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.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The NYT on Bill Stuntz

By Rick Garnett

Here is the NYT's obituary for Bill Stuntz.  It concludes with this:

Mr. Stuntz wrote extensively about the chronic pain he suffered after a back injury in 1999, saying he felt better after realizing it was futile to dream of being painless. “Hopelessness turns out to be surprisingly good medicine,” he wrote.

He kept writing when he was dying of cancer, saying that he found hope in a single passage of the Book of Job. “You will call and I will answer,” Job says. “You will long for the creature your hands have made.”

Mr. Stuntz wrote, “The concept that God longs for the likes of me is so unbelievably sweet.”

Monday, March 21, 2011

Woodward's "Memories of a Catholic Boyhood"

By Rick Garnett

In my view, this First Things essay by Kenneth Woodward is a delightful read, and also highly relevant to the question of "Catholic legal theory", in this way:  The Catholic moral anthropology, cultural vision, and sensibility are, it is often said, more "communitarian" (while never losing focus on the dignity and destiny of every individual person) than some others.  Woodward's essay depicts a time, and context, when thick Catholic communities were instantiated, lived realities, and not just ideas.

This part struck me:

  In the fifties half of all American Catholic kids attended parochial schools, a figure unequalled before or since. Nancy and Bill and I were three of them. First grade was more than just the beginning of formal education. It was above all an initiation into a vast parallel culture.

As I have already noted, every religious group formed its own subculture, some more closed to the outside world than others. Lutherans, Adventists, and some (mostly Orthodox) Jews also operated their own religious schools, and in Utah, as in much of the South, Mormon and Southern Baptist majorities effectively determined the religious ethos of public classrooms. But at mid-century only Catholics inhabited a parallel culture that, by virtue of their numbers, ethnic diversity, wide geographical distribution, and complex of institutions mirrored the outside “public” culture yet was manifestly different. We were surrounded by a membrane, not a wall, one that absorbed as much as it left out. It was, in other words, the means by which we became American as well as Catholic.

Catholic education was the key. Through its networks of schools and athletic leagues, the church provided age-related levels of religious formation, learning, and belonging that extended through high school and, for some of us, on into college. Church, therefore, always connoted more than just the local parish: kids experienced it anywhere, including schools, where the Mass was said. In this way, Catholicism engendered a powerful sense of community—not because it sheltered Catholic kids from the outside world, as sectarian subcultures try to do, but because it embraced our dating and mating and football playing within an ambient world of shared symbolism, faith, and worship. In my adolescent years, for example, St. Christopher’s transformed its basement on Saturday nights into the “R Canteen” where teenagers from all over Cleveland’s West Side danced to juke-box music; a muscular young priest from the parish roamed the premises to prevent fights and keep the drunks at bay. Yes, Catholics felt like hyphenated Americans, but nothing in human experience, we also came to feel, was foreign to the church. . . .

Half of all Catholic kids were in Catholic schools!

Egyptian Christians Vote "No"

By Marc DeGirolami

A concerning story here.

Why Do We Let Girls Dress Like That?

By Elizabeth Schiltz

.... wonders Jennifer Moses in this rather poignant Wall Street Journal piece subtitled: "Women of a liberated generations wrestle with their eager-to-grow-up daughters -- and their own pasts." 

Her theory: 

It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"

We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up. We were also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find our true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls now drowning in regret—I know women of my generation who waited until marriage—but that's certainly the norm among my peers.

So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.

Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don't know one of them who doesn't have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I've ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she'd "experimented" more.

My tip for women (and men) who don't know how to teach their kids 'not to give away their bodies so readily' is to take this advice fom the always wise Helen Alvare, and buy them a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter, by Nobel prize winning author Sigrid Undset.  (And if you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and buy yourself a copy, too.)

