As I write these words, thousands of people have gathered at the White House, at Ground Zero, and in Times Square, among other places, waving flags, chanting "USA, USA," and singing patriotic songs. The throngs are cheering the courage of our brave soldiers and the unsung and unknown analysts and agents who brought us this day of justice; they are expressing their relief that the hunt for bin Laden is over, at long last; they are expressing their hope that, perhaps, the war against Al Qaeda may yet be won. And, yes, the crowds are also celebrating the demise of Osama bin Laden.
As an American and a Catholic Christian, I join with them whole-heartedly in each of these sentiments. President Obama, his national security team, and those individual soldiers who undertook the military operation deserve our gratitude. Courage is a virtue and is rightly praised. The American people in their fortitude and commitment to see this through have seen the fruits of our perseverance. Patience and faithfulness in our work are also virtues to be honored. Justice for the leading perpetrators of the worst mass murder ever committed on American soil brought is deeply satisfying and long overdue. And, while we as Catholics hold every human life as precious, even those of our enemies, Osama bin Laden was no longer a simple man but had become, by his own considered choice, the incarnation of unreasoning terror and the face of atrocity. The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of United States was the result of a strike against evil that should be respected. And, most importantly, today's events bring an end, not merely to the life of one man, but to that man's ongoing, personal, and dedicated efforts to kill more innocents.
On this particular occasion, I think Dale Carpenter at the Volokh Conspiracy has it just right:
I appreciate Michael’s and Marc’s recent postings dealing with various aspects of Friday’s royal wedding between Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge. Their respective postings encouraged me to examine the Act of Settlement (1700-01) [the “Act”] concerning the religion of the British Sovereign and his or her spouse and the provisions addressing religious freedom and non-discrimination in Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, of which the United Kingdom is a member.
With these words, the Act prohibits the sovereign from being a Catholic and the spouse of the sovereign from being of that religion:
...all and every Person and Persons then were or afterwards should be reconciled to or shall hold Communion with the See or Church of Rome or should profess the Popish Religion or marry a Papist should be excluded and are by that Act made for ever incapable to inherit possess or enjoy the Crown and Government of this Realm...
A further provision might entitle a Catholic to remain as sovereign by converting to Anglicanism, or else. As the Act further states:
That whosoever shall hereafter come to the Possession of this Crown shall joyn in Communion with the Church of England as by Law established...
As many will recall, when Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Kent entered the Catholic Church in 1994, she had to renounce her claim to succession of the throne due to the provisions of the Act. Of course, by that time, the United Kingdom was a member of the EU and is therefore subject to the provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the Charter). It is also a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the ICCPR). Both of these texts have provisions addressing religious freedom and prohibitions against religious discrimination. Here I shall concentrate on the EU Charter and suggest why it and the Act are in tension with one another insofar as the religions of the British sovereign and the sovereign’s spouse are concerned.
First of all, Article 10 of the Charter specifies that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Included in this general provision are the attending rights to change one’s religion and to manifest religious beliefs and practices in private and public. The ICCPR accords with these principles. Article 21, a non-discrimination provision of the Charter, prohibits any discrimination based on religion.
Of course, interpretation and enforcement of the Charter are dependent on both the state member of the EU as well as the enforcement and juridical branches of the EU. While acknowledging this complication about the application of the Charter, I would argue that both the plain meaning as well as the intent and purpose of the EU Charter provisions on religion conflict with the Act. Moreover, I do not see anything in the articles of the Charter dealing with the its scope and the extent of the rights and protections guaranteed that would enable the Act to remain inviolate.
