Thus reads the caption of a news item in the February 18 issue of The Tablet [London]. Read on:
American Catholicism’s most
progressive archdiocese this week warmly welcomed its new head and his
message of inclusion. At Wednesday’s installation Mass in San
Francisco, Archbishop George Niederauer was handed the crosier by his
predecessor, Archbishop William Levada, who the Pope named last May to
succeed him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith.
Quoting T.S. Eliot in his
first homily to the city’s 425,000 Catholics, Archbishop Niederauer,
69, made his own the poet’s assessment of the Church: “She is tender
where you would be hard, and hard where you would like to be soft.” The
new Pope’s first major appointee in the United States indicated that
Benedict’s recent encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, would “guide”
his stewardship of a diocese known for its significant contingent of
gay Catholics and its efforts in caring for the sufferers of HIV/Aids.
In an interview with The Tablet
on Monday, Archbishop Niederauer spoke of his distaste for the
labelling which he said had brought the American Church further from
God and nearer to the dust.
Before being named bishop of
Salt Lake City – home to 150,000 Catholics and the headquarters of the
Mormon Church – in 1994, George Niederauer spent most of his priesthood
in seminary work in his native Los Angeles. His nuanced interpretation
of the Vatican’s November document banning gays from priestly formation
has attracted the fury of church conservatives, one of whom recently
castigated the archbishop’s appointment to San Francisco as “troubling”
and called his position on the document as being analogous to the views
of “dissenters”.
Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle,
Archbishop Niederauer said that, in his oversight of the archdiocesan
seminary there, the document would come up “in the context of an entire
programme of priestly training and formation, not as a headline item”.
He reaffirmed his opinion on its contents, emphasising the importance
of a seminary candidate being “able to maintain the appropriate
boundaries … able to retain his commitment to that celibate
relationship with Christ in priesthood”. He added that this “would be
true, also, for the heterosexual candidate”. He also dismissed the
hypothesis, prevalent in some US church circles, that the sexual
orientation of priests was the prime cause for the abuse scandals. He
said this was a “mistaken” construct that “doesn’t make sense”.
The first American bishop to acknowledge publicly that he had seen the controversial film Brokeback Mountain,
which centres on the romance between two cowboys, the archbishop said
he found it “very powerful”, seeing as one of its lessons “the
destructiveness of not being honest with yourself, and not being honest
with other people – and not being faithful, trying to live a double
life, and what that does to each of the lives you try to live.”
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mp
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
MOJ-friend and occasional contributor, Gerry Whyte of Trinity College (Dublin) writes:
"Further to your recent posting on MOJ re start of life [here], last year the Irish
Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, of which I was a member,
published its report in which a majority, inter alia, rejected the argument
that legal protection for the embryo should commence once fertilisation was
complete. I was the only dissentient on the 'start of life' question. You
can read the full report here. My dissent is here."
I heartily recommend that MOJ-readers read Gerry's dissent.
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mp
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Rick asks, in his post below, whether "'bioethics' . . . is anything more than a political movement masquerading as an academic discipline or as moral reflection." The answer is yes. Click here to read about a quarterly titled Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, which brings together Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant writers.
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mp
Monday, February 13, 2006
Some MOJ-readers are interested in the Doctrine of Double Effect (especially as it relates to capital punishment and abortion). The following book--a collection of essays by various writers, some of whom are quite prominent--was recommended to me and certainly seems to be excellent. Some of the essays defend the doctrine; other of the essays challenge it:
P.A. Woodward, ed., The Doctrine of Double Effect: Philosophers Debate a Controversial Moral Principle (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
Click here to learn more about the book.
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mp
Sightings
2/13/06
Evangelical Ecology
-- Martin E. Marty
Two cheers for the evangelicals who disturbed the peace and drew headlines this week with the "Evangelical Climate Initiative." Why two and not three? I've often been told that if people outside the evangelical camp favor a faction inside it, this can hurt the cause. If a "secular humanist," a "mainline Protestant," or a fanatic Lutheran like M.E.M. praises certain evangelicals, there must be something wrong with them. So I'll think three cheers and utter two.