 

(Hard) Core First Amendment "Protection"

By Marc DeGirolami

Here is a summary of a recent New York lower court decision, People v. Andujar, involving a prosecution for the unlicensed vending of condoms with "political" messages and caricatures:

Charged with unlicensed general vending in violation of AC §20-453, defendant moved for dismissal of the accusatory instrument for facial insufficiency. The instrument alleged that, in front of 1585 Broadway, defendant displayed and offered for sale 20 condoms without being able to produce a license from the Department of Consumer Affairs. While the condoms were not described any further in the instrument, defendant contended they bore political messages on their packaging and contained caricatures of Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin, along with "satirical slogans and commentary regarding political awareness, sexual responsibility, and abortion." The court granted defendant's motion, finding that the condoms fell within the "written matter" exception as construed by the consumer affairs agency. The court cited the exception contained in AC §20-453, which ensures that the statute is not unconstitutionally applied to First Amendment-protected forms of expression protected. It added that a reasonable consumer of the condoms is unlikely to buy them for use during intercourse, but would instead buy them because of the political message contained on the wrapper.

I wonder how the court felt so sure about the purposes for which "reasonable" people would buy condoms with caricatures of President Obama and Sarah Palin?  (For those who may be wondering, "the instrument" refers, I believe, to the complaint).

Ahhh, the freedom of speech. 

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Sure looks like a monologue to me

By Robert George

Thank you, Fr. Robert, for providing a link to the program for the four-session colloquium, "More Than A Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church," being sponsored by members of the academic communities of Fordham and Fairfield Universities, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary.  I had a look.  It seems pretty clear that the colloquium itself is designed to be a monologue---members of the choir preaching to the choir about how the Church's teachings on sexual morality and marriage are all wrong and need to be changed.

Unless I'm missing something, the speakers seem to be drawn exclusively from the pool of people whose views line up with the editorial positions of the New York Times, not the firm and constant teachings of the Catholic Church, at least when it comes to homosexual conduct and the nature and meaning of marriage.  I hope I'm proven wrong, but it doesn't look to me as if arguments in support of the Church's teachings will be presented or even seriously entertained.  It certainly doesn't look like anyone has (yet?) been lined up to defend those teachings.  Perhaps I'm missing something, but even if I am, the program looks lopsided.

If the folks organizing the colloquium are looking around for institutions where discussion is stifled and diversity of opinion on sexual morality and marriage has given way to a "monologue" on those subjects, I would be happy to give them a very long list of universities, newsrooms, professional associations, and other institutions they could organize colloquia about.  I would suggest that "monologue" is a much more serious problem in those institutions than it is in the Catholic Church.  But I suspect that the organizers' real objection is not to monologues as such.  Their real objection is to the teachings of the Church. That, I further suspect, is why the colloquium itself is designed, or so it appears, to be . . . a monologue. 

"Secular Power in Swedish Schools"

By Rick Garnett

A cautionary reminder about government involvement with, and support for, religious (?) schools, over at Sightings:

Sweden, by some standards one of the world’s most secular countries, passed a new education law stipulating that public schools must teach their subjects in a “non-confessional” and “objective” manner. The law applies to all schools, including independent Christian and Muslim schools, because they, too, receive funding from the state. . . .

On Italy's anniversary

By Rick Garnett

Here's George Weigel, reflecting on "Italy at 150."  After explaining why -- despite the romantic regrets of some -- the loss of the Papal States to Garibaldi and his crowd was, in fact, a blessing for the papacy -- and the Church -- he writes:

The key figure in this, it seems ever more clear, was the immediate successor to Pius IX, Pope Leo XIII. Rather than behaving like a petulant dispossessed minor Italian noble, Leo set about engaging modernity in his own distinctive way, thereby laying the groundwork for the exercise of new forms of papal power. He thought through the challenges of political modernity and the modern, secular state in a series of encyclicals; their literary style tends toward the higher baroque, but the trenchancy of Leo’s thought makes them worth plowing through today. Leo fostered a Catholic intellectual renaissance by encouraging study of the original texts of Thomas Aquinas, whose political theory he himself used to launch modern Catholic social doctrine, one of the three mega-proposals for ordering the human future on offer in the world today (the others being jihadist Islam and the pragmatic-utilitarian ethos embodied in American consumerism and popular culture). . . .

None of this would have been possible if Leo had been stuck managing a minor European state in the middle of the Italian peninsula and trying to reconcile his evangelical functions as Successor of Peter with the requirements of daily statecraft. Nor would we have seen the historic accomplishments of the man who brought the Leonine papacy to its apogee, John Paul II, the pivotal figure in the collapse of European Communism. John Paul deployed the moral weapons that Leo began to develop, and showed them to be singularly effective in bringing to an end the greatest tyranny in human history. The victory of freedom over Communism had many authors, to be sure. But in the judgment of serious Cold War historians, the pivotal moment in the drama that became the Revolution of 1989 was John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to his Polish homeland in June 1979: a moment made possible, in no small part, by the victory of Italian secularists over Pius IX in 1861 and 1870. . . .