I realize that the decision-making authorities within the EU do not always have the best track record when it comes to matters dealing with religious liberty and non-discrimination based on religious grounds. It is clear that the plain meaning and the underlying intent and purpose of the Act are discriminatory against Catholics—and Papists, and those who profess the Popish religion, and those who are in communion with the See and Church of Rome. While the sovereign must be a member of the Church of England—of which he or she would be the head, the spouse need not be an Anglican as long as he or she is not a Catholic. Interestingly, the Sovereign’s spouse could be a member of the Free Church, a deist, a Jew, a Muslim, anything else or professing no religion at all. Moreover, should the UK move beyond its present state of registering civil partnerships, I would imagine that there is nothing in the Act to prohibit the sovereign from entering into a “same-sex marriage.” Catholics in the UK are no longer subject to many of the prohibitions and discriminations they faced even into the twentieth century. I realize that the Church of England’s opposition to repealing the Act may be based on the concerns associated with having a non-Anglican being the supreme head of the church in England. However, this issue takes us back to the time of Henry VIII: did he really have the authority to proclaim the sovereign as such? This may well be a case demonstrating that two wrongs clearly do not make a right.
I just made my way through Jeffrie Murphy's thoughtful and highly readable book, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the relationship of vengeance, repentance, and forgiveness to criminal law. Murphy makes some deft arguments about the proper place of at least certain features of vengeance (resentment in particular, and its relationship to self-respect -- there is a well-known chapter titled, Two Cheers for Vindictiveness) for punishment. In one section, he draws on R.A. Duff's important work involving the communicative function of punishment -- communicative in the sense both of its being about the transmission of ideas to the offender, and that those ideas ought to be the community's. At one point I was attracted to the somewhat communitarian, or, if you prefer, paternalistic, feel of some of this -- I'm less so now. There are some arguments that I'm a little skeptical about -- e.g., that self-imposed suffering through repentance ought to be relevant to the issue of official, state-sanctioned mitigation of the sentence -- but all in all it is a terrific monograph.
I want to raise for MOJ denizens a somewhat peripheral claim that Murphy makes relating to the circumstances in which forgiveness is a Christian value. The question arises whether it really is true that Christians ought to forgive unilaterally, or instead forgive bilaterally -- in conjunction with repentance. Murphy's view is that forgiveness should wait for repentance, and he notes that others in his own religious community (Anglican) sometimes take this position as verging on the blasphemous. His opponents generally cite Jesus's words on the cross, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" and the passage in the Lord's prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" as conclusive evidence that forgiveness is a universal and unconditional obligation for Christians. Murphy is not a theologian, and neither am I, but to this untutored philistine, he makes some interesting points:
Jesus's words from the cross are surely not offering universal forgiveness. Indeed, Jesus takes the trouble to offer a reason why forgiveness should be bestowed on these particular wrongdoers -- namely, their ignorance that they are sacrificing the true son of God. (Do you think -- in different circumstances -- that he would have said, "Father forgive them even though they know full well what they are doing"?)
And consider the passage from the Lord's Prayer. One natural reading of the English word, "as," is "in the manner of" -- for example, "Do it as I do." Thus one perfectly natural reading of . . . "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" is this: "In the realm of forgiveness, God, I pray that you treat me in the manner that I treat those who wrong me. If I will not forgive them unless they repent, I do not expect you to forgive me unless I repent." (36)
There are other biblical passages (noted by Murphy) which also suggest that forgiveness and repentance are conjoined (e.g., Luke 17:3 -- "If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him"), but the larger point is that a fully worked-out Christian theology of forgiveness is a complicated and difficult endeavor not resolved in the least by citing a couple of translated selections from the Bible. Thoughts?
Susan's post on the jurisprudential legacy of Pope John Paul II reminded me of a symposium published by Ave Maria Law Review on "Pope John Paul II and the Law." The symposium (here and here) includes papers by (in order of appearance) George Weigel, Father Robert Araujo SJ, Father Kevin Flannery SJ, Jane Adolphe, Ed Peters, Gerry Bradley, Richard Myers, James Eyster, and Howard Bromberg.