The Initiative drafters, who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, received a page in Newsweek and hundreds of column inches in newspapers for their message of commitment to stewardship of the environment. The signers, half of whom I know, are evangelical Evangelicals, not people on the fringes. To find that speaking up for care by God's people for God's created order is treated as "man bites dog" -- exceptional news -- is a comment on evangelicals. Line one of the Bible and line one of the creeds affirm Creator and creation, and are not licenses for despoiling the environment and helping make the globe uninhabitable -- as we are on course to doing.
Few believers have a good record. Mainline Protestants have probably written most and spoken out most, but two-score years ago most of them stopped knowing how to mobilize citizens. Jeffrey J. Guhin, in the Catholic weekly America, asks, "Where Are the Catholic Environmentalists?" (February 13). They have been slow comers, but are documentably doing better now. I have no space here to deal with the substance of the call to commitment; it is easy to track down. What interests me first is the evident passion of big-name popular and scholarly evangelicals (from Rick Warren to Wheaton College president Duane Litfin, from journalist David Neff and veteran activist Ron Sider to National Association of Evangelicals biggies and professors of note) who are now on the line.
Equally interesting are the attacks by other evangelical parties, some of whom, bizarrely, still cite as relevant the Genesis mandate to "subdue" or "dominate" the created order. Well, consider it subdued into a coma and dominated so much that it needs life-support. Why have evangelicals been so late in acting that their rallying cry is so newsworthy? Many reasons. They have had other priorities that crowded this one out. They've gotten two or three cheers in recent years for taking up the cause of religious liberty and human freedom in many neglected corners of the world. Yet most of their energies have gone elsewhere.
What else? Well, you can always find a Danish scientist or two and a dozen right-wing talk show hosts who tell us not to worry about global warming, the mercury in the fish we eat, or de-treeing the landscapes, and it is to the advantage of some political interests to take as a motto, "What, me worry?" Some evangelicals stood back because they thought that caring for the environment was a New Age monopoly, a fashionable preoccupation with the secular order. We are told that some apocalypticists say, "Don't think about this world; Jesus is second-coming to end it all!" I think that voice is being muffled a bit now.
So on second thought, in these times, "Three cheers!" for the ecologically-minded evangelicals. Perhaps others of us will follow.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Although, as H. Tristam Engelhardt has observed, "many describe the status of the embryo imprecisely by asking when human life begins or whether the embryo is a human being . . . no one seriously denies that the human zygote is a human life. The zygote is not dead. It is also not simian, porcine, or canine."
Philosopher Peter Singer, who is famously and enthusiastically pro-choice, has acknowledged that "the early embryo is a 'human life.' Embryos formed from the sperm and eggs of human beings are certainly human, no matter how early in their development they may be. They are of the species Homo sapiens, and not of any other species. We can tell when they are alive, and when they have died. So long as they are alive, they are human life."
Similarly, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, a staunch pro-choice advocate, has written that "the fetus is alive. It belongs to the human species. It elicits sympathy and even love, in part because it is so dependent and helpless."
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mp
Friday, February 10, 2006
The Tablet
February 11, 2006
Editorial: A gulf that Catholics can bridge
The
self-appointed Chief Inquisitor of Religions, Richard Dawkins,
presented a series of television programmes recently in which he
dismissed and derided various religious fundamentalists. By treating
them as if they were representative of the whole, he was able to
persuade himself that it was religion per se he had exposed as absurd,
not just extreme and distorted expressions of it. A certain truth was
unwittingly revealed by his efforts: secular fundamentalists like
himself need religious antagonists with equally closed minds. The
current row about the Danish cartoons that ridiculed the prophet
Muhammad must please him immensely, for the reaction is exactly what he
needs to prove his point. The burning of embassies abroad and the
carrying of placards on London streets containing the words “Kill” or
“Death to …” only add to the impression that Islam is irrational,
absurd and dangerous.
