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.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI's last General Audience

By Michael Scaperlanda

From this morning:

Dear Brothers and Sisters, I offer a warm and affectionate greeting to the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors who have joined me for this, my last General Audience. Like Saint Paul, whose words we heard earlier, my heart is filled with thanksgiving to God who ever watches over his Church and her growth in faith and love, and I embrace all of you with joy and gratitude.

During this Year of Faith, we have been called to renew our joyful trust in the Lord’s presence in our lives and in the life of the Church. I am personally grateful for his unfailing love and guidance in the eight years since I accepted his call to serve as the Successor of Peter. I am also deeply grateful for the understanding, support and prayers of so many of you, not only here in Rome, but also throughout the world.

The decision I have made, after much prayer, is the fruit of a serene trust in God’s will and a deep love of Christ’s Church. I will continue to accompany the Church with my prayers, and I ask each of you to pray for me and for the new Pope. In union with Mary and all the saints, let us entrust ourselves in faith and hope to God, who continues to watch over our lives and to guide the journey of the Church and our world along the paths of history.

I commend all of you, with great affection, to his loving care, asking him to strengthen you in the hope which opens our hearts to the fullness of life that he alone can give. To you and your families, I impart my blessing. Thank you!

Monday, February 25, 2013

R.I.P. Benedict Ashley O.P. (1915-2013)

By Michael Scaperlanda

Raised in Blackwell, Oklahoma, Fr. Ashley attended the University of Chicago where he studied the great books under Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins; studied literature under Thornton Wilder; and studied grammar under Gertrude Stein. In Cloth Bound: How the Great Books seminar turned a radical poet into a philosopher and priest, the biographer says: "Stein liked Ashley’s poetry and encouraged him to write more. As for the verse novel he had written in high school, she told Wilder that she enjoyed it but advised Ashley to 'leave out the fleshy stuff.'"

As for his conversion:

Chicago had exposed him to religion in its many varieties; in the beginning of his first year, his close Jewish friend had taken him to Yom Kippur services at a synagogue, and a Catholic friend occasionally brought him to mass. But it was only after reading Aquinas that he found an intellectual challenge to his Marxism and atheism. “I was gradually convinced by my own reflections that Aquinas had provided a better case for theism than Marx or Darwin had provided against it,” he says. Then faith entered: as he recovered with difficulty from an appendectomy at the University of Chicago Hospitals in 1937, he started to pray. ...

Ashley started studying Catholicism in River Forest with a priest of the Dominican Order, the same order Aquinas belonged to. He attended daily mass at St. Thomas the Apostle church in Hyde Park and in 1938 was baptized. “The Socialist Workers’ Party expelled me as a scandal,” he recalls, “and I was forced to rethink my Marxism.” He still sympathized with the movement’s call to equality and social justice, but its dogmas and party commitments were incompatible with his new religious path. Ashley transferred to the University of Notre Dame to finish his studies; in 1941, he took vows as a Dominican, adopted the name Benedict, and commenced studies to become a priest.

Although I never met Fr. Ashley, I am grateful for our correspondence and for his contribution to Recovering Self-Evident-Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law.  His chapter is titled "A Philosphical Anthropology of the Human Person: Can We Know the Nature of Human Persons?"

 

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

"Where Have All the Babies Gone?"

By Michael Scaperlanda

Newsweek reflects on the potentially devastating effects of a childless - they call it "postfamalial" on our culture. Here are a few quotes:

...Postfamilial America is in ascendancy as the fertility rate among women has plummeted, since the 2008 economic crisis and the Great Recession that followed, to its lowest level since reliable numbers were first kept in 1920. That downturn has put the U.S. fertility rate increasingly in line with those in other developed economies—suggesting that even if the economy rebounds, the birthrate may not....

 ..."Kids, they change your entire life. That’s the name of the game. And that’s not something I’m interested in doing.”  ...

These changes are not theoretical or inconsequential. Europe and East Asia, trailblazers in population decline, have spent decades trying to push up their birthrates and revitalize aging populations while confronting the political, economic, and social consequences of them. It’s time for us to consider what an aging, increasingly child-free population, growing more slowly, would mean here. As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes.

Crudely put, the lack of productive screwing could further be screwing the screwed generation.

 

 

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

A Baptist reflects on the retirement of our Augustinian Pope

By Michael Scaperlanda

Timothy George's Benedict XVI, the Great Augustinian, will be of interest to our readers.

He writes, in part:

Soon after Benedict emerged as the surprise choice of the most recent papal conclave in 2005, I wrote an essay on why Evangelical Protestants, among orthodox believers of all persuasions, should be pleased at his election. I summarized the promise of his new pontificate in five points. I emphasized that:

• he takes truth seriously, an antidote to what he called on the eve of his papal election “the dictatorship of relativism”;

• his theology is Bible-focused, building on the declaration of Vatican II that “easy access to sacred Scripture should be provided for all the Christian faithful”;

• his message is Christocentric, boldly asserting that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God and the only Redeemer of the world;

• he is a fierce champion of the culture of life, advocating for the most vulnerable members of the human community, the children still waiting to be born.

To these four items I added a fifth: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is an Augustinian. Those familiar with his intellectual biography will find no surprise in this statement. As he himself noted, “I have developed my theology in a dialogue with Augustine.”

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Of frog legs alligators: more on the law of abstinence

By Michael Scaperlanda

Dear Prof. Scaperlanda,

I would have written this in the comment box at Mirror of Justice, but it appears to be closed.

