Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

MOJ at 10: Scaperlanda's reflection

By Michael Scaperlanda

My first post, written on February 10, 2004 was titled “Anthropology and the Structures of Injustice.” In that post, I suggested that “A (maybe THE) major structure of injustice in our society is a malformed anthropology, which provides the foundation for many of the other structures of injustice.” I continue to think this. 

A Chronicle of Higher Education (1/27/2014) article, “When I Was Young at Yale,” written by an English professor who co-taught a course with Richard Rorty at Virginia, where the objective of the course was “de-divinization,” supports my hypothesis. He writes: “We were out to wipe the highest aspirations of humanity off the blackboard—they were an encumbrance, a burden, a major inconvenience. Courage, compassion, the disinterested quest for ultimate truth: Let’s drop them. They were forms of oppression. They weighed people down.” Although this professor confessed to being “slow,” he finally realized that “If there were no ideals, or no creditable ideals, then the kids who were headed from Skull and Bones to Wall Street and the CIA were absolved, weren’t they? They didn’t have to be honorable; they didn’t have to seek the truth; they didn’t have to do what Auden told us all we had to try: ‘love one another or die.’ No, the kids from Yale [and, I would add, the rest of us] were free.”

I too am slow. I ended my first post with “We cannot force someone to accept our anthropology - our understanding of what it means to be human - but I think (like Rick) that there is good reason to raise the question and also hope (not to be confused with optimism) that this anthropological perspective will resonate with others. More on these two points later ...”

Ten years later, I continue to hope, but I am much less optimistic that this hope will be realized in the near term than I was a decade ago. Ten years ago, in my youthful (I wasn’t even 44 yet) naiveté, I imagined that the new springtime of the Church was just around the corner. I thought that if people understood the beauty of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the nature of the human person (instead of obsessing over and twisting a few aspects of this teaching), they would gravitate toward that worldview in large numbers at least philosophically. My co-edited book (with Teresa Collett), “Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law,” was an attempt to show that the Catholic Church had much to contribute to the discussion about labor law, immigration law, property law, contract law, etc.

My sense today (and maybe I am just an overly pessimistic nearly 54 year old) is that far from gaining traction, a Catholic anthropology is actually losing ground in the public sphere where debate is being shut down in the name of tolerance and diversity. I now expect a long winter before the coming spring. 

I am grateful for Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and their sound philosophy and theology (I suspect that the Theology of the Body will take root in the long run) in the decades after Vatican II.  Rational argument still needs to be made, and the two of them along with faithful theologians and philosophers, have kept the Church on solid intellectual ground. But, I sense a shifting of the wind, and I am equally grateful for Pope Francis with his emphasis on being a living witness to Christ’s love and mercy. I suspect that love and mercy showered on those who have lost hope will have a greater impact in the long term than any argument the best of us could make.  As a result of my shift in emphasis from arguing with others to being present to others, I have become one poor correspondent on MOJ.

Ten Year anniversary reflection by Russell Powell: The law of love

By Rick Garnett

Here are some anniversary thoughts from Russ Powell:

A Reflection on Catholic Legal Theory

The role of the Church in law is dynamic. For the early Christian community, law was often a tool of oppression wielded by the state, though it was occasionally used to challenge arbitrary state power by leaders who had access to citizenship and education such as the Apostle Paul.  Once states (particularly the Roman Empire) formally endorsed Christianity, making it the official religion, the Church’s approach to law shifted from a posture of critique to one of power and justification.  Although states and the contexts in which they governed did not remain static, it is arguable that the Catholic Church generally continued to imagine law as a tool that it could legitimately use to encourage conformity with its teaching. The Reformation and the rise of modern nation states challenged this identification between states and the Catholic Church, gradually shifting the Church’s posture back to one of defense and critique.  However, this was not a reversion to the marginalization of the early Church.  Instead, it gave the Church the opportunity to consider and comment on the policy implications of its teaching, especially its social teaching, without the power to enforce its doctrine on states.  Ideally this gives Church institutions and Catholic scholars freedom, objectivity and moral authority to proffer arguments for the appropriate place of law in fostering the common good.  In this project, we rely on authoritative expressions of Church teaching, and we apply a variety of methods rooted in our tradition and the best of contemporary science and social science.  If the Mirror of Justice is a fair example of the development of Catholic legal theory, it is obvious that it represents a diversity of views, which are sometimes in opposition.  Even so, we rely on the same body of texts and traditions, and we endeavor to engage legal problems in ways that are faithful to our commitments to Christ and the Gospel. We strive to engage each other and the world in a spirit of humility, motivated by love.

