Monday, September 30, 2013
"Top new Law and Religion papers"
Our friends at the Center for Law and Religion Forum have posted (as they regularly do) a list of the "top new Law and Religion papers" (by SSRN downloads). Check 'em out . . . and I'm not just saying that because one of them is mine. In fact, the current leader -- Doug Laycock's reflection on "Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars" -- seems like particularly timely reading, given all the conversations among Catholics about the best way(s) to take Pope Francis's challenge and witness to heart.
Germain Grisez on Pope Francis's Interview
A friend sent me something important that the distinguished moral theologian Germain Grisez, thoroughly a man of the Second Vatican Council, has written about Pope Francis's much-discussed interview and the thinking and attitude that it reveals. I'll preface Grisez's devastating criticism with the considered observation that the "dialogue" between the Church and the world so much pressed by some Catholics today, including Pope Francis himself, is a literally hopeless novelty. The term dialogue appears some 28 times in the documents of the Council, but, to my knowledge, the term had never appeared -- not once -- in earlier Church documents. There was transcendent reason to prefer the Church Militant to "dialogue." What happens in such "dialogue" is not that the world is converted, but that the world finds some of its *own* reasons for agreeing with *some* of what the Church teaches. But that sort of worldly-sculpted agreement elides the one necessary moment for which the Church must be working with respect to every available soul, viz., conversion. I would suggest that when the New York Times applauds its favorite, humble Pope, it's not because the Times or some poor soul has been converted. It's because the Times sees an image of its not-humble self in what the Pope has said. Grisez's critique should put a welcome end to certain myths about the value of the Pope's interview. The relationship between the Church and the world cannot be like that among "friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine" (Cf. John 16).
Here is what Grisez wrote:
Dear Dr. Moynihan,
Insofar as I understand what Pope Francis had to say, I can agree with him, but he said some things that I do not understand, and that have already been made bad use of by the secular media. Take the following passage:
"The dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent. The Church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow."
The teachings of the Church certainly are not all equivalent. There is a hierarchy.
But what is the point of saying that the Church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a "disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently"? Making this assertion suggests, unfortunately, a caricature of the teachings of recent pontificates. I assume Pope Francis would reject that reading. But where, then, is the state of affairs that needs to be overcome?
Proclamation in a missionary style does focus on essentials. But the new evangelization cannot proceed as if the Gospel has not been already preached, and either understood or not, but in either case, rejected. Still, I agree that what is central needs to be presented more clearly and forcefully than has generally been the case. Unless people believe that Christ has risen and will come again and gather into his kingdom all who are ready to enter, and unless they hope to be among those ready to enter, there is no use trying to instruct them about what they need to do in order to be ready to enter.
But what is meant by “moral edifice of the Church”? Many people mistakenly think that the moral truth the Church teaches is a code she has constructed and could change. If that were so, it could collapse like a house of cards. Perhaps Pope Francis means that the moral teachings, though they are truths that pertain to revelation, will collapse for the individual who lacks hope in the kingdom to come. But who knows what he means? The phrase is impressive. It reverberates in one’s depths. But if it was suggested by a spirit, it was not the Holy Spirit, for it is bound to confuse and mislead. [emphasis added]
I’m afraid that Pope Francis has failed to consider carefully enough the likely consequences of letting loose with his thoughts in a world that will applaud being provided with such help in subverting the truth it is his job to guard as inviolable and proclaim with fidelity. For a long time he has been thinking these things. Now he can say them to the whole world — and he is self-indulgent enough to take advantage of the opportunity with as little care as he might unburden himself with friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine.
