Friday, June 27, 2014
I took a shot at translating Pope Francis’s remarks on religious freedom, which he addressed to the participants at our conference on international religious freedom (an official translation will be issued later). I have tried to be faithful to the text, sacrificing a bit of readability. I have done this in part because some partial translations I’ve seen are not true enough to the original, even if the resulting translation here still leaves some open spaces in meaning (which, at any rate, should not be filled by the translator). Here is the original in Italian. I’ve also got a few comments at the end of the translation.
I welcome you on the occasion of your international conference, dear brothers and sisters. I thank Professor Giuseppe Dalla Torre for his courteous words.
Recently the debate about religious freedom has become very intense, asking questions of both governments and religious denominations. The Catholic Church, in this respect, refers to the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, one of the most important documents of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II.
In effect, every human being is a “seeker” of truth about his own origins and his own destiny. In his mind and in his heart arise questions and thoughts that cannot be repressed or suffocated, inasmuch as they emerge from the deeps and are by nature connected with the intimate essence of the person. These are religious questions and they demand religious freedom to manifest themselves fully. These questions seek to shed light on the authentic meaning of existence, on the ties that connect it to the cosmos and to history, and they mean to pierce the darkness by which the human condition would be surrounded if such questions were not asked or if they remained answerless. The Psalmist says: “When I see your heavens, work of your fingers/ the moon and the stars that you have fixed, / what then is man that you would remember him, / a son of man that you would care for him?” Psalms 8: 3-4.
Reason recognizes in religious freedom a fundamental right of man that reflects his highest dignity, that of the capacity to seek the truth and to adhere to it, and recognizes in that right an indispensable condition in order to deploy his own potentialities. Religious freedom is not only the freedom of a thought or of a private sect. It is freedom to live according to ethical principles consequent to discovered truth, whether privately or publicly. This is a great challenge in the globalized world, where weak thought—which is like a disease—lowers the general ethical level, and in the name of a false notion of tolerance ends by persecuting those who defend the truth about man and that truth’s ethical consequences.
Legal regimes, national or international, are called to recognize, guarantee, and protect religious freedom, which is a right that inheres intrinsically in the nature of man, in his dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and one of the principal fonts of the legitimacy of the state.
Religious freedom, implemented in constitutions and in laws and translated into coherent behaviors, favors the development of relationships of mutual respect among the different faiths and their healthful collaboration with the state and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonisms. In place of the global conflict of values, coming from a nucleus of universally shared values, a global collaboration in view of the common good becomes possible.
By the light of the acquisitions of reason, confirmed and perfected by revelation, and of the civil progress of peoples, it is incomprehensible and worrisome that, even today, in the world there remain discriminations and restrictions of rights for the sole reason of belonging to and professing publicly a certain faith. It is unacceptable that true and actual persecutions exist for reasons of religious membership! And wars too! This wounds reason, attacks peace, and humiliates the dignity of man.
It is a motive of great pain for me to observe that Christians in the world suffer the largest number of such discriminations. Persecution against Christians today is even more powerful than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs than in that era. This is happening more than 1700 years after the edict of Constantine, which granted freedom to Christians to profess their faith publicly.
I hope profoundly that your conference illustrates with depth and scientific rigor the reasons that today oblige the legal order to respect and defend religious freedom. I thank you for this contribution. I ask you to pray for me. From my heart I wish you the best and I ask God to bless you. Thank you.
Some brief thoughts (and I hope others will add theirs as well):
1. A note on the fourth paragraph with Patrick Brennan’s good questions in mind (Patrick was getting the English translation from a different source). According to my translation, the Pope did not say that “every person has a right to seek the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly, consequent to the truth one has found.” The full paragraph fragment in Italian is:
La ragione riconosce nella libertà religiosa un diritto fondamentale dell’uomo che riflette la sua più alta dignità, quella di poter cercare la verità e di aderirvi, e riconosce in essa una condizione indispensabile per poter dispiegare tutta la propria potenzialità. La libertà religiosa non è solo quella di un pensiero o di un culto privato. E’ libertà di vivere secondo i principi etici conseguenti alla verità trovata, sia privatamente che pubblicamente.
The phrase in question, as well as the entire paragraph fragment, is, I think, more faithfully translated as “discovered truth” rather than “the truth one has found” ; “discovered truth” refers back to the same truth that is being sought for in the previous section of this paragraph.
2. Note the reference to the “global clash of values” in paragraph six–a specific comment on our conference–and the Pope’s statement that such a clash can be overcome. That struck me as relevant to the discussion that Tom Berg and I have been having here, here, and here.
3. Nevertheless, in spite of his optimism about the prospects for religious freedom, the Pope expresses great distress about the plight of Christians in the world today, as can be seen in the paragraphs toward the close of the speech.
The Supreme Court's unanimous judgment yesterday in McCullen v. Coakley was correct: Massachusetts violated the First Amendment by prohibiting peaceful speech on public sidewalks outside of abortion clinics. The Chief Justice's opinion for the Court puts some real teeth into narrow tailoring and should be very speech-protective in application to a range of speech restrictions down the road. I was disappointed, however, in the Chief Justice's content-neutrality ruling.
Justice Scalia's concurrence in the judgment powerfully sets forth the case for understanding the Massachusetts law as content-based, and therefore deserving of strict scrutiny. Lest this be viewed as just another episode in the series which the Chief Justice refuses to overturn a problem precedent while Justice Scalia lambastes the Chief's faint-heartedness/moderation (readers' choice), it is worth taking note of a couple ways in which this case departs from that pattern. First, Justice Alito wrote separately from the Chief Justice to take the even stronger First Amendment position that the Massachusetts law was viewpoint-based. (Contrast that with a case like Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation.) Second, Professor Laurence Tribe agrees with Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito, while disagreeing with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. How often does that happen?