"She moves in mysterious ways", indeed.

O'Scannlain on "The Natural Law in the American Tradition"

By Rick Garnett

There has been, in relatively recent months, a fair bit of discussion around the Catholic and legal sections of the blogosphere about the Natural Law and its role / place / content / foundations.  This lecture, delivered by Judge O'Scannlain at Fordham in November of 2010, is well worth a read.  Judge O'Scannlain engages, inter alia, natural-law-thinker Hadley Arkes (Amherst) and Justice Scalia.

For some other MOJ posts -- including, specifically, thoughts by Patrick Brennan -- on the question of the natural law and American constitutional doctrine, go (e.g.) here, here, here, and / or here. 

Among other things, Judge O'Scannlain explains why he "as a judge, [does not] have the authority to strike down a statute, simply because I think it violates the natural law."  At the same time, the natural law is "relevant to judging" [that is, relevant to exercising the power given to federal courts by our Constitution] "in two major ways: one rather technical, and the other more abstract."

More than a monologue?

By Robert John Araujo, SJ

I recently came across an announcement for a four-session colloquium that will take place on four successive dates running from September to October 2011 that should be of interest and concern to the contributors and readers of the Mirror of Justice. Members of the academic communities at Fordham University, Fairfield University, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary are sponsoring this program which is entitled “More Than A Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church.” Information about this program is hosted on a web log at Fairfield University which is available here. As readers and contributors are aware, we at the Mirror of Justice have frequently addressed issues related to topics concerning human sexuality in the past. I am reasonably confident that we will continue to do so in the future.

The conveners of “More than a Monologue” state that they “are coming together to change the conversation [and perhaps the teachings] about sexual diversity and the Catholic Church.” Apropos of this, the web log further indicates that:

For too long, the conversation on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in the Roman Catholic Church has been only a monologue — the sole voice being heard is that of the institutional Catholic Church. We must engage in more than a monologue by having a 21st century conversation on sexual diversity, with new and different voices heard from.

The four sessions that will be offered are entitled: (1) Learning to Listen: Voices of Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church; (2) Pro-Queer Life: Youth Suicide Crisis, Catholic Education, and the Souls of LGBTQ People; (3) Same-Sex Marriage and the Catholic Church: Voices from Law, Religion, and the Pews; and, (4) The Care of Souls: Sexual Diversity, Celibacy, and Ministry.

Many of us who contribute to the Mirror of Justice have previously addressed most, if not all, of these issues with a variety of perspectives.

The organizers of this program also claim that “This series will show the variety of viewpoints on issues of sexual diversity among Catholics.” As just pointed out, they also claim that “the sole voice being heard is that of the institutional Catholic Church.”

I wonder if this is an accurate description of the program and the situation which its organizers describe. First of all, many of the currently advertised speakers are well known for their views on human sexuality and their criticism of or disagreement with Catholic teachings. I cannot see how they contend that “the sole voice being heard is that of the institutional Catholic Church.” Moreover, the modifier “institutional” in describing the Catholic Church is problematic. In the hope that there is more to this program than is currently advertised, I realize that there may be other speakers not listed on the web site who may very well explain the Church’s position on these neuralgic issues and why she teaches what she teaches. However, the diverse voices that are currently billed on the website are not really known for supporting the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, yet, as I have stated, their views and their works are well known and well publicized. It is a misrepresentation to imply that their voices are not heard on these critical issues since the only voice heard is that of “the institutional Catholic Church.”

If the organizers of “More than a Monologue” intend on presenting more than a monologue, I look forward to hearing about who will be the speakers scheduled to explain with fidelity the “what” and the “why” of the Church’s teachings. As the program is currently structured, I do not see this being any part of their offer. If I may borrow from Clara Peller, where’s the debate? Is it conceivable that the sponsors are more interested in convincing the audiences that the Church’s teachings are wrong and their challenges are correct? If so, a monologue will suit the cause.

 

RJA sj

 

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