What is the law of the People of God? It is the law of love, love for God and love for neighbour according to the new commandment that the Lord left to us. It is a love, however, that is not sterile sentimentality or something vague, but the acknowledgment of God as the one Lord of life and, at the same time, the acceptance of the other as my true brother, overcoming division, rivalry, misunderstanding, selfishness; these two things go together. Oh how much more of the journey do we have to make in order to actually live the new law — the law of the Holy Spirit who acts in us, the law of charity, of love! Looking in newspapers or on television we see so many wars between Christians: how does this happen?[ …] We must ask the Lord to make us correctly understand this law of love. How beautiful it is to love one another as true brothers and sisters. How beautiful! Let’s do something today. (Pope Francis I, 6/12/13)

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Tenth Anniversary reflection by Lisa Schiltz: The Church as Marian mystery

By Rick Garnett

Here is another Tenth Anniversary reflection, this one from Prof. Lisa Schiltz:

Many of my posts on MOJ have reflected my interest in feminist jurisprudence, in particular the concept of complementarity, and how that concept plays out in both Catholic teachings and legal theory.  In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has now repeated Blessed John Paul II’s challenge to the Church to seriously consider the role of women in the Church, cautioning that issue presents “profound and challenging questions which cannot be lightly evaded.” (¶ 104). 

In thinking about the role of MOJ in helping the Church meet this challenge, I find myself persistently puzzled by two particular questions.  First, what is it about the format or process of blogging (or at least blogging at MOJ) that seems to come so much more naturally to men than women?  This has been frequently discussed by some of us “MOJ chicks”, without any resolution. 

Second, more generally, what is it (if anything) that blogging (or at least blogging at MOJ) can do for the Church, as a means of helping the Church address challenging questions such as the role of women, or any other of the topics that we regularly address?  I presume the reason most of us blog here is that we think we are somehow helping the Church do some of its thinking with our blog posts.  How effectively are we, in fact, doing this?

In thinking about both of these questions, I regularly find myself reflecting on the following passage from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay “My Word Shall Not Return to Me Empty!”, in the collection of essays by Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary:  The Church at the Source (Adrian Walker trans., Ignatius Press 2005) (1980) (at p. 16-17):

In my opinion, the connection between the mystery of Christ and the mystery of Mary . . .  is very important in our age of activism, in which the Western mentality has evolved to the extreme.  For in today’s intellectual climate, only the masculine principle counts.  And that means doing, achieving results, actively planning and producing the world oneself, refusing to wait for anything upon which one would thereby become dependent, relying rather, solely on one’s own abilities.  It is, I believe, no coincidence, given our Western, masculine mentality, that we have increasingly separated Christ from his Mother, without grasping that Mary’s motherhood might have some significance for theology and faith. . . . We treat the Church almost like some technological device that we plan and make with enormous cleverness and expenditure of energy. . . .

What we need, then, is to abandon this one-sided, Western activist outlook, lest we degrade the Church to a product of our creation and design.  The Church is not a manufactured item; she is, rather, the living seed of God that must be allowed to grown and ripen.  This is why the Church needs the Marian mystery; this is why the Church herself is a Marian mystery.

What has changed over 10 years? What hasn't?

By Rob Vischer

Ten years ago, when I was asked about joining a blog dedicated to Catholic legal theory, I confess that I wasn’t entirely sure what a blog was.  And while I had some ideas about Catholic legal theory, even those were a bit murky.  I’ve learned a lot about both in the past decade thanks to the merry band of bloggers and readers who have gathered here regularly.

Today I spend a lot more time thinking about Catholic legal education than Catholic legal theory.  Ten years ago may seem like it was a high-water mark for law schools’ interest in Catholic legal theory – lots of well-attended conferences, new journals sprouting up, two new Catholic law schools that were intentional about building mission-centered programs, faculty hiring  at several schools that suggested a high value on Catholic legal scholarship, etc.  This burst of activity has plateaued over the past several years, but I do not think it represents diminished interest in Catholic legal theory as much as a recognition that legal education in general is in a period of profound challenge and change.  The pressures that Catholic legal theory faces today in terms of maintaining traction and momentum in the U.S. legal academy are more about the pressures that U.S. legal education faces in general.  Three come to mind. 