On this last point, I can't help but add a personal perspective on the decision in McCullen. Yesterday's decision marks the culmination of the first "real" federal litigation I have been involved in. As a law student, I was there at the beginning, helping out with the earlier First Amendment challenge (McGuire v. Reilly) to the (also-unconstitutional) predecessor to the law held unconstitutional yesterday. And I've had the opportunity to help out some with the McCullen case along the way as well. It has been a professional privilege to work with excellent lawyers who never gave up on meritorious First Amendment claims over the course of well over a decade. But perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the litigation for me has been to see Professor Tribe and Justice Scalia agree on the application of core First Amendment principles in a case like this. More than once, I've received strange looks and skeptical questions from people who wonder how anyone could have worked for both of these men. Yet there are a handful of us. And though I can't speak for the others, it's fair to say that I agree with Justice Scalia more than Professor Tribe about matters of constitutional law. The occasions that they agree on constitutional substance, even while many others disagree, are occasions that give me confidence in the capacity of legal principle (often more fragile in application than it should be) to direct sound reasoning about difficult and divisive issues.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
This is the second of two posts responding to Tom's post below about irony and tragedy. In the first, I tried to lay out what I perceive as some of the conceptual differences between a tragic and an ironic approach generally with some application to more theoretical issues in the interpretation of the religion clauses. In this one, I try to address some of the challenges that Tom poses about the resources (or lack thereof) that tragedy might draw on for practical purposes.
Tom argues that irony has various practical advantages over tragedy inasmuch as it provides a resource for issuing challenges and for striking deals. He raises the arguments that he and others have been making on behalf of religious exemptions as examples of the critique from irony. And he suggests that a tragic view may not offer the same kind of practical resource because it often denies that the values advocated by one side in a conflict are commensurable with the values championed by the other side.
These are all fair points. Tom is right that tragedy opens up the domain of incommensurable values. Tom is also right that the tragic view will be far less amenable as a resource for the sorts of critiques that he argues have been important.
But I wonder very much whether the ironic critique is…true.
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As part of the Auburn Applied Theology series, a new collection of short essays, called Losing Faith in our Democracy, is out. The report is billed as a "theological critique of the role of money in American politics," and the contributions come from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish theologians. I have not read the essays, though I quickly skimmed the ones by William Cavanaugh and Charlie Camosy, which I recommend.
My own view is that, generally speaking, the "there's too much money in politics" claim is more often asserted than established -- how much, after all, is the right amount?; that the urge to regulate campaign speech, spending, and contributions usually reveals and implements a goal of securing an advantage for one's preferred political outcomes; that complaints about the role of "corporations" or about the "fiction" that "corporations are people" too often fail to deal with the reality that not only big businesses but also charities, unions, tribes, churches, political parties, and interest groups also use the corporate form; and that claims about the "distorting" effects of money on politics usually pay insufficient attention to the many other ways in which the content and quantity of political speech and activism are shaped, inflated, dampened, and distorted. But, like the man says, "that's just me, I could be wrong." (I should not, by the way, that the above observations do not apply to the Cavanaugh and Camosy essays in the report, which raises important issues.)
Thanks to Tom for his post and his very good questions. Tom and I have been having this discussion for a good while and it is a pleasure to talk together again. Several years ago, Tom put together a wonderful conference on Niebuhr, Christian realism, and law at the University of St. Thomas. I wrote a paper for that conference that I never published on the differences between tragedy and irony, and Tom’s post made me look back at it.
My thoughts about Tom’s post are in two posts. The first post concerns the conceptual difference between tragedy, comedy, and irony as I understand the terms. The second post addresses some of the more concrete practical challenges and questions Tom poses.
This post is long, as is the next one. For the impatient reader, the quick version is that I am a tragedian and not an ironist because I believe that tragedy better describes the nature of conflict in the world, or at least in that corner of the world that Mirror of Justice contributors sometimes think about, the law of religious freedom. Deep and true conflict, and not simply the appearance of conflict that awaits the ironist’s clever harmonization, is our condition. The tragic perspective helps us to appreciate the true breadth of the chasms that separate us—chasms that, in our day, are expanding. And that is why, much as I appreciate the virtues of the ironist, and much as I admire the efforts of Tom, Rick, Doug Laycock, Robin Wilson and others to reach the sorts of agreements Tom mentions, I believe that those agreements are at best temporary, pragmatic settlements. That is not to denigrate them at all: indeed, I believe that Niebuhr himself took little more than a series of pragmatic micro-deals to be the concrete political expression of his ironic Christian realism. Negotiating conflict sensibly is no small feat. But, to the extent they have been achieved (which is, regrettably, not often enough), those agreements are not larger victories of principle. They do not tell us much at all about the commensurability of the clashing values. And their fragility and evanescence is some evidence that tragedy, not irony, is the deep force at work. Though I do believe that the tragic view has something to say about conflict resolution—something different than what the ironist says—the reason to be a tragedian is not to resolve conflict but to perceive as completely as possible the nature and depth of our divisions. They are very great.
Concepts. What are we talking about in using these terms? Let me focus first on Niebuhrian irony, and then contrast it with a tragic view.
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Perhaps the politicization of the IRS was inevitable. In any event, the agency is now completely out of control and has become an active threat to the integrity of our political system and the liberty and privacy of the American people. Our nation should move as expeditiously as possible to a different system of taxation for funding the federal government, one that does not create so many opportunities for the abuse of power. I do not have settled views as to which of the various alternatives would be most suitable; nor, I believe, do most Americans. It strikes me as time for a national debate on the subject. I would very much like to hear the strongest arguments for and against the different options.
The IRS has agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for...
