It's the current fad among certain Catholics, among others, to complain that the Church has been too "inwardly focused" in recent decades. Depending on how the charge is understood, I agree. The Second Vatican Council, however, certainly stressed the need for missionary work, work ad extra, as here in its decree Ad Gentes:
7. This missionary activity derives its reason from the will of God, "who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, Himself a man, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all" (1 Tim. 2:45), "neither is there salvation in any other" (Acts 4:12). Therefore, all must be converted to Him, made known by the Church's preaching, and all must be incorporated into Him by baptism and into the Church which is His body. For Christ Himself "by stressing in express language the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mark 16:16; John 3:5), at the same time confirmed the necessity of the Church, into which men enter by baptism, as by a door. Therefore those men cannot be saved, who though aware that God, through Jesus Christ founded the Church as something necessary, still do not wish to enter into it, or to persevere in it."(17) Therefore though God in ways known to Himself can lead those inculpably ignorant of the Gospel to find that faith without which it is impossible to please Him (Heb. 11:6), yet a necessity lies upon the Church (1 Cor. 9:16), and at the same time a sacred duty, to preach the Gospel. And hence missionary activity today as always retains its power and necessity.
By means of this activity, the Mystical Body of Christ unceasingly gathers and directs its forces toward its own growth (cf. Eph. 4:11-16). The members of the Church are impelled to carry on such missionary activity by reason of the love with which they love God and by which they desire to share with all men the spiritual goods of both its life and the life to come.
Finally, by means of this missionary activity, God is fully glorified, provided that men fully and consciously accept His work of salvation, which He has accomplished in Christ. In this way and by this means, the plan of God is fulfilled - that plan to which Christ conformed with loving obedience for the glory of the Father who sent Him,(18) that the whole human race might form one people of God and be built up into one temple of the Holy Spirit which, being the expression of brotherly harmony, corresponds with the inmost wishes of all men. And so at last, there will be realized the plan of our Creator who formed man to His own image and likeness, when all who share one human nature, regenerated in Christ through the Holy Spirit and beholding the glory of God, will be able to say with one accord: "Our Father."(19)
The Church wishes to fulfill her divine mandate to correct and transform the culture in the light of the Gospel. To remain focused only on herself, would be to deny that mandate. This is what I hear Pope Francis teaching. What is urgently needed is more missionary work, not less. Starting especially where Catholics waste time on trading accusations about who's "liberal" and who's "conservative" in the Church.
It's the whole Tradition that the Church offers. The culture needs to be saturated with the Gospel. The squabbling between "left" and "right" is an impediment to the true work of the Church.
This course invites leading law and religion scholars to make presentations to a small audience of students and faculty. The schools will be connected through video link so that students and faculty at both schools will be able to participate synchronously in a virtual classroom seminar experience. My colleague, Mark Movsesian, and I are
absolutely delighted to be working
on this project with Villanova Law School Vice Dean and Professor (and MOJ stalwart) Michael Moreland.
The following speakers have confirmed:
January 27: Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study) (at St. John's)
February 10: Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania Law School) (at Villanova)
February 24: Kent Greenawalt (Columbia Law School) (at St. John's)
March 17: Donald L. Drakeman (Cambridge University) (at St. John's)
March 31: Kristine Kalanges (Notre Dame Law School) (at St. John's)
April 14: Steven D. Smith (University of San Diego Law School) (at Villanova)
Topics will be announced at a future date.
For more information, or if you would like to attend the sessions, please contact the Colloquium’s co-organizers, Marc DeGirolami ([email protected]), Mark Movsesian ([email protected]), and Michael Moreland ([email protected]).
This morning, the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer published an excerpt from my new book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. It's from my chapter comparing the thought of John Stuart Mill with that of John Henry Newman on liberty and conscience. The Inquirer entitled the exceprt "Freedom Means Responsibility"---which does quite a good job of capturing the argument:
Recently, the Pentagon announced several measures aimed at preventing and prosecuting sexual assault cases in the military. These changes were apparently supported by many members of Congress, but fall short of what many members continue to demand.