1. It’s all about employment.  Law schools have always cared about their graduates’ employment outcomes, but greater transparency and more granular data have now increased pressure to marshal all the assets of the law school in an effort to improve employment prospects.  This often affects faculty hiring and the priorities of existing faculty.   Teaching and writing in areas where there are jobs have become more of a focus.  Hiring the candidate who wants to write on subsidiarity (e.g., me) may not be as attractive in the current environment.

2. Marketing Catholic identity to prospective law school applicants is insufficient, standing alone, to draw students.  To be clear, Catholic identity is still a strong draw for some applicants, but they also need to know how that identity enhances their professional preparation.

3. Tighter budgets mean less money for travel, conferences, and journals.

These pressures are not necessarily bad things; they simply require Catholic law schools – and faculty at non-Catholic law schools who teach and write about Catholic legal theory – to be more intentional and creative in showing students (and administrators) why they should care about our shared project. 

It will be fascinating to watch how this unfolds over the next ten years.  A few very tentative predictions:

1. Faculty scholarship, including scholarship related to Catholic legal theory, will become more student-centered.  Teaming up with interested students to work on research, including students in advocacy projects that flow out of research, and articulating the impact of research will become more prevalent.  I know that all of this already happens at law schools, but I think the trend will accelerate.  (Most) law schools cannot afford to devote significant resources to activities that are not noticed or appreciated by students.  It is possible to include students more proactively in the Catholic legal theory project, and we will work on finding new ways to do so over the coming years.  (At St. Thomas, our Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy has been doing a great job on this front.)

2. Catholic legal education will become more international.  Catholic identity remains a strong draw in other parts of the world, especially Latin America.

3. There will be much more focus on whole-person formation.  With the rise of MOOCs and more “accessible” methods of legal education, there will be a powerful story to tell about the distinction between formation and information transfer.  Catholic legal education needs to lead on formation.

While there will be changes, the core of the Catholic legal theory project will, I hope, remain centered on the same question – what is the nature of the human person, and what does that mean for law?  It is a conversation that we are privileged to engage, and I appreciate Rick’s stewardship of this unique venue over the past decade.

Happy Tenth Birthday to Mirror of Justice

By Rick Garnett

Ten years ago this week -- in early February, 2004 -- the "Mirror of Justice" blog went live, with this first "welcome" post:

Welcome to Mirror of Justice, a group blog created by a group of Catholic law professors interested in discovering how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law. Indeed, we ask whether the great wealth of the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition offers a basis for creating a distinctive Catholic legal theory- one distinct from both secular and other religious legal theories. Can Catholic moral theology, Catholic Social Thought and the Catholic natural law tradition offer insights that are both critical and constructive, and which can contribute to the dialogue within both the legal academy and the broader polity? In particular, we ask whether the profoundly counter-cultural elements in Catholicism offer a basis for rethinking the nature of law in our society. The phrase "Mirror of Justice" is one of the traditional appellations of Our Lady, and thus a fitting inspiration for this effort.

A few things about this blog and us:

1. The members of this blog group represent a broad spectrum of Catholic opinion, ranging from the "conservative" to the "liberal", to the extent that those terms make sense in the Catholic context. Some are politically conservative or libertarian, others are on the left politically. Some are highly orthodox on religious matters, some are in a more questioning relationship with the Magisterium on some issues, and with a broad view of the legitimate range of dissent within the Church. Some of us are "Commonweal Catholics"; others read and publish in First Things or Crisis. We are likely to disagree with each other as often as we agree. For more info about us, see the bios linked in the sidebar.

2. We all believe that faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation. We may differ on how such values should be expressed or considered in those conversations or in public decisionmaking.

3. This blog will not focus primarily on the classic constitutional questions of Church and State, although some of our members are interested in those questions and may post on them from time to time. We are more interested in tackiling the larger jurisprudential questions and in discussing how Catholic thought and belief should influence the way we think about corporate law, products liability or capital punishment or any other problem in or area of the law.