Germain Grisez
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Wills on the "Detachment Movement", neo-medievalism, and other fun stuff
The New York Review of Books has made available part (but not -- not yet -- all) of Garry Wills's review of a book that sounds fascinating -- it's called Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942–1963
A hotbed of the Detachment movement—people detaching themselves from the commercialism of the modern world—was in Minnesota around World War II. Eugene and Abigail McCarthy were part of it. So were their good friends the writer J.F. (“Jim”) Powers and his wife Betty. So were their East Coast friends Robert (“Cal”) Lowell and his wife Jean Stafford. All had been part of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. They were adherents of what was known, in mid-twentieth-century America, as the Catholic Renaissance.
A window into that distant world is opened by the letters of Jim Powers, published by his daughter, along with excerpts from his occasional journals and from his wife’s diary. The editor briefly adds memories of growing up in what Powers called “the Movement.” That movement had four main strands. . . .
It appears that "neo-medievalism" and "ruralism" were two of those strands. In any event, if anyone has a link to the full review, please e-mail it. Or, if anyone has read the book, please let us know!
Saturday, September 28, 2013
The Law, Rules, and Salvation
A few days ago I suggested that I would return to a brief comment on Pope Francis's recent interview on which others here at the Mirror of Justice have previously commented. I think that the pope's words have a bearing on the law as it is a system of rules or precepts. Interestingly, some commentators have focused on what the pope called "small-minded rules," but then not all rules, not all laws--be they of God or of Man--are small-minded. The pope also reminded priests of the need to offer in their homilies the need to address what he calls "the first proclamation": salvation. In view of these points, here is a homily for this weekend that brings together particular messages from sacred scripture and the pope's words:
26th Sunday—C
Amos 6:1, 4-7
Timothy 6:11-16
Luke 16:9-31
Wasting, self-indulgence, and complacency—while not necessarily evil—are not good attributes for any person to pursue. This is something about which the prophet Amos reminds us. This is one way to the road to sin, and sin exiles as from God as the prophet further suggests. In sin, we fall from God’s grace because we become absorbed in our own interests that may not be the things of God. Sin leads to a fall, a fall that damages the soul because we engineer a chasm between ourselves and the God of mercy and forgiveness. Yet there is still hope…
I was reminded of the significance of the fall and of hope on Friday morning as I was attempting to cross Michigan Avenue near the Chicago Water Tower. Intent on reaching the pedestrian light before it was too late, I did not realize that my left foot caught on the uneven pavement, and I was destined for a bruising fall. Here I was a sinner whose mind was on other matters but falling once again; yet, I was pulled from a more painful experience by three kind souls who were attentive enough to realize a fellow pilgrim in distress. The fall was broken by the hope displayed by those who came to my aid and helped save me from more serious consequences.
This episode of a modest form of a kind of salvation history recalls Saint Luke’s account of the rich man Dives and the chasm he established between himself, Lazarus, and Abraham. Dives was not intentionally cruel to the poor Lazarus or to anyone else. He simply did not see anyone else, including God. Lazarus is not real to the rich man because of the self-indulgence with which Dives surrounded himself. His whole life centers on himself.
The world of Dives can be summarized in this fashion: It is all about ME! The great chasm, the separation, is self-inflicted by Dives. He does not quite get the picture: no one forced him to do this. He chose this path himself. Abraham reminds Dives of this. Then Dives begins to wonder and worry about his five brothers—will they share the fate of Dives? It seems that Abraham is callous to Dives request to help the brothers. But this is not correct, for Abraham is telling Dives that they have had and continue to have warnings about the proper way to live one’s life in this world. All they must do is pay attention.
Hence the reference to Moses and the prophets: those who are inclined to sin nonetheless have warnings. All they need to do is pay attention to them, but do they? Will they? The answers to these questions depend on their openness to the God’s mercy and forgiveness. But first they must realize that they alone are causing themselves to sin. This realization was at the very core of Pope Francis’s candid interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro a fellow Jesuit. Pope Francis returned to the reality of his own sinfulness.
But unlike Dives, Francis turns to the mercy and patience of God to receive what the pope calls the “spirit of penance.” Pope Francis, unlike Dives, realizes that even for the sinner—one who acknowledges his intentional wrongdoing before God and man—is the recipient of salvation.