While I am pleased that the military is taking some action to respond to this problem, and pleased that Congress may be pushing the Pentagon to do more, I find much of this discussion about sexual assaults in the military has a certain "Captain Renault – esque" ring to it ("I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"). One must wonder how these actors can be surprised that staggering numbers of women (and men, but my focus today is women) are being perceived as objects by men to be used regardless of whether the women consent.
Consider the culture the military tacitly endorses. It has long been the case that outside many military bases are thriving sex industries. Not only are these industries problematic for women, in their modern day form they are understood to be staffed largely by trafficked women. Although military regulations have been passed to forbid purchasing women for sex, these trafficking industries continue to prosper and it has been reported the regulations are rarely enforced. While one might seek comfort in the fact that recently, as in just this summer, the Military Exchange stores stopped selling "adult" magazines, do not be too impressed. The reason for the change according to the Army spokesman was not enlightenment:
"Along with other magazine sales, sales of adult sophisticated titles at [Army and Air Force Exchange Service] stores have declined 86 percent since 1998," said an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Antwan C. Williams. "Like their civilian counterparts, exchange shoppers' increased reliance on digital devices to access content virtually has resulted in a sustained decrease in demand for printed magazines."
To appreciate my point I encourage you to go to this link to this news story and see the juxtaposition of an official army spokesman calling these publications "adult sophisticated titles" and the picture of the cover pages of these "titles" which includes "headlines" such as: "Fatal Attraction: 9 Deadly Fetishes." I am sorry, I thought "adult sophisticated titles" were Jane Austen novels.
Is it any wonder, therefore, the result? The military has created a climate in which it tacitly endorses "industries" whose very function is to objectify women as sexual objects for men's use. It has a climate in which its official spokesman refers to violent "deadly fetish" images that objectify women as "sophisticated adult titles." It is a climate with regulations but then fails to investigate hundreds of Department of Defense employees who violate the regulations. Is it any wonder that the people within this climate receiving these messages actually start acting consistently with the messages? Is it any wonder that they actually start to believe that women exist to be their objects to be used regardless of consent? I think not. The only shocking thing here is that the military is surprised.
While it is a positive step that the military and Congress actually have noticed this plight, nothing will change until they acknowledge the elephant in the room. That elephant is the climate they have allowed to thrive on and off base which sends a repeated message about the objectification of women- about denying the inherent dignity of women. Until that is included in the discussion on how to move forward, the climate endorsing this perception of women as objects will continue…and so will the assaults.
The ABA Journal trumpets Attorney General Holder's announcement of a change in prosecutorial behavior toward those charged with drug crimes as a "Sweeping reversal of the War on Drugs" (here).
Rather than something new or novel, however, this simply heralds the return of something old and long-neglected: prosecutorial discretion.
As reported by the ABA Journal, speaking to the ABA House of Delegates, Mr. Holder addressed the problem of over-incarceration for non-violent offenses by outlining a new program:
The new "Smart on Crime" program will encourage U.S. attorneys to charge
defendants only with crimes "for which the accompanying sentences are
better suited to their individual conduct, rather than excessive prison
terms more appropriate for violent criminals or drug kingpins," said
Holder.
A few nay-sayers (see here) already have attacked the proposal as another example of the Obama Administration's overreaching in unilaterally revising laws with which it disagrees or aspects of which it finds inconvenient. But this episode is nothing like the more dubious actions of the administration in delaying the statutory deadlines for implementation of various aspects of Obamacare or specially excepting members of Congress and their staffs from being covered by the insurance exchanges in Obamacare as the statute requires -- changes made by administrative fiat without approval by Congress. (For George Will's cogent summary of the case against the administration on its lawlessness as to Obamacare, see here.)