4, We are resolutely ecumenical about this blog. We do not want to converse only among ourselves or with other Catholics. We are eager to hear from those of other faith traditions or with no religious beliefs at all. We will post responses (at our editorial discretion, of course.) See "Contact Us" in the sidebar.

5. While this blog will be highly focused on our main topic, we may occasionally blog on other legal/theoretical matters, or on non-legal developments in Catholicism (or on baseball, the other church to which I belong.)

6. We will be linking to relevant papers by the bloggers in the sidebar. Comments welcome!

In the coming days, the MOJ bloggers will be putting up "anniversary" reflections, so stay tuned.  And, in the meantime, thanks to all those -- we have had more than 3 million visits over the years -- who have made MOJ a part of their surfing routines.

Sherif Girgis on the indispensable role of philosophy

By Robert George

Today at Public Discourse, my brilliant co-author and former student Sherif Girgis begins an important three part series of articles on the need for philosophical reflection and analysis in thinking and arguing about moral questions, including morally-charged questions of law and public policy.

Against the view advanced by a number of prominent contemporary Christian writers, Sherif argues that we cannot get along simply by relying on scriptural revelation or the tradition of the Church. As the headnote to today's article says "our natural moral knowledge in some ways precedes revelation and helps us to understand it." It should go without saying that in no way is this to claim that revelation is irrelevant or redundant. It is to argue, rather, that faith and reason really are, as Pope John Paul II famously said, "like two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth."

Sherif is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, where he won prizes for the best senior thesis in philosophy and the best senior thesis in ethics, as well as the International Dante Prize. He earned a graduate degree at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and is currently completing a J.D. at Yale Law School, where he is an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/02/11978/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=64e3e62749-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_mediuma=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-64e3e62749-84111381

Monday, February 3, 2014

"No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have, but really, when it comes to intruding into private life---"

By Kevin C. Walsh

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise lectures were delivered in 1960 by Francis Biddle. Published the next year in a slender volume Justice Holmes, Natural Law, and the Supreme Court, the lectures provide Biddle's defense of Holmes from "the assaults of certain Roman Catholic priests teaching in Jesuit law schools." A fair amount of the argumentative work done in the book is done by a simplistic reductive antithesis between "two points of view about the law and the proper approach to its application that are fundamentally opposed, and touch the roots of its life." These are the abstract moralism of Catholic natural law thinkers and the pragmatic empiricism of Justice Holmes. Biddle gets both of these schools of thought wrong, by simplifying natural law thinking and by denying some of the least defensible aspects of Justice Holmes's thought. 

The impressions of Holmes that Biddle wishes to counter are that "Holmes was a cynic, who thought of law as nothing but the application of force; that he believed that morals, basically concerned, were but the expression of individual taste, and had nothing to do with law; and that he held that the proper function of a judge was to carry out what the majority had already decided, whether it was right or wrong." But these impressions are not far off the mark, if at all, as Albert Altschuler set forth in some detail in Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes.

Those studying Holmes are better served by Altshculer than by Biddle. But those interested in understanding a certain strain of anti-Catholic-intellectualism should check out Biddle. Here's a taste:

[Holmes] wished Malthus' teaching in its substance were more taken to heart. G.K. Chesterton, in his Victorian Age in Literature, probably because he was a Catholic, had to be contemptuous of Malthus; and Holmes wrote to his young friend Harold Laski that he was reminded of what Lord Melbourne had said--it had tickled him: "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding into private life---"

All good society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform--although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. . . . He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . . 

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Hijabs, modesty, and Islam

By Robert George

My posting this video at my Facebook page drew criticism from some Catholics and others who expressed hostility to Islam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3a7ftZZAew

I responded in some posts that I will repost here:

I am a Catholic.  My Church teaches me to esteem our Muslim friends and to work with them in the cause of promoting justice and moral values. I am happy to stand with them in defense of what is right and good. And so I stand with the young woman in the video in defense of modesty, chastity, and piety, just as I stand with Muslims like my dear friends Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Dr. Suzy Ismail against the killing of unborn children and the evil of pornography, and with my equally dear friend Asma Uddin of the Becket Fund in defense of religious freedom. In the great document Nostra Aetate, we Catholics are taught the following by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council:

"The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims link their own. Although not acknowledging Jesus as God, they revere him as a prophet; his virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the Day of Judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting.