Unlike Dives who was self-centered, Francis has shown the way that Christ, the One who came to save us from our sins, is and must be at the center of human existence.
What gets the human person back on track to God by turning from self-indulgence is thinking with God and His Church—God’s holy people. Francis warns that this is not thinking with the misguided populism that often captures the minds of those who live in the present moment; rather, it is thinking and acting in accord with those who seek the path to greater holiness and, therefore, proximity to God in their lives.
Francis’s words about “small-minded rules” have been misinterpreted and misappropriated. These “rules” have been confused with fundamental teachings of the Christian faith that are inextricably tied to human salvation. We need to be mindful that first and foremost Christ has come to save us from our sins and sinful tendencies. What leads us to this realization is not “small minded” in any fashion. To intensify the significance of the centrality of this principle of faith, Francis spoke of the importance of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation. Our good confession must be handled by a good confessor—not one who is too rigorist and not one who is too lax. With exuberant rigor, we may miss the mercy of God; with laxity, we may miss the fact that we have sinned and, like the woman in John’s Gospel who had sinned, that we are asked by God, through the confessor, to go and sin no more. The sacrament is not designed to condemn; rather, the sacrament was established to reform so that we sin less and less and seek authentic holiness more and more.
As Pope Francis properly noted, the sacrament of confession is not a “torture chamber” but a place that incubates and intensifies holiness. When we realize that our free will is better suited to directing ourselves to what we ought to do rather than to what we want to do, the mercy of God to absolve us from any defiance we have committed becomes all the more clear. The chasms we have generated by sin become crossable by the grace of God and His tender mercy. But when we ignore God’s mercy and beckoning to Him, we become like Dives separated from God and His holy people by the deepening chasm of sin. But the gulf can be forded when we acknowledge the wrongdoing that seemed at one time so attractive and excusable.
This is the message of salvation that Christ brought into this world; this is the reality of God’s self-gift and His suffering for our sins. All that is needed for the salvation to become complete is the redirection of our human will to embrace God’s mercy and forgiveness and to sin no more. But even if we cannot absolutely guarantee that we will sin nor more, may we at least seek to sin no more by not forgetting to ask God’s help to thwart whatever temptations come our way!
All that is needed is faith and adherence to what God asks. With that as our disposition: God will surely help us with the rest. For as the Psalmist reminds us: blessed are those who keep the faith, who hope in God, and who exercise caritas. Then will God’s protection and salvation be at hand!
Amen.
RJA sj
Friday, September 27, 2013
Robert Christian: "Can Pope Francis Help End the Culture Wars?"
Robert Christian is the editor of the Millennial blog, which is a rising voice among young-adult Catholics, and a fellow with Democrats for Life of America, where he edits and contributes to DFLA's "Everyday Life" blog. Today he writes at the Washington Post's "On Belief" page, on whether the re-sets in tone and priorities suggested by the Pope's recent statements could "help end the culture wars." He writes that the "commitment to all life," the unborn and those vulnerable in other ways,
is partly responsible for [Francis's] call to rebalance church teaching, to move it away from a legalistic focus on a handful of moral teachings, including abortion, at the cost of proclaiming the Gospel and welcoming new faces into the church. . . .
Pope Francis warns, “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.” This new balance does not entail an abandonment of church teaching on abortion, but a full embrace of the moral and social teachings of the Church, and a recognition that Catholicism is about more than a political agenda or even its understanding of justice in the contemporary world.