No legal, moral, or professional obligation requires a prosecutor -- wielding the awesome power of government to subject a person to captivity -- to charge someone whenever a plausible case can be made that he or she has committed a crime, much less to seek the highest charge (with the highest attendant sentence) that the facts could support. Indeed, there was a time when a prosecutor, as a matter of wise discretion, would choose not to file a charge at all, when the circumstances were extenuating or a criminal solution was not in the best interests of all of those involved in an episode.
In other words, there was a time when the exercise of prosecutorial discretion fairly and impartially was thought to be essential to the promotion of justice (just as was the regular exercise of executive clemency to ameliorate the harshness of the law -- but the story of this administration's failure to exercise that power belongs to another day). (For a five-year-old Mirror of Justice posting on prosecutorial discretion, see here.)
Attorney General Holder is to be commended for taking this step as leader of the nation's federal prosecutors. And in doing so, he is supported by a broad and bipartisan coalition, including Senators Leahy and Durbin, on the Democratic side, and Senators Lee and Rand and former Attorney General Ed Meese, on the Republican side. While there will be (and already are) those who will castigate this move away from the past policy as a left-wing assault on law and order, a growing number of my fellow conservatives are awakening to the disaster of a policy that has made the United States the world leader in percentage of its citizens being held in custody.
I only wish that Attorney General Holder would apply this new ethos of prosecutorial discretion beyond the low-level drug offender -- and he need look no further than the 15-year sentence recently imposed on Edward Young of Kentucky, who had committed small-time property crimes, for inadvertently possessing seven shotgun shells that he found when helping the neighbor widow dispose of her husband's belongings. And that irrational charge and sentence was obtained by one of Mr. Holder's United States Attorneys. The Young case is now on appeal -- and so there is still time for the Justice Department to do the right thing in that case.
I'm also proud to say that my colleague here at the University of St. Thomas
School of Law, Nekima
Levy-Pounds, has long been one of those decrying prosecutorial
overzealousness, mandatory minimum sentences, and the foolish,
debilitating, and bankrupt policy of over-incarceration of young, non-violent
offenders. In Professor Levy-Pounds's scholarly work, she has emphasized
that current drug-sentencing practices disparately impacts poor women of
color and children. For example, she reports that excessive incarceration of
African-American women who had a peripheral role in drug offenses wreak
havoc on the family and leave children parentless, setting the stage for
the next generation of offenders and another cycle of incarceration.
You can read her work here, here, and here. It is gratifying to see her work and that of so many other scholars, attorneys, and public officials of faith and compassion has borne fruit in the new federal prosecution policy.
I have learned much from Michael Novak over the years, but consider the logic of the following passage: “In a genuine pluralistic
society, there is no one sacred canopy.
By intention there is not.
At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the
knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek
there. Its emptiness, therefore,
represents the transcendence which approached by free consciences from a
virtually infinite number of directions. . . . Such an order calls forth not only a new theology but a new
type of religion.” Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
53, 69 (1982, 1991). Novak wants to rewrite theology and create "a new type of religion" in order to prop up pluralism. The importance of instantiating pluralism is so transcendent in Novak's eyes, in fact, that he is willing to compel all of us to be arrayed around an "empty shrine." I look in vain in the theology of the Catholic religion for support for worship at an "empty shrine." The tomb was in fact empty on Easter morning, but that was because Christ had risen from the dead. Now He is to be worshipped and obeyed and loved. Pluralism is a fact about our world, to be sure, but not a reason to invent a new religion. Pluralism requires prudent action and lots of toleration, but not the intentional fabrication of an "empty shrine.". And, by the way, is it true that Christ is, as Novak contends, "not worthy of what all seek?" Not all people of good will acknowledge Christ as their redeemer and king, and, within the limits of the common good, individuals should be free to practice even false religions. But justice requires me to resist the suggestion that Christ is somehow "not worthy." Quite the reverse, "Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum . . . ." This prayer that was prayed six times in the Usus Antiquior is prayed only once in Pope Paul's new Mass, and in that, I am afraid, there can be no cause for surprise. New theology, new religion? It wasn't my idea.