Archbishop Aymond's letter, which you posted on Mirror of Justice, reflects the long-standing interpretation of the law of abstinence, which is that "meat" is the flesh of a warm-blooded, terrestrial member of the kingdom Animalia. See 1983 CIC c. 1251 ("abstinence from meat"). Eggs, milk, and dairy products are well known as falling outside the scope of "meat." Likewise, we tend to describe those things that aren't "meat," at least colloquially, as "fish." So mollusks and fish are in on days of abstinence.

But the traditional rule has always, or at least long, been that the flesh cold-blooded animals, at least aquatic cold-blooded animals, doesn't count as "meat." Some people on the internet cite Paul VI's constitution Paenitemini for this principle, but it's not there. The origins of the distinction are
obscure, at least to me (that is, I haven't looked for them very hard). I do know that there are additional oddities, such as the tradition that capybara is not "meat," apparently predicated on a mixture of food scarcity in certain regions of South America and a rather loose grasp of zoology by some early-modern curial officials.

Enjoy your frog legs,

Paul Krog
Nashville, TN

Note:  Thanks Paul.  I'm not sure why the comments appear closed.

Pope Benedict and the New Evangelization

By Michael Scaperlanda

Andreas Widmer has an insightful analysis  suggesting that Benedict completed the work of JPII and then laid the groundwork for the New Evangelization, realizing that that project should be headed by someone else.  Here is the conclusion:

The timing he chose is greatly important. If he had waited until pundits, even only a few, would call for his abdication it would be too late. Then the political undertones would diminish and pollute the sincerity and selflessness of the decision. The way he decided to do it allowed Benedict to be ahead of the speculators and politicians among us. Dare I say he outsmarted them?

Leaders take note: Pope Benedict XVI provides a rare but profound example of humility in action. True leaders put their cause before their power and self-interest. Far from a failure or weakness, this may be the most shining moment of Benedict's papacy, and what will turn out to be a historically brilliant move.

HT: Rebekah Scaperlanda

Eating alligator on Friday's during Lent (and the rest of the year)

By Michael Scaperlanda

If anyone remembers the story behind this great case of legal intepretation, please comment. 

Alligator meat
HT: Jason Reese

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Ash Wednesday

By Michael Scaperlanda

Lorenzo Albacete's reflection on Ash Wednesday:

Every year the Church celebrates the season of Lent. It begins on Ash Wednesday with the traditional, sobering reminder, “Remember Man that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And just in case we forget, the Church sprinkles ashes over us, reminiscent of the ashes that we will become. Now, I am aware that cultural prejudices have led the Church to allow other versions of the reminder, lest we continue to sink into the depression lurking in the mind of each citizen of our psychologically haunted society, but I am a Hispanic Catholic, and we don't like those other formulas. Ash Wednesday is one of those few days all of us feel like going to Church, and if we do go, we expect the real thing, the reminder of death, and not some sort of watered down inspiration to live better lives. We want to be able to say what is a typical expression in our language: No somos nada. Actually, the allowed substitute formula, "repent and believe in the gospel," means the same thing, because Christian repentance is a real dying with Christ, and faith the beginning of a totally new existence, but those words have been "deprived of their meaning," as Walker Percy said. They have been evacuated of their full meaning, devalued as currency for communication, they now mean much less. It is hard, though, to devalue the words, “Remember, Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And, in any case, there are those ashes to make it all quite concrete.

in Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Pope Benedict (Cardinal Ratzinger) on the Gospel's call to justice

By Michael Scaperlanda

Like Lisa, my only personal encounter with Joseph Ratzinger was a few weeks before his election as Pope, when he celebrated Mass at St. Peter's for those attending a confernce on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Gaudium et Spes. In his homily that day, he said:

... We should not be surprised if the attitudes toward Jesus, that we find in the Gospel, continue today in attitudes toward his Church. It is certainly true that today, when the Church commits herself to works of justice on a human level (and there are few institutions in the world which accomplish what the Catholic Church accomplishes for the poor and disadvantaged), the world praises the Church. But when the Church's work for justice touches on issues and problems which the world no longer sees as bound up with human dignity, like protecting the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death, or when the Church confesses that justice also includes our responsibilities
toward God himself, then the world not infrequently reaches for the stones mentioned in our Gospel today...

As Christians we must constantly be reminded that the call of justice is not something which can be reduced to the categories of this world. ...

And so, to be workers of this true justice, we must be workers who are being made just, by contact with Him who is justice itself: Jesus of Nazareth. The place of this encounter is the Church, nowhere more powerfully present than in her sacraments and liturgy. The celebration of the Holy Triduum, which we will enter into next week, is the triumph of God's justice over human judgments. In the mystery of Good Friday, God is judged by man and condemned by human justice. In the Easter Vigil, the light of God's justice banishes the darkness of sin and death; the stone at the tomb (made of the same material as the stones in the hands of those who, in today's Gospel, seek to kill Christ) is pushed away forever, and human life is given a future, which, in going beyond the categories of this world, reveals the true meaning and the true value of earthly realities. ...

Monday, February 11, 2013

Reflections of a young Catholic convert

By Michael Scaperlanda

“Pope John Paul II remained in office so that he might show us how to suffer and how to die. Pope Benedict XVI is leaving the Papal Office so that he might show us how to live in humble honesty.”

http://www.piercedhands.com/im-glad-pope-benedict-is-resigning/

 

 

Previous Articles More Articles

Recent Posts

Categories

Monthly Archive