This
week’s conviction of the Egyptian-born imam Abu Hamza al-Masri at the
Old Bailey for incitement to murder and other similar offences fits
this picture entirely. In vain do the great majority of Muslims and
their leaders cry “Not in our name!” Thus does the gulf of mutual
incomprehension and distrust grow ever wider.
But
it must be bridged, if the degree of harmony necessary to social
cohesion is to survive. That places a special responsibility on the
shoulders of those in the West who have not in principle closed their
minds to the claims of religion, and can reach out to understand and
explain what Muslims in Britain must be feeling. Catholics and Jews,
because of their own experience as minority religions which have not
always been popular, have a particular role in this; and Catholics
being the more numerous, have the greater responsibility.
As
well as being a model for integration without assimilation, Catholics
have a religious sensibility that enables them, at least more readily
than secular intellectuals, to empathise with what Muslims are feeling.
They too have not rejected the help of metaphysics in shaping their
conception of reality; they too have an absolute rather than a
relativistic morality; they too value the family and want to pass their
beliefs on to their children; their faith also has a strong
international dimension. They understand how much pain ridicule and
contempt can cause when directed at revered religious figures, and why
that pain can quickly turn to indignation and anger. And they have
learnt when it is best to turn the other cheek. Being more familiar
with the secular mindset, Catholics may help to explain Muslim
feelings. In short, they may be in a position to supply the missing
link. It is sorely needed.
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mp
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Sightings 2/9/06
Religion Scholars Challenge Patriot Act
-- W. Clark Gilpin
On Wednesday, January 25, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the world's largest association of scholars of religion, joined a lawsuit that challenges a key provision of the USA Patriot Act. Citing the 2004 revocation of a travel visa for noted Swiss scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan, the suit contends that an "ideological exclusion" provision of the Patriot Act is being used to impede the free circulation of scholars and scholarly debate that are integral to academic freedom. Commenting on the suit, AAR Executive Director Barbara DeConcini stated that "preventing foreign scholars like Professor Ramadan from visiting the U.S. limits not only the ability of scholars here to enhance their own knowledge, but also their ability to inform students, journalists, public policy makers, and other members of the public who rely on scholars' work to acquire a better understanding of critical current issues involving religion."
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of the AAR and two other major associations of scholars and writers: the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and PEN American Center. As quoted in the suit, the Patriot Act includes among the persons ineligible to receive visas those who have used their "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization, in a way that the Secretary of State has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities."
The plaintiffs contend not only that Professor Ramadan has been a consistent critic of terrorism but also that the ideological exclusion provision of the Patriot Act violates their own First Amendment rights to hear a full range of ideas. A press release from the AAUP quoted the reaction of its general secretary, Roger Bowen: "Fearing another's ideas enough to prohibit their expression is perplexing to scholars and troubling to citizens ..... The freedom to teach and the freedom to learn are protected freedoms in this nation and the AAUP and its co-plaintiffs must insist that these two freedoms be respected. Now is the time when we should be listening to and learning from Muslim scholars, not trying to silence them."
The specific case of Tariq Ramadan came to the attention of American scholars of religion most forcefully in 2004, when he was offered a tenured faculty position as the Henry R. Luce Professor at the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Although Ramadan was initially granted a visa in order to accept the faculty post, this visa was suddenly revoked only days before he and his family were to move to Indiana. Neither he nor the University of Notre Dame received any written explanation of this reversal, and, subsequently, Ramadan has been denied visas to speak at the professional conventions of the AAR and other scholarly organizations in the United States. Ramadan's many writings have focused on the relations of Islam to the West and to modernity, most recently in his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.
The study of religion is necessarily international in scope and actively engages scholars from other cultures and nations. At a moment in history when religion is perceived to have exceptionally volatile connections to international politics, it is not surprising that the scholarly exchange of ideas about religion may include political views the government disfavors. It is, however, precisely in such volatile circumstances that sustaining free academic deliberation about the relations among religion, culture, and politics becomes imperative.
W. Clark Gilpin is Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
