John Paul’s gifts to the church, but also notes that “this popular acclaim did not always translate into popular conversion.”
Rabbi Irving Greenberg highlights the pope’s resistance to communism, his validation of the Jewish covenant, and his emphasis on the “culture of life.”
In addition to these authors, University of Dayton theologian Terrence Tilley assesses how John Paul went about preserving the faith, and Orthodox writer Jim Forest recounts a telling personal meeting he had with the pope early in John Paul’s pontificate.
From the April 22d issue of COMMONWEAL, by Catholic Theologian Richard Gaillardetz:
Richard R. Gaillardetz
The death of Pope John Paul II has unleashed an outpouring of grief and gratitude for a man who may well have been the most widely recognizable human being of our time. This pope’s virtually unparalleled charisma and productivity and the length of his reign will likely rank his pontificate among the most influential in church history. Studies on the contributions of Pope John Paul II and his impact on the church will engage theologians and church historians for decades to come.
In the midst of this widespread mourning it is inevitable that the world will also be looking to the future. By the time this article appears we may already have a new pope. Over the weeks and months ahead there will be much discussion regarding items that ought to appear on a new papal agenda. Many will hope for a spiritual clone of John Paul II, a pope who will continue to encourage a robust and evangelical Catholicism capable of confronting the insidious relativism of our age. Others will wish for a pope with the courage to change Catholic teachings they find troubling. We will surely hear more, as we probably should, about issues that still rankle the church politic (at least in North America): women’s ordination, mandatory priestly celibacy, and homosexuality.
I harbor my own “wish list” for our new pope. Yet perhaps our hopes and prayers ought to leave more room for the work of the Spirit and focus less on issues and more on papal vision. For my part, I shall be content to pray that our new pope might allow two insights affirmed throughout the documents of Vatican II to inform his vision for the church: First, the Word of God is addressed to the whole church. And second, living in history as a faithful follower of Jesus requires an eschatological humility.
. . .
This is no liberal fantasy for a democratic church, but a quite traditional longing for a genuine community of discernment that dares to introduce its decisions as did the church of Jerusalem: “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us...” (Acts 15). It is a longing for a church that raises up leaders who recognize that leading and listening are not mutually exclusive.
. . . I hope for a pope who has a healthy dose of eschatological humility. Eschatological humility treasures divine truth as it is mediated through the received faith of the church but also recognizes that we do not so much possess divine truth as it possesses us. The revelation of God’s love comes to us first, not in doctrinal formulae, but as a person, Jesus Christ, who is for us “both the mediator and the sum total of revelation” (Dei verbum, 2). As the council taught, the church is “always advancing toward the plenitude of divine truth” (Dei verbum, 8). A pope with eschatological humility would know that in the final consummation of all things in God, our confident dogmatic assertions will be seen, not as erroneous, but as inevitably impoverished before that ineffable mystery that is God. Such a pope would not hesitate to give testimony before the world to the truth so treasured by followers of Jesus, but he would readily acknowledge that although the church is “guardian of the deposit of God’s word, and draws religious and moral principles from it...it does not always have a ready answer to every question” (Gaudium et spes, 23).
Eschatological humility comes with understanding as well what it means to belong to, and to lead, a church that is pilgrim-a church that is confident it has set upon the right path and wishes to share that way with others but that knows it has not yet arrived (Lumen gentium, 48). A pope with eschatological humility would know that this pilgrim church need never fear reform and renewal, for it is only by reform and renewal that the church will hobble forward on its journey (Unitatis redintegratio, 6).
Let us pray for a pope who believes that God’s Spirit abides in the church as in a temple and speaks in and through that church’s corporate discernment. Let us pray for a pope who speaks with a conviction chastened by the modesty befitting a pilgrim. Such a pope would truly merit the ancient title, servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God.”
[To read the whole piece, click here.]
The new issue of The Christian Century magazine has an article by Allen Verhey of Duke Divinity School on Terri Schiavo and the nutrition/hydration issue. Because Verhey tries to present arguments from Christian premises on both sides, as sympathetically as possible, the article may be useful as a teaching tool.
Verhey presents the argument for maintaining nutrition and hydration:
"Terri might not count for much as the world counts, but she surely counts as among 'the least of these' in Jesus’ parable. 'In as much' as you gave food to the hungry or drink to the thirsty, Jesus said, you did it 'as unto me' (Matt. 25). . . .
"If we fail to see life as a good, as a benefit to her, we have evidently accepted an unbiblical and Cartesian dualism of body and soul, reduced the self to its powers of rationality and choice, and reduced the body to a mere container for what’s really important and valuable."
Then he presents the argument on the other side:
"Christians regard life as a good, to be sure, but not as a second god. Remembering Jesus and following him, we can hardly make our own survival the law of our being. Christians may refuse medical care so that another may live. They may refuse medical procedures that may lengthen their days but do nothing to make those days more apt for the tasks of reconciliation or fellowship.