(A couple of days ago I posted a reflection on Jean Elshtain, but I then clumsily deleted it and have been unable to recover it through any easy means (Typepad Help has proven itself not to be an easy means). So here is a new post: same themes, different wording, a bit shorter, and with an added comment at the end.) We have lost a great public philosopher in Jean. I had the fortune to get to know her personally through a couple of projects; in every setting where I heard her speak, public discussion and private conversation, her words were always incisive, humane, and full of common sense. Jean was a leader--often by standing contrary to the dominant trends in the academy--in so many areas central to this blog's project. Before I mention a couple, I should add personally that for many years, Jean, a Lutheran most of her life, was a model to me of how a Protestant could be deeply drawn to and influenced by Catholic thought. (She probably didn't stop playing that specific role until she joined the Catholic Church in 2011.) Jean's model was one important factor in why I came to participate in this blog and why I've been heavily involved for more than a decade in building a law school at the University of St. Thomas seriously grounded in the Catholic tradition. I know she similarly influenced many other non-Catholics by trenchantly articulating ideas central to Catholic thought on human persons and society.
In 2003 Jean kicked off the inaugural symposium of the Law Journal at St. Thomas, which was on themes in the thought of John Noonan. Her keynote speech and article, "The Equality of Persons and the Culture of Rights," hit so many themes central to our current discussions. About the nature and importance of religious freedom, she said (among other things), citing Dignitatis Humanae: "Because we have a right, and therefore a responsibility, to seek the truth, the right that speaks most profoundly to the search for truth is primary among our rights." She also spoke at some length about the problems of an individualistic society and the contribution of the Catholic vision of persons as inherently social but in no way submerged into collectives.
To speak of an anthropology is to be open to cultural and historic specificity and the role of contingency in human affairs. But the grounding-- the conviction that every human being possesses a God-given dignity--is not dependent on any particular cultural configuration. One asks: What sort of person is this human being? Catholic Social Thought answers: an intrinsically, not contingently, social being--one born to relationality. The dignity of the self cannot be dehistoricized and severed from the experiences of human beings as creatures essentially, not contingently, related to others. The modern social encyclicals speak of human rights in a way that avoids two extremes: either positing a primordially free, sovereign self that is a possessor of rights against others, or, contrastingly, positing a self so thoroughly defined by, and absorbed within, an overweening social entity that no one possesses rights against--only rights within. Catholic Social Thought steers a course that avoids either self-sovereignty or the oversocialized self. The dignity of the human person conjures up a richer, more relational image than does the sovereign “individual” favored by libertarianisms of both the Left and the Right. In speaking of the person, one preserves a notion of individuality without sliding into individualism, and one speaks of the self-in-society without endorsing social determinism. . . .
As I already noted, the person nowadays is often defined by choices understood as preferences. Because this way of thinking is so pervasive, we have lost sight of just how inadequate it is. For is there not something not only inadequate, but extreme, in the view that we are most ourselves when we are all alone with our preferences? This position also makes it difficult for us to assess the negative, cumulative effect of thousands upon thousands of individual “choices,” let us say those leading directly to certain forms of environmental degradation. Because we cannot criticize any single individual choice (if it is “right” for him or her), our capacity to critically evaluate the overall direction of our political economy or our popular culture or anything else is denuded. The great gift and responsibility of moral autonomy atrophies if we reduce human freedom to a vast array of consumer choices in a world in which individual goods triumph and any possibility of a common good is lost.