In the latest issue of First Things, Mary Ann Glendon has this as-per-usual thoughtful essay, "The Bearable Lightness of Dignity", in which she reflects on the fact "human dignity" is a concept "necessary to human decency but notoriously resistant to precise definition." A taste:
. . . [I]t seems fair to say that the challenge of supplying the concept of dignity with philosophical foundations that are intelligible to believers and nonbelievers alike is still a work in progress. That does not mean, however, that, as Miosz feared, it rests on an “abyss.” For, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in his essay On the Dignity of the Human Person, the recognition of human dignity is rooted in the experience of living with and interacting with other human beings: “The community is the vehicle through which we experience our own dignity and the dignity of others, and the connectedness of persons and the value of persons are discovered through their interdependence.” Through experiencing and reflecting on experience (historical experience as well as our own), we accumulate a body of knowledge about right and wrong. The impressive multinational consensus reached on documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is testimony to the fact that some things are so terrible in practice that virtually no one will approve them—or openly admit they approve them—and that some things are so good in practice that virtually no one will oppose them, or admit they oppose them. . . .
It is a mystery to me why a paper with the aspirations (and pretensions) of the New York Times continues to give the outstandingly mediocre thought and writing of Maureen Dowd the platform that it does. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I admit that I was, that this snark-dripping mudball ("Hold the Halo") from Dowd ran on Easter Weekend. Thank God, soon-to-be Blessed John Paul II is beyond being relieved (I'm sure he never did) that Dowd concedes he "was admirable in many ways", even as she pronounces that he was "disturbingly regressive" (by which she seems to mean "garden variety, mainstream Catholic") on others.
Better for a reader to spend an hour or two with Redemptor hominis than a second with Dowd, and to remember his first words as pope: Do not be afraid to open wide the doors for Christ.
As we prepare for the the beatification and celebration of the life of John Paul II, I thought I'd remind everyone of the fine symposium held several years ago at St. John's University School of Law on The Jurisprudential Legacy of Pope John Paul II. A number of MOJ authors participated in that symposium, including Michael Scaperlanda, Greg Sisk, Lisa Schiltz and Fr. Araujo. You can find the issue, including links to all of the articles, here.
Check out "What is a 'Human Right'?" (here) and "The Ground of Human Rights" (here). Fitting stuff, as we prepare for the beatification and celebration of the life, work, and witness of Pope John Paul II, for whom proclamation of the true ground of human rights and dignity was a driving mission. In 1999, for example, in "Respect for Human Rights: The Secret of True Peace" (here) he emphasized:
. . . Peace flourishes when these rights are fully respected, but when they are violated what comes is war, which causes other still graver violations. . . .
[W]hen the promotion of the dignity of the person is the guiding principle, and when the search for the common good is the overriding commitment, then solid and lasting foundations for building peace are laid. But when human rights are ignored or scorned, and when the pursuit of individual interests unjustly prevails over the common good, then the seeds of instability, rebellion and violence are inevitably sown. . . .
I'll take the occasion of Rich Myers's mention of Sandro Magister's (fascinating) story on the "hermeneutic of reform" and religious liberty to issue another invitation to visit Villanova. We've got great Catholic programming going on at Villanova! As previously announced, the sixth-annual Scarpa Conference will celebrate and explore the work of John Finnis, someone who needs no introduction here. Prof. Finnis will deliver the keynote address at the conference. What hasn't been announced until now is that Fr. Rhonheimer will also speak at the conference. A complete list of the speakers will be announced soon. The date of the conference is September 30, 2011.
That is the title of a recent article by Martin Rhonheimer. Rhonheimer's article is the subject of this very interesting piece by Sandro Magister. Rhonheimer discusses Dignitatis Humanae and explores what he contends is the discontinuity between Vatican II's teaching on religious liberty and prior papal writing on the topic. I think Rhonheimer places too much emphasis on Dignitatis Humanae's brief discussion of the issue of the confessional state. Russell Hittinger has noted that the Vatican II Declaration on religious liberty is largely silent on that issue. But Rhonheimer's article looks to be a very interesting perspective on this contested matter.