I think Robert does an excellent job of reflecting on the priorities the Pope is reemphasizing. It's undeniable, to me, that some of those embroiled in the culture wars have wrongly prioritized other matters over the core of the Gospel. (Of course Christians of many theological and political stripes have done that over the centuries.) Consider Cardinal Burke's recent interview with The Wanderer, where he states that the homosexual-rights movement is "a lie about the most fundamental aspect of our human nature, our human sexuality, which after life itself defines us." [ADDED: HT on the Burke interview: Michael Sean Winters] I can appreciate the importance of complementarity, but ... sexuality is right after life in defining us? When the interviewer asked "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?," the Pope answered, "I am a sinner." It seems Cardinal Burke might answer, "I am a male." I understand that Galatians 3:28--in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female"--obviously does not eliminate the relevance of sexual nature in all respects. But I don't think Cardinal Burke's response quite reflects the prophetic content of that verse.
Before we are men and women, conservatives or liberals, we are all sinners--redeemed, we hope and pray, by grace. Living mindful of that fact can help us treat each other with respect and charity even when we disagree, or when the other person has erred. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln could conclude with the call to "bind up the nation's wounds' and care for the widow and orphan"--"with malice toward none [and] charity for all"--in significant part because he had just acknowledged that both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God"--suggesting that the North had its role in slavery as well.
So yes, I agree, an emphasis like the Pope's on the core of the Gospel--"I am a [redeemed] sinner, serving others out of gratitude"--can help temper the culture wars.
With that said, it's crucial to remember that many people want the Church not just to reprioritize its beliefs on sexuality, but to give them up, under state pressure if that's necessary. Catholic and other traditionalist organizations could spend massive amounts of time and money helping the poor--they do, of course--and some on the other side of the culture wars will still keep pressing to marginalize those organizations by means of regulation, the denial of tax exemption or other general government benefits, and so on. So while, as I see it, traditionalist Christians have gotten their priorities very wrong in many instances, changing those priorities won't make the culture war go away entirely. The other side won't abandon it.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Law and the Academic Study of Religion: Further Thoughts
A few additional thoughts on the convergences and divergences of law and the academic study of religion, prompted by thoughtful emails from legal and ASR scholars Nelson Tebbe and Donald Drakeman (here's my earlier post on the topic).
Methodological Distinctiveness
Both law and ASR may be similar in that they harbor anxieties about their methodological uniqueness and about the autonomy of their disciplines as fields of academic inquiry. In law, this has been a perpetual worry that became particularly acute in the 20th century, as scholars from Pound to Holmes to Posner have argued compellingly for law's non-autonomy. Indeed, Posner has advocated the project of "overcoming" law: what takes the reins after law has been overcome is economics, philosophy, political science, or some other discipline with truly independent methodological bona fides (it's mostly economics for Posner). Though it is not my field (and so I hope to be corrected by those who know better), my sense is that ASR has some of these same anxieties but in its case, the anxieties are connected to the conceptual distinctiveness of the subject matter that it studies. Certainly in law, self-justification and disciplinary apology are not unknown.
Practice and Theory: Maintaining or Collapsing the Division?
Both law and ASR have roots as practical endeavors--as trades and professions, rather than as purely academic subjects. For law this is obvious; for ASR the root is theology and ministry. And law schools and divinity schools historically functioned to prepare tradesmen; indeed, both continue to operate primarily to train future practitioners of their respective trades.
My friend Nelson Tebbe points out to me that Yale Law School Professor Paul Kahn notes some of these similarities in his book, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. Kahn's project is precisely to help legal scholarship get over its past professional association, in much the same way that ASR has attempted to transcend its own. Here's an interesting passage from early in Kahn's book:
When lawyers think about contemporary legal theory, they are likely to express the view that it is too theoretical, too disconnected from the practice of law to be of any interest or use. In fact, the problem is exactly the opposite. Theory has substantially failed to separate itself from practice. The reforms offered by legal theorists may often be impractical, but the central assumption of both the scholar and the lawyer-critic is that reform is the appropriate end of scholarship. The lawyer-critic wants only to replace the poor--meaning impractical--reform proposals that emerge from the academy with better ones.