"Over the centuries many quarrels and dissensions have arisen between Christians and Muslims. The sacred Council now pleads with all to forget the past, and urges that a sincere effort be made to achieve mutual understanding; for the benefit of all men, let them together preserve and promote peace, liberty, social justice and moral values."

Let us heed this teaching. Let us, Muslims and Christians alike, forget past quarrels and stand together for righteousness, justice, and the dignity of all. Let those of us who are Christians reject the untrue and unjust identification of all Muslims with those evildoers who commit acts of terror and murder in the name of Islam. Let us be mindful that it is not our Muslim fellow citizens who have undermined public morality, assaulted our religious liberty, and attempted to force us to comply with their ideology on pain of being reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Let all of us---Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of other faiths who "esteem an upright life" and seek truly to honor God and do His will---embrace each other, seeking "mutual understanding for the benefit of all men [and working] together to preserve and promote peace, liberty, justice, and moral values."

* * * * * * *
Through the great work being done by my friend Jennifer Bryson--who is a devout Christian and a great American patriot who spent two years as an interrogator at Guantanamo---I have met hundreds of religiously observant Muslims over the past several years and many are now my close friends. They are among the finest people I know. Like faithful Christians and Jews, they seek to honor God and do His will. They work, as we do, to inculcate in their children the virtues of honesty, integrity, self-respect and respect for others, hard work, courage, modesty, chastity, and self-control. They do not want to send their sons off to wars. They do not want their children to be suicide bombers. They do not want to impose Islam on those who do not freely embrace it. They thank God for the freedom they enjoy in the United States and they are well aware of its absence in the homelands of many of those who are immigrants. It is not right for us to make them feel unwelcome or to suggest that their faith disables them from being loyal Americans. It is unjust to stir up fear that they seek to take away our rights or to make them afraid that we seek to take away theirs. And it is foolish to drive them into the arms of the political left when their piety and moral convictions make them natural allies of social conservatives. (A majority of American Muslims voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. A majority of the general voting population did not.)

* * * * * * * *

I admire Muslim women and all women who practice the virtue of modesty, whether they choose to cover their hair or not. There are many ways to honor modesty and practices vary culturally in perfectly legitimate ways. Men and women are called to serve each other in various ways, and women who refuse to pornify themselves, especially in the face of strong cultural pressures and incentives to do so, honor themselves and others of their sex while also honoring those of us of the opposite sex. They uphold their own dignity and the dignity of their fellow human beings, male and female alike.

I have no doubt that my friend Marilyn is right in saying that in certain cultures, including some Muslim cultures, the covering of women is taken to an extreme and reflects a very real subjugation, just as in sectors of western culture, the objectification of women (including the sexualization of children at younger and younger ages) by cultural pressures to pornify reflects a very real (though less direct and obvious) subjugation. But, of course, we are in the happy position of not having to choose between the ideology of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and that of Hugh Hefner.

Of course, defenders of pornification claim that they are "liberating women" and "celebrating female beauty." The liberation claim is the very reverse of the truth. As for "celebrating female beauty," let me ask you this: Is there an actress in all of Hollywood who when appearing at one of these absurd awards shows dressed in a see-through gown, bra-less and wearing a thong, can compare with the beautiful young Muslim woman in the video I posted? I submit that there is none. Oh, yes, to be sure, the actress will appeal to something in her male viewers. (I'm a man.Take it from me.) But it will not be their sense or appreciation of beauty. It will be something much lower and brutely appetitive. Their experience will be one in which who she actually is as a person is utterly submerged. The men viewing her will not be drawn in to wonder about her thoughts and feelings, her experiences of joy and sorrow, her strengths and vulnerabilities---the things that actually make her the unique person she is.  Their experience will, quite literally, be an experience of de-personalized desire---the very definition of lust.

 

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Legal Scholar and Theologian Kaveny Is New Libby Professor

By Michael Perry

That's the headline of a proud announcement issued by Boston College earlier today.  The entire announcement is here.  An excerpt:

Cathleen Kaveny, a legal scholar, moral theologian and nationally noted expert on the intersections of law, morality and religion, has joined Boston College as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor. With an appointment in the Law School and Theology Department in the College of Arts and Sciences, Kaveny is the first person to hold a faculty appointment in two schools at the University.