"It is not shocking that Terri would have suggested she would not want artificial nutrition and hydration if she were in a persistent vegetative state. That decision must be honored if we would respect Terri’s Christian integrity. . . . If we regard the preservation of her biological life as a benefit to her, then we have evidently adopted an unbiblical vitalism, reduced her to her body and her body to a mere organism."
He characterizes the issue between the two competing arguments: "Both sides agree that Terri is to be treated and cared for as an embodied self. They disagree about whether the greater risk is that she will be reduced to her capacities for rational choice or that she will be reduced to a biological organism."
From the issue dated April 22, 2005
Pope John Paul II was a force of nature, a man of iron will and passionate spirituality, who was also blessed with a quick wit, a magnetic personality, and a fearless moral temperament.
There can be no gainsaying his extraordinary achievements, both on the world stage and as one of the most compelling Christian witnesses of our time. The millions who poured into Rome to view his body and attend his funeral were the most obvious testimony to the regard in which he was held by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Countless words have now been written honoring this pope, and trying to explain the powerful effect Karol Wojtyla exerted over the sophisticated and the unsophisticated, over believers and nonbelievers, and perhaps especially over those seeking faith in a world where religious answers and religious authority can no longer be taken for granted. In his dying as in his life, John Paul made his love of and devotion to Christ real for others in the most intimate and undeniable ways.
Commonweal has asked commentators of different faiths and philosophical inclinations to reflect on the broad sweep of John Paul’s legacy (page 13). Over his long papacy this magazine has, of course, written extensively about John Paul, and a selection of that material is available on our Web site (commonwealmagazine.org). Like any significant historical figure, this pope will only be truly understood in the course of time. He was, for many of his contemporaries, a figure of paradox, even contradiction. His unwavering defense of human freedom and his eagerness to engage thinkers of all persuasions too often stopped at the church’s doors. He traveled the world confronting tyrannical governments, but refused to listen to those calling for change, or at the very least dialogue, within his own house. He broke down barriers between Catholicism and other faiths, especially Judaism, but seemed determined, in his appointment of bishops and cardinals, not to permit pluralism a place at his own table. He gave the church the most accessible and compelling public face imaginable, yet turned a stony face toward many fellow Catholics.
Perhaps these contradictions are best understood in light of John Paul’s formative experience as a bishop in a Polish church that had to walk a delicate line between accommodation and confrontation in its struggles with a totalitarian regime. It was there that John Paul learned the virtues of church unity, discipline, and loyalty. Without those qualities, the Polish church would have been divided, undermined, and destroyed. Unfortunately, he seemed to take this model of an embattled church-one that could not brook public discord on internal church matters-and to employ it even when dealing with liberal democracy and modern secular culture. Some credit John Paul’s hard line on church discipline and theological dissent with revitalizing a moribund institution and forging a more cogent sense of Catholic identity. His critics note, more often in sorrow than anger, that there is little evidence that the church’s teachings are more broadly followed or deeply held after John Paul’s reign. More worrisome, there is even less evidence that, under his firm grip and long shadow, local churches are producing the kind of leaders needed in his absence.
One of the most acute comments on the pope’s passing was made by the Irish novelist Colm Toibin in the New York Times Magazine (“A Gesture Life,” April 10). Toibin described John Paul’s presence before a crowd of 1 million at the church of the Black Madonna in Poland in 1991. The pope’s hesitant yet sure movements, his practiced but effortless gait, were the work of a great actor, Toibin observed. The novelist was struck especially by how the pope’s facial expressions somehow conveyed humility and pride, loneliness and exhilaration. John Paul was “natural and improvised and also highly theatrical and professional. More than anything, [he] was unpredictable.” At one point during the Mass, the pope held the crowd’s attention for twenty minutes by merely holding his head in his hands. To Toibin’s mind, John Paul’s artful gestures provided “some mysterious example of what a spiritual life might look like.”
Toibin used his novelist’s gifts to render unmistakably what has been one of the most expressive faces of the last century. “His eyes understood and forgave everything,” Toibin writes, but “his mouth and the set of his chin forbade deviation and did not want there to be any change.”
Toibin’s description reminds us that Christ entrusted his church to Peter and his successors, to fallible human beings, not to oracles or gods. John Paul’s was an all too human face, one Catholics looked up to for more than a quarter century, and to whom we have now bid a wrenching goodbye. It is a face the church, and the world, will not soon forget.
April 12, 2005
The following editorial, from COMMONWEAL, April 8, 2005, is worth reading and reflecting on:
The passions of those on either side of the Terri Schiavo tragedy are not hard to understand. Still, whether Michael Schiavo was right to have his wife’s feeding tube removed is not a judgment that people outside the family should second-guess too quickly or easily. The choices involved cannot simply be reduced to the slogan “err on the side of life” or to accusations of euthanasia or death by starvation. Contested by Terri Schiavo’s parents, Michael Schiavo’s decision was rightfully adjudicated in the courts, not in Congress, the Florida governor’s office, or the White House.