By taking up the project of legal reform, however, the scholar becomes a participant in legal practice and, therefore, a part of the very object that he or she has set out to investigate. The collapse of the distinction between the subject studying the law and the legal practice that is the object of study is the central weakness of contemporary legal scholarship. "Collapse" does not happen at a moment in time, as if there were first a separation of subject and object, which suddenly disappeared. The legal scholar comes to the study of law already understanding herself as a citizen in law's republic. She is committed to "making law work," to improving the legal system of which she is a part. Collapse refers to the failure of an analytic possibility, not some sort of transitional experience.
I believe that Kahn is right about this: there is a tension that permeates legal scholarship that is in some ways a product of its historical situation within a practical discipline alongside its long tradition of rigorous academic study (dating at least to the University of Bologna in the medieval period). Sometimes, legal scholars do not negotiate this tension successfully.
But where Kahn criticizes the collapse of theory into practice, one might just as readily question the collapse of practice into theory that he recommends. It has always seemed to me that one of the strengths and unique points of legal scholarship lies in its preservation of the separation of theory and practice. That is, its strength lies in negotiating that separation, and in refusing to collapse it into either constituent category. Legal scholarship is perched between two worlds, and it is only in this precarious posture that it retains both an internal and an external perspective on its subject. If it fell to one side or the other--if the separation on which it depends really did collapse-- what methodological tools would the legal scholar use to analyze law? Precisely those of the economist, the philosopher, the political scientist, or the ASR scholar.
The Role of Doctrine
Likewise, as I have noted before, law schools and schools of theology or divinity are the only ones I can think of in which the idea of doctrine is intrinsically important. This is in part because these disciplines are specially attuned to the authoritativeness of the past. Other disciplines have no such commitments--indeed, their commitments may run in a very different direction. It is not clear to me what perspective ASR has on the role of doctrine, but it would not be surprising that the less closely the discipline associates itself with schools of theology or divinity schools, the more it would embrace a critical posture toward doctrine.
The other difference in this respect is that doctrine provides a coordinating function in law and theology that simply does not apply in other areas of study. This function of doctrine is, of course, connected to law's managerial role and its internal perspective on the customs and traditions of the specific society in which it operates. This role and this orientation are not shared by most other disciplines.
Happy Birthday, Edict of Milan!
The Catholic Bishops in Europe are marking the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan (and identifying it as a milestone in the history of legal protection for religious freedom). Time flies!
Catholic education and the new evangelization
Notre Dame publishes a really nice journal, Church Life: A Journal for the New Evangelization, which is edited by my friend Tim O'Malley. Here is a piece from the new issue, called "Catholic education and the new evangelization." The essay is primarily about parochial schools, but its broad points would seem to apply to the mission and work of Catholic higher education -- including legal education -- as well. And, indeed, the latest issue of Church Life includes a longer essay by O'Malley called (nice title!) "The Idea of a Catholic University."
Murray on the HHS mandate, Hosanna-Tabor, and Religious Organizations
My friend and former student, Brian Murray -- now an attorney in Pennsylvania -- has posted an adaptation of forthcoming law-review article ("The Elephant in Hosanna-Tabor") at Public Discourse. Here is a taste:
The history of the First Amendment indicates a strong preference for institutional religious autonomy. Religion remains special in the eyes of the law. This tradition of respect and deference must guide any legal framework that purports to determine whether an organization qualifies as religious under the Free Exercise Clause. Hence, the Court should consider placing a presumption of religiousness at the forefront of any test, finding its support in the divergent opinions among the founding fathers, the prevalence of unconventional religious experience throughout American history, and current precedent, which admits that religion is special--even if it is difficult to define. Such a presumption comports with the Court's inclusive language in Hosanna-Tabor.
However, this presumption cannot be the end of the analysis. Left unchecked, it could conflict with Employment Division v. Smith because an organization's self-characterization as religious is not entirely internal. . . .
Check it out.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Gerson on the Pope, Part 2
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