Friday, April 12, 2013
"Hard questions about Francis in Argentina and a lesson from Chile"
No journalist's coverage of the Vatican is better than--indeed, none is as good as, I think--John Allen's superb coverage. Allen has a wonderfully informative and throughtful article here. Many MOJ readers will be quite interested.
Sauce for the Gander
Here is a question for Patrick.
First, please consider this pair of sentences, which I’ll call ‘Claim 1’:
Claim 1: A speaker,who was making a presentation at an Army Reserve venue, in the course of so doing likened Catholics and Evangelicals to al Qaeda members as ‘extremists.’ Hence the Army endorses that assimilation and, as an institution that makes war against al Qaeda, now plans a war against Catholics.
[Please follow the link above if you do not know what occasions this remarkable claim, the last clause of which in particular continues to flabbergast me.]
Now substitute a few variables for several key terms in Claim 1, yielding this claim frame:
Claim Frame: A p, who was q-ing in an r venue, in the course of so doing s’d. Hence the r endorses that s-ing and, as an institution that t's, now plans more s against Catholics.
Now fill the variables with the following values, appropriately conjugated or preposition-supplemented where applicable:
p – priest
q – teach or otherwise minister
r – Church
s – abuse children
t – pursuant to its mission, receives regular access to children
I cannot bring myself actually to type the claim that results from thus filling the variables, so let us here leave it unspoken and call it ‘Claim 2.’
Now as all of us know, many people during the thick of the paedophilia scandals made claims along precisely such lines as the lines of Claim 2. And in light of the shocking pervasiveness of the problem that emerged during this painful period, as well as the evidence of systematic cover-up in some quarters that likewise emerged, these charges were in a certain sense understandable. Yet they were nevertheless wrong. It simply did not follow that the institution endorsed or committed itself to further incidents of the unspeakable evil that some had committed in the course of working for that institution.
I wonder, then, what principled ground Patrick might offer for rejecting Claim 2, that does not warrant rejection of Claim 1.Lessons from Hungary
Social atheism, such as the godless U.S. Constitution enshrines, is not inevitable. (I never thought it was, but some Hegelians do think that and therefore would march us all in that direction). Look at what's going on in Hungary. I celebrated the preconditions of Hungary's now turning its government schools over to religious institutions here, responding to James Davison Hunter's premature burial of religious institutions. Thirty-two percent of Americans want a Christian constitutional amendment, according to a Huffington Post/You Gov poll. The Framers knew what they were doing, alas, when they sought to make it virtually impossible to amend their godless Constitution.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
"Cardinal leads rethink on same-sex civil unions"
From The Tablet:
11 April 2013
A leading cardinal has said that same-sex relationships should be respected and recognised in law amid signs of a change in church thinking on the subject.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, made the remarks in a lecture at the National Gallery evening titled "Christianity: Alien Presence or Foundation of the West?" on Monday.
"There can be same-sex partnerships and they need respect, and even civil law protection. Yes, but please keep it away from the notion of marriage. Because the definition of marriage is the stable union between a man and a woman open to life," Cardinal Schönborn said.
"We should be clear about terms and respect the needs of people living in a partnership together. They deserve respect," he added.
Two other cardinals, Colombian Ruben Salazar and Theodore McCarrick have recently suggested the Church should not oppose same-sex civil unions.
Legal Affinities
It's never too early to pre-order Legal Affinities: Explorations in the Legal Form of Thought, a volume (which I co-edited with Jeff Powell and Jack Sammons) that explores and celebrates the pathbreaking work of Joseph Vining, the Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Michigan Law School. I do not know of a better phenomenology of law than the one Vining has offered us, and that's just the beginning of what the book's chapters cover. There are chapters by (among others) MOJ-friend Steve Smith, Judge Noonan, Jeff Powell, Jack Sammons, and James Boyd White. Check it out.
This is from the book's jacket:
"This book is about what makes law possible. A stranger to contemporary legal practice might think such a book unnecessary, but the eight authors of this book share the view that what makes law possible is under siege today. The authors also share the hope that by exploring how law is a humanistic practice that involves whole persons, the siege will be reversed. The pathbreaking work of University of Michigan Law professor Joseph Vining provides the authors' focus for their varied analyses of how law works not through force but, instead, through affinity.
"Vining's four books and other writings, spanning four decades, reveal the hidden connections by which men and women freely create and sustain a world of meaning through the phenomena we associate with law. Drawing on legal philosophy, theology, musicology, and other humanistic disciplines, the authors join Vining in discovering how law is, as Vining has written, ''evidence of view and belief far stronger than academic statement or introspection can provide.'' Law as Vining and the other authors reveal it is evidence of our better selves, not of the totalizing and brutalizing selves humans are capable of becoming, sometimes even under cover of law."