Prior to her arrival at Boston College, Kaveny was the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, where she had been on the faculty since 1995. She also held visiting professorships and fellowships at Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago and Georgetown University. Previously, Kaveny was an associate with in the Health Law Group at the law firm Ropes & Gray in Boston and clerked for Judge John T. Noonan Jr. in the US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Kaveny graduated with a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Princeton University and earned a JD and PhD from Yale University. She is the incoming president of the Society of Christian Ethics, the major scholarly organization of Christian ethicists in North America. The society meets annually in conjunction with Jewish and Muslim ethicist groups.

“Bringing Cathleen Kaveny to Boston College is a spectacular move for the entire University community and in particular, the Law School and the Theology Department,” said Founders Professor of Theology James Keenan, SJ, acting chairman of the Theology Department. “She brings the rare combined competency of vigorously mastering law and ethics and teaches and writes with wit and brilliance. It is simply great to have her here.”

Law School Dean Vincent Rougeau said, “Professor Kaveny’s appointment places Boston College at the forefront of scholarship in both law and theology, with her most recent work offering critical insights on how American law engages highly contested moral debates in an increasingly diverse society.

The Pope’s Words to Notre Dame and to all Catholic Educators

By Robert John Araujo, SJ

 

Today, Pope Francis, S.J., had an audience with a delegation from Notre Dame. Rick, I am sure you are basking in this honor!

The Holy Father offered instructive words intended not only for Notre Dame, but for all persons involved with Catholic higher education. This would surely include legal education and the enterprise which is pursed at the Mirror of Justice. The major theme of the pope’s address is presented in these words of his,

In my Exhortation on the Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium, hereinafter EG), I stressed the missionary dimension of Christian discipleship, which needs to be evident in the lives of individuals and in the workings of each of the Church’s institutions. This commitment to “missionary discipleship” ought to be reflected in a special way in Catholic universities (cf. EG, 132-134), which by their very nature are committed to demonstrating the harmony of faith and reason and the relevance of the Christian message for a full and authentically human life. Essential in this regard is the uncompromising witness of Catholic universities to the Church’s moral teaching, and the defense of her freedom, precisely in and through her institutions, to uphold that teaching as authoritatively proclaimed by the magisterium of her pastors. It is my hope that the University of Notre Dame will continue to offer unambiguous testimony to this aspect of its foundational Catholic identity, especially in the face of efforts, from whatever quarter, to dilute that indispensable witness. And this is important: its identity, as it was intended from the beginning. To defend it, to preserve it and to advance it!

I have two brief points to make of these words of the pope.

The first is that they have a tremendous bearing on the work and debates that take place here at the Mirror of Justice. After all, the discipline and study of law, certainly within the context of efforts directed at developing Catholic legal theory, involve moral issues; thus, those who pursue legal education from and in a Catholic perspective ought to be concerned about the Church’s moral teachings (including their propagation and defense) and the Church’s freedom to pursue those engagements with civil society that the Church chooses to engage. This responsibility is unambiguous and cannot be compromised—no matter how inconvenient; no matter what pressures may be faced.

The second point is much closer to home for me. While our Holy Father was addressing a distinguished delegation from a highly regarded school founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross, I am quite confident that he did not exempt from the application of his exhortation the twenty-eight colleges and universities founded by his (and my) religious order, the Society of Jesus. There is no question that these institutions also have a crucial role in “the uncompromising witness… to the Church’s moral teaching, and the defense of her freedom, precisely in and through her institutions, to uphold that teaching as authoritatively proclaimed by the magisterium of her pastors.” It may be that there are some within the Jesuit network of higher education institutions who are willing to compromise on such matters, but I know that there are dedicated, faithful people who view such compromise as a betrayal of one’s duty as a disciple of Christ. Pope Francis is clearly one of them, for he recognizes that the unambiguous witness of the Christian cannot compromise on any matter central to the Catholic faith.

Time will tell to what extent his words and the sentiments they carry are shared within the world of Jesuit higher education.

 

RJA sj

Previous Articles More Articles

Recent Posts

Categories

Monthly Archive