Given the inherently complex nature, both medically and morally, of Terri Schiavo’s persistent vegetative state (PVS), the demagoguery of some of her self-appointed advocates, especially certain elements of the prolife community and the Republican Party, has been appalling. Almost as bad has been the failure of the Catholic hierarchy to present the full depth and subtlety of Catholic teaching on this difficult question.
[To read the rest, click here.]
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
An abstract of Mark Sargent's forthcoming paper, "Utility, the Good, and Civic Happiness: A Catholic Critique of Law and Economics", is available here:
This paper contrasts the value maximization norm of welfare economics that is central to law and economics in its prescriptive mode to the Aristotelian/Aquinian principles of Catholic social thought. The reluctance (or inability) of welfare economics and law and economics to make judgments about about utilities (or preferences) differs profoundly from the Catholic tradition (rooted in Aristotle as well as religious faith) of contemplation of the nature of the good. This paper also critiques the interesting argument by Stephen Bainbridge that homo economicus bears a certain affinity to fallen man, and that law and economics thus provides appropriate rules for a fallen world. From a Catholic perspective, the social vision of neo-classical economics and its progeny (welfare economics and law and economics) rests on a concept of human autonomy and a utilitarian concept of pleasure inconsistent with the Aristotelian and Aquinean concept of virtue and the conception of civic happiness articulated by Antonio Genovesi and other Catholic economists.
Rick
Notre Dame's Dan Philpott, professor of Political Science, contributes these thoughts (taken from an essay recently published in America magazine), on John Paul II and reconciliation, to the online symposium on the Pope's legacy in the legal context:
In his message for the 2002 World Day of Peace, Pope John Paul II affirmed “the right to defend oneself against terrorism,” but made forgiveness and reconciliation his central theme. In the Old and New Testaments, reconciliation means “restoration of right relationship.” The Christian tradition emphasizes restorative practices of healing, repentance and forgiveness between individuals. Now John Paul II is advocating these for collectivities: nations, civilizations and the church itself.
In a quarter-century of statements and speeches, the pope has taught reconciliation under three headings: apology, forgiveness and dialogue. By his own example he has shown the importance of apology. According to the Italian journalist Luigi Accatoli, John Paul has led the Catholic Church in apologizing for its own members past sins at least 94 times for 21 categories of historical offenses, including hostility toward Jews, slavery, denials of religious freedom, the Crusades and the Inquisition.
He has taught also forgiveness as a practice for nations and states, beginning with his second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy,” 1980) and repeating the theme in several later messages, including his post-Sept. 11 message for the World Day of Peace in 2002, in which he appended to Paul VI s famous “no peace without justice” the phrase “no justice without forgiveness.”
Finally, the pope has led the church in dialogue, which, he explains, involves the charitable uttering and hearing of disagreement in the hope of a deepened understanding. Besides urging dialogue between Christian churches and world religions, John Paul II has called for a “dialogue between civilizations,” an invitation to which Muslim leaders . . . have responded warmly.
A social ethic of reconciliation is an important development in Catholic social thought. . . . What [the Pope and other thinkers] suppose is that a Christian social ethic, like the Gospel in the life of an individual person, is incomplete if it consists solely of a set of norms prescribing what is good, just, right and consonant with natural law—the logic of most Christian political thought since the Middle Ages. A new social ethic must also teach how a society ought to proceed when everything has gone wrong, and how it can realize healing, forgiveness and restoration as social processes grounded in the Cross and the Eucharist, a logic that dates back to the Gospel itself.
Ethicists must now translate these theological concepts into an applied political ethic, specifying how and by what moral criteria reconciliation might take place. . . .
Rick
Here is a contribution to the MOJ symposium on John Paul II and the Law from Pepperdine's Bob Cochran:
John Paul's writing on subsidiarity has been very influential in my thinking. In "Centesimus Annus, The Economics of Human Freedom," he said:
In the Christian vision, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the state but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political, and cultural groups that stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good.
The principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of a higher
order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower
order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it
in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of
the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. Needs are best
understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them, and who act as
neighbors to those in need.
In my view, this strikes the right balance and Christians should be neither libertarians nor socialists. The state has important value, but it primarily should be concerned with keeping intermediate communities healthy, rather than doing everything itself. This has implications for almost every
area of law-family law, property law, wills, welfare policy, education law, constitutional law, etc. I have even argued that it has an important place in Tort Law (see my "Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought" and "Law and Community"). Historically, the law did a much better job of protecting
intermediate communities, but it has tended to take responsibilities from them.
Rick
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