Steve Smith on "the Hard and Easy Case of the Contraception Mandate"
Profl Steve Smith (San Diego) has a clear and compelling essay up, at PENNumbra, on the HHS mandate and religious freedom, called "The Contraception Mandate and Religious Freedom." As he says (correctly, I think): "There are hard cases, and then there are easy cases. The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) contraception mandate (the Mandate) gives rise to both." As he points out:
Many people who argue that the mandate does not violate RFRA can be better understood as contending, wittingly or unwittingly, that religion should not receive special, legal protection. And one reason why the contraception mandate controversy seems so important, even to religious believers (like myself) whose faith does not proscribe the use of contraceptives, is that the controversy is a contest in miniature over the fate and future of religious freedom in America.
Peter Berger on "militant secularism," the CLS case, and flypaper
Peter Berger has a nice post, here, commenting on the tendency of lawyers and bureaucrats to "think in highly abstract categories," the misguided expansion and application of "nondiscrimination" rules to student groups, and flypaper reports. A bit:
I have previously written about a militant secularism having become a noisy presence in America. I have called it (only half tongue-in-cheek) Kemalist—after Kemal Ataturk’s view of religion as a backward superstition to keep out of public space. It is the ideology of a quite small group that would not get anywhere through the democratic process and can only work through the courts, the least democratic branch of government. I can’t see Justice Ginsburg as a secularist ideologue. More likely, she reflects the views of church/state relations that have come to be taken for granted in the liberal subculture.
The legal mind, and the bureaucratic mind which is its lowbrow offspring, likes to squeeze the immense vitality of human life into abstract categories. Once these categories have been established, they must be imposed on everyone. I recall an episode I came across during my stint in the US Army. I knew a company clerk in Fort Benning, Georgia, where I spent most of my time in the military. He was enormously bored on his job. This was just before the two revolutions which transformed the American South: desegregation and air-conditioning (making the region more humane, more tolerable in the summer, and because of these two developments more dynamic economically). My acquaintance spent his days sitting at his desk, with little to do, sweating and swatting away the flies. He acquired a flypaper, which did indeed attract and kill a good many flies. He counted the number of flies caught on the flypaper and began to send weekly reports with this information to base headquarters. After three weeks of this exercise every unit in Fort Benning received a memorandum from headquarters, demanding to know why no flypaper reports had been submitted.
Heh.
Judge Posner on exclaustration and the Constitution
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh has the story about the Seventh Circuit's recent and fascinating decision about the alleged defamation involved in calling someone a "fake nun." Here's a bit from the (I think correct, for reasons I wrote about here) decision:
A secular court may not take sides on issues of religious doctrine. The district judge in this case has ruled that a federal jury shall decide whether Patricia Fuller is a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, though if the jury decides that she is it will be rejecting the contrary ruling of the religious body (the Holy See) authorized by the Church to decide such matters.
A secular court must be allowed to decide, however, whether a party is correct in arguing that there is an authoritative church ruling on an issue, a ruling that removes the issue from the jurisdiction of that court.... But once the court has satisfied itself that the authorized religious body has resolved the religious issue, the court may not question the resolution....
Ignoring uncomfortable facts
I know I should not be surprised, but I am, but the near-silence in major-media outlets about the Kermit Gosnell trial. The unwillingess to report on this story -- an unwillingness that, it is most reasonable to conclude, reflects the reporters' decision that it would be unhelpful to the cause of expanding abortion rights -- is, like the facts of the case, disgusting. A bit, from the International Business Times:
Horrific testimony in the trial over the last couple of weeks has revealed tales of the abortionist and his workers at Gosnell's Women's Medical Society clinic allegedly snipping fetuses' spines with scissors to "ensure fetal demise," jars of terminated fetuses' feet that Gosnell allegedly kept at the clinic, and a baby "screeching ... like a little alien" during a so-called live-birth abortion procedure allegedly performed at the clinic.
"Screeching like a little alien." Lord have mercy.
NOTE: Kirsten Powers' USA Today column is a welcome exception:
Let me state the obvious. This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News' Brian Williams intoned, "A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh," as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn't make the cut.
You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy. This is not about being "pro-choice" or "pro-life." It's about basic human rights.
The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Getting rid of illusions
A thoughtful reader of MOJ sent me the following:
"[With respect to] your outrage that the U.S. Army has placed the Catholic Church alongside al Qaeda....isn't the Army, actually, right? That is, once you realize that, from the perspective of the State, the issue is not whether the Church and al Qaeda are morally equivalent, but whether they are able and willing to contest the State's pursuit of its own interests, then of course the Church and al Qaeda are equivalent.
"I actually take pleasure in the Army's slip of tongue, as it were, since it helps us get rid of the illusion that our State has any conception of justice that does not reduce to the pursuit of its own economic and political advantage. In any case, perhaps it will awaken certain Catholics from their dream that the somewhat militarist civil religion of America is compatible with what the claims of Catholicism actually entail.
"So be of good cheer! George Bernanos saw this coming, what, sixty years ago?"
___________________
My correspondent (whom I do not know personally) makes a profound point. Our current predicament was not only predicable but, in fact, predicted.
At the risk of being told again to "dial it down," I am reminded of something Pope St. Pius X wrote in "Notre Charge Apostolique" (1910):
"Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO."
There is no surprise in the fact that our government, at whatever level, cannot think straight, least of all about the Church.
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