As time passed Jean increasingly was labeled in political rhetoric as a "conservative" because of her dissent from much of cultural liberalism and her initial support for the Iraq War. And as Robbie George mentions, she was a kind of conservative and certainly had no fear of that label: nothing like that, even if aimed at marginalizing her, would come close to getting her to change her voice. But I'm struck how the above passages call both the Left and the Right to account: the sovereign self has become a key assumption of both sides, part of the political and intellectual "air we breathe" as Jean put it. We may have different senses of the urgent problems in our society that must be addressed: "environmental degradation," or family breakdown, or (better yet) both, and many others. Jean told both Left and Right that we can never develop the capital, the resources and energy, to counter any of these problems, and their costs to persons in suffering and indignity, without a renewed willingness to prioritize--and a renewed vocabulary to describe--the common good.
Public Discourse today posted my tribute to Jean Bethke Elshtain, whom the world lost earlier this week. Here are a couple of paragraphs.
"Late in her life, Jean “pulled the trigger” on a decision she had been contemplating for many years: she followed the path of her great Lutheran friend Richard John Neuhaus into full communion with the Catholic Church. Like Fr. Neuhaus, she believed that Lutheranism had accomplished its mission of reforming the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” There was, in her view, as in his, no longer a need or a justification to remain a Protestant. So she was received into the Catholic Church by another of her dear friends—a fellow polio victim—Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. Present at the service as a witness was yet another of her dearest friends, Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School—someone she always referred to as “my sister in solidarity.”
"Of course, the larger “sisterhood” of 1970s feminists and “gender studies” types (and the Left more generally) had disowned Jean long before her conversion to Catholicism—which did nothing but please her. She refused to go along with abortion, sexual “liberation,” redefining marriage, or many of their other causes. The contemporary writer on women and femininity whom she most admired was . . . Pope John Paul II. She made it a point to include his writings on the syllabus whenever questions of gender were addressed in her courses. Readers can easily imagine how many friends that made her in the Gender Studies department."
I've long thought that a somewhat neglected topic in theology and law is the virtue of hope--not optimism, not despair, not wishful thinking, not pessimism, but the theological virtue of hope. Those looking for a start should read my friend Dominic Doyle's fine book on Christian humanism and St. Thomas on hope. And so on this Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, here is Pope Francis speaking of hope in his homily at Castel Gandalfo:
Hope is the virtue of those who, experiencing conflict – the struggle between life and death, good and evil – believe in the resurrection of Christ, in the victory of love. We heard the Song of Mary, the Magnificat: it is the song of hope, it is the song of the People of God walking through history. It is the song many saints, men and women, some famous, and very many others unknown to us but known to God: mums, dads, catechists, missionaries, priests, sisters, young people, even children and grandparents: these have faced the struggle of life while carrying in their heart the hope of the little and the humble. Mary says: "My souls glorifies the Lord" – today, the Church too sings this in every part of the world. This song is particularly strong in places where the Body of Christ is suffering the Passion. For us Christians, wherever the Cross is, there is hope, always. If there is no hope, we are not Christian. That is why I like to say: do not allow yourselves to be robbed of hope. May we not be robbed of hope, because this strength is a grace, a gift from God which carries us forward with our eyes fixed on heaven. And Mary is always there, near those communities, our brothers and sisters, she accompanies them, suffers with them, and sings the Magnificat of hope with them.
Amid this memorial notice for Jean Elshtain (at the site of the splendid Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago), the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion offers a tribute that is also (most especially as we prepare to start a new academic year) a magnificent summary of the vocation of a Christian academic:
Jean Bethke Elshtain had a tough-thinking mind and a friendly open heart, while most people—in the academy as well as outside it—are the reverse: weak in thought, hard in feelings. Her books on (just) war, gender and feminism, culture and democracy were not only able to raise the level of discourse, fuel fierce debate, and engage vigorously the most well-received idols of our days, but they also gave back to moral and political philosophy a renewed dignity as serious science....Christian faith gave her enough certitude to display radicality in thinking, unlimited energy in interacting with interlocutors, colleagues and students, and an obviously deep and sincere friendship for all. In her presence, I was proud not only to teach and work with her in Swift Hall, but also to share the